kingship and law 454 of royal power in the three Scandinavian kingdoms being relatively similar as regards authority and resources, up to the start of the twelfth century. After that the king’s power was expanded with a series of new functions and the power that accompanied them. Since this took place at differing speeds, and took different forms, differences in a variety of aspects became increasingly obvious between the Scandinavian countries. Opinions are divided as to whether the growing and increasingly institutionalized royal power should be understood as an expression of a state formation process. The discussion is based on different perceptions of how appropriate it is to apply the concept of state to the Middle Ages, and ultimately it goes back to disagreement about what constitutes state functions or a state. In direct or modified form, the discussions have tended to proceed fromMax Weber and the monopoly on legitimate force as a minimalist criterion for what constitutes state power. Although this definition is in many ways both problematic and ideal-typical, it is also used in this book as an analytical point of reference for discussing the expansion of royal power and the transformation, if such indeed took place, into state power. There has been considerable discussion among archaeologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists about the processes behind the medieval and early modern state formation process in Europe, from different premises and perspectives. In sociology and political science especially, war has been held up as the most important driving force, with a leading advocate of this view in the person of the American sociologist Charles Tilly, who has summed it up thus: “War made the state, and the state made war.”4 Some historians, notably Joseph R. Strayer and Alan Harding, convincingly argue instead that judicial development—along with the influence of ideologies, religious doctrines, and conscious political action—was at least as crucial for the state formation process. Despite disagreement about whether war or the legal system was the most decisive force in the state formation process, all scholars tend to agree on the significance of centralized control over resources and institutionalized bureaucracy. An important starting point for this study, based both on earlier German scholarship and more recent Anglo-Saxon scholarship, is that the judicial order, the law, was a central expression of social order during the Middle 4 In Scandinavian research the civil wars in the Scandinavian countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been regarded, especially by Sverre Bagge, as a breakthrough for the state formation process, since they resulted in greater royal control of the use of force and a centralized political system.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=