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kingship and law 453 rical chapters, to the development of the king’s power in relation to the regional legal assembly and the church.3 Each chapter is structured according to a number of identified research questions which illuminate, in different ways, the powers and resources possessed by the king. The expansion of law-regulated royal power—and the state formation process this entails—is illustrated in concrete terms through the processual concepts of centralization, institutionalization, hierarchization, and territorialization. In this context centralizationdenotes a concentration of power resources and the transfer of political power from local actors and institutions to counterparts working at the national level. Institutionalization denotes that the exercise of power takes firmer shape and that the rules of the political and judicial exercise of power become more explicit and more predictable through formalized political institutions with a fixed composition and clearly defined spheres of competence. The termhierarchization denotes that the power to decide in different spheres is more clearly divided between different actors and is hierarchically structured, while simultaneously the access to power resources becomes more unevenly distributed. Territorialization denotes that political authority is increasingly linked to a specific geographical area and that political power is related more with control over a particular territory than supremacy over people. Since a medieval king was rarely able to exercise the same degree of control over his whole realm, a distinction is made between extensive and intensive exercise of power. The royal exercise of power, whether it was of extensive or intensive character, could moreover be either direct or delegated. Direct power refers to decisions personally made by the king, with or without counsellors, while delegated power refers to decisions made by people whom the king authorized to exercise power on his behalf. Research on the general European expansion and institutionalization of royal authority and power resources in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is both the starting point and the benchmark for this study. The growth of royal power was nourished by the rex iustus ideology of the righteous king by the grace of God, taught by the RomanCatholic Church, making the king the holder of a divine office where he was supposed to maintainpax(peace) andiustitia(justice). Earlier research paints apicture of the initial conditions 3 In this book no distinction is made between freemen (Sw. bönder) and lay magnates (Sw. stormän) since the laws generally made no distinction, besides which the social structure differed in time and place inmedieval Scandinavia. The legal assemblies were composed of the freemen, of whom some, of course, had greater potential to exert influence than others.

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