gift transactions.Often, she sold or gave away land that came from an earlier marriage (land which she inherited from children who died or a husband who died in an earlier marriage).When she sold land or gave chantries to Nydala Monastery, she could either be remarried or widowed. It depended on her age. If she was old and widowed, and if her own male relatives were dead, she did business on her own. If she had remarried, the present husband gave his consent to the transaction.Why didn’t the present husband carry out such transactions? I have come to the conclusion that the present husband could not lay claims to land that came from other relatives than the wife’s own.The land the woman sold or gave away and which came from the former husband’s relatives, either via him or the children they had together, was not accessible to the present husband. It was watched over by the former husband’s relatives, if they were still alive. In such situations the woman could do business on her own, without involvement from the present husband. In Chapter One, above, I mentioned that one preserved the cognatic inheritance system by, within the marriage, clearly keeping apart land that came from relatives on the mother’s side and land that came from the father’s family. I have also emphasised the significance of cognatic descent for the the pre-emptive right and the right of inheritance for both women and men.Maria Sjöberg has brought attention to the cognatic system’s positive result for men, while Michael Gelting has found it difficult to understand why the keeping apart of property was important when the man nevertheless administered the woman’s property. I believe that I have successfully shown that such keeping apart favoured both the woman’s (in the first place male) relatives when she and her husband wanted to sell and that it also favoured the spouses when the woman’s relatives wanted to sell.That is to say, when – for example – the woman’s brother wished to sell land (and no other brothers were alive) the woman’s husband could buy the land. The husband thus safeguarded the woman’s pre-emptive right in Finnvel 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 294
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