Other kinds of transactions that were important to document were donations through which the land was handed down from one kin group to another, unrelated, kin group. An example of this is the gifts that the Norwegian royal power gave to the freeholders in Jämtland in return for their payment of fur taxes to the Crown. Under the Norwegian law, such land fell to the freeholder with full title and became his allodial land.This allodial land was, of course, not transmitted by heredity and the freeholder therefore needed a written consent confirming that he owned the land. (See Chapter 3.) Gifts were in general given to a non-relation: in Jämtland by the royal power to the freeholder; in Finnveden by the noble families to religious houses. In these cases, the need of writing was great just because land changed owners; a transfer to someone who was not related.When an institution, as in my case Nydala Monastery, received large amounts of land in the form of endowments, the need to secure its ownership arose. For this reason, Nydala Monastery insisted on a charter about the endowment, irrespective of whether the donor gave inheritance land or acquired land.The charters would also include consent from the immediate heirs, to the effect that they approved the donation; this also, regardless of whether the land was inheritance land or acquired land when the gift was bestowed, since a donor’s acquired land became inheritance land when he died. Donations had been given for several decades before disputes between the nobles and Nydala Monastery became a fact during the 15th Century. In these disputes the endowments and chantries functioned as evidence of the ownership. Each acquisition has received its own chapter (chapters 3-6) so that I could analyse each transaction form for itself, in part to see when literacy was applied to transactions, and in part from a land market perspective ie when one began to use money as a tool for valuation and when coins were used to pay the difference. In each chapter, I have analysed which legislation it was that directed the l e g a l a c q u i s i t i o n , l a n d m a r k e t s a n d m o n e t i s at i o n 278
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