284 Summary ent role in the national legal codes of medieval Sweden (the legal code of King Magnus Eriksson, promulgated in 1350, and the legal code of King Christopher, promulgated in 1442 and in force until 1736), these laws also explicitly mentioned that property rights to land could be gained through ancient usage. More specifically, this meant that a person or an institution (such as the Crown or the Church) could be regarded as the owner solely on the grounds of having held the land for a long period of time, provided that no one else contested their right or claimed to have heard anything which cast doubt on the legitimacy of their possession of the land. Correspondingly, a person or an institution could lose landed property if rights of ancient usage were considered to have arisen for someone else. Consequently, it has to be acknowledged that, in medieval and early modern times, property rights did not arise solely by the explicit consent of a previous owner, but also by the implicit consent or silence of previous owners. Moreover, the written legal code cannot be looked upon as an exhaustive description of the legal position. In legal practice, judges took a number of other circumstances into account. Of course, this is true of contemporary legal practice too, but the kinds of factors judges were wont to take into consideration in the early modern period were different from those heeded today. In his famous ‘Rules for judges’ {Domareregler, sixteenth century), Olaus Petri exhorted judges to pay attention to local customs and to let their verdicts be guided by the consent of the common man {menige mans samtycke). It may be concluded fromthis that this was a society in which traditional views on how land was to be held and transferred played a crucial role. It is only through a close study of legal practice and the thinking underlying it, therefore, that it will be possible to understand howpropertv rights actually arose. Chapter 2. Historiographic perspective The subject of this study—rights to landed property—is situated within a broader setting, to which the much-debated character of the early modern epoch provides a general backdrop. Several historians have pointed out that this was a period in which absolutist states strove bv means of statute law to create a new kind of order in society, be it ‘order’m the sense of gate Pollzei and less violent behaviour between human beings (as discussed
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