kingship and law 456 can be regarded as expressions of a shared medieval European societal system. In Scandinavian research there has long been an awareness that the Roman Catholic Church had a crucial role in the consolidation of medieval royal power in the Scandinavian countries and was a motor in the process towards closer cultural and political integration with continental Europe and the British Isles. One limitation is that neither Gotland nor Iceland, which had a special relationship to the Swedish and the Norwegian crown respectively, are included in the study. The limitation in time is approximate, comprising the period that is known in Scandinavian historiography as the High Middle Ages, when the majority of the surviving laws were written. The empirical chapters apply a progressive chronology (and progressive analysis), thus focusing on the development over time of different aspects of law-regulated royal power in the respective areas under study. the limitedpossibility of determining the age and origin of many of the individual legal regulations, and even of some of the law codes, complicates the study of changes over time. Regulations which deal in different ways with royal power were passed in various, often unknown, political contexts under the influence of different actors and interest groups. Several problems of source criticism arise, which justifies devoting a separate chapter to the law material. Unlike in many other studies, the laws are not regarded here as a direct reflection of the power relations prevailing between the king and the people at the time when the laws were codified. The reason for this is that the laws often contained older rules which no longer reflected the current power situation, while newer and disputed shifts of power could be difficult to have codified. Parallel to the expansion of both royal and ecclesiastical exercise of institutionalized power, in the Scandinavian countries as elsewhere in Europe, there were major judicial changes in the period from the middle of the twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. Local and regional customary law gave way to more centralized legislation under greater control of the king and the church and with increasingly strong influences from Roman and canon law. Most of the provincial laws, as they are preserved, came into existence at a time of transition between these two judicial sysChapter 2: The Medieval Scandinavian Laws
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