dependent on what social group or corporation the individual in question belonged to.The scholastic ideology, which dominated Western legal thinking from the early Middle Ages, presupposed that society and people had to be divided into different groups, with different legal status.Thus, each individual and each branch of society was obliged to share their parts of a divine plan. Swedish pre-modern law did not deviate from this common European medieval conception.The terms for trade and for labour relations were strictly regulated in more than one sense.The provincial codes (Sw. landskapslagarna) as well as the national legislation that replaced it around 1350 - the National Rural Code and the National Urban Code63- imposed a duty on every ablebodied person who did not own a fixed amount of money to take annual employment. Individuals without means were obliged “to present a lawful occupation”, at the risk of being treated as vagrants and placed in forced servitude or drafted for military service.64 These rules on the duty to annual work were issued in close connection with detailed statutes concerning the parties in the master-servant relationship, in which the master (husbonden) was considered to be a trustee of his servant’s (tjänstehjon) true best interests. The general national legislation from the middle of the th century prescribed that a master should not be punished if he chastised “his own servant in order to bring him up to good deeds and virtue and this does not lead to any wound and as long as he does not beat him black or bloody”.The same rule applied to the case when a master beat “his shepherd, either with a stick p a r t 1 i , c h a p t e r 2 42 2. 3. 2 swedi sh medi eval provincial law and nat ional code s 63 Sw. Magnus Erikssons Landslag (MELL) and Magnus Erikssons Stadslag (MEStL). 64 MELL BB14:3, Dr I 38-40 in Holmbäck &Wessén 1962, pp. 107, 231; MEStL BB 21:4 in Holmbäck &Wessén 1966, pp. 95-96; Kumlien 1997, p. 173 with references.
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