veden, on the other hand, the relationship was not equally clear. Women of the noble families always inherited (at least) one third of the parent’s inheritance land.When the woman wanted to sell, it was often not the brother who was interested in purchasing (he had sufficient). It was presumably distant relatives who bought from the women of the aristocracy, or men who married into the woman’s family, which meant that a sister could have bought from a sister but that her husband carried out the purchase, and in such cases it has been more difficult to detect the nature of the relationship through the charters alone.The result from the land market project on the Continent and in the British Isles has shown that the sales to relatives decreased during the large epidemics, or at least they were carried out with such distant relatives that the relationship was not evident from the available material (eg Müller 2005, p305, Dyer 2005, pp225-226).Thus, the researchers imagine that the personal bonds in connection with the transactions that were effected had been weak and that the possibilities to carry out the transaction in an independent way increased. In my documents, I have not found any such connection.Overall, the sales with respect to both of my regions went to relatives in33per cent of the cases. When a relative did not utilise his pre-emptive right, he gave his consent to the transaction. Consent occurred more often in Finnveden than in Jämtland. At the end of the investigation period a conception introduced in Jämtland reveals that it was no longer enough for those with a pre-emptive right to give their consent: they also received compensation because they gave up their right of first refusal.Those who held the pre-emptive right received a small sum of money from the purchaser, known as good will.This new innovation can be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the inheritance and pre-emptive rights of all parties in Jämtland (also women’s).However, it can at the same time be interpreted as a way to prevent the same entitled person from utilising their right so that the whole homestead ended up in the hands of heirs who p a r t v i 1 287
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