kingship and law 458 special focus on limitations of royal power. They were formally issued by the king and were considered to have the same judicial status as laws. The medieval Scandinavian laws have been published in standard editions which are now mostly rather old, with more or less comprehensive variants. It is these editions that this book is based on. This means that an edited and more or less normalized text has been used, even though there are in many cases a number of different manuscripts preserved of one and the same law with considerable differences between them. this chapterstudies the judicial authority and functions of the king and how they changed over time in the Scandinavian realms, by investigating the scope and forms of the king’s right to prosecute as the injured party and his judicial, legislative, and executive power. The king’s right to prosecute as the injured party is considered on the basis of the spheres of justice where the king had the right to collect fines and the scope of this right. Judicial power is studied primarily in terms of the types of cases which the king had the power to judge, the royal power to appoint lawmen/judges, and the extent to which the king had the right to grant pardons. The king’s legislative power is traced through the issue of ordinances, the royal proclamation of new or revised provincial laws and laws covering the whole realm. Executive power is studied partly on the basis of the extent to which royal officials had executive judicial functions. While most of these aspects of the king’s judicial powers have been studied previously for individual Scandinavian countries, there has been no systematic inter-Scandinavian comparison of the subject as a whole. The empirical survey of the king’s judicial authority and functions in the law material shows, at a general level, a similarity in that the king in all three Scandinavian countries acquired jurisdiction over more spheres of justice and gained an increasing right to collect fines, alongside an ever greater judiciary, legislative, and executive power. In all the countries it is also possible to see signs of a greater institutionalization of the exercise of judicial power. The inter-Scandinavian differences concern the time when the crucial changes occurred and the forms and scope of the different judicial powers. The study has confirmed a previous view, namely, that royal control of the judicial system was stronger in Norway than in Denmark and Sweden in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is clear that the Swedish king had Chapter 3: The King and the Administration of Justice
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