english summary 459 weaker judicial power than the kings in the neighbouring countries. This has been shown, for instance, in the way the Swedish king had less right, relatively speaking, to collect fines and confiscate property than the kings of Denmark and Norway, a consequence of the tripartite system that applied to almost everything in Sweden. The heinous crimes (Sw. urbotamål), those where a fine was not a sufficient penalty, indicating a stronger position for the king, are also most frequent in the Norwegian laws and are found least in the Swedish laws. In Norway and Sweden the king became the supreme judge in temporal matters in the thirteenth century. In contrast, the Danish king’s right to act as judge was limited by the ecclesiastical and lay magnates. In Denmark however, a special royal court (retterting) was established, as in Sweden (kungaräfst) but unlike the situation in Norway. A possible reason for this is that the Norwegian king had already attained such control over the ordinary judiciary bodies that this not was considered necessary. In all the Scandinavian countries the king acquired an increasing right to pardon outlaws, but it was the Norwegian king who gained the greatest latitude to use this power, while the Swedish king had the least. The development towards increased royal legislative power followed the same path in the Scandinavian countries. The first explicit statement in the extant laws indicating that the king had legislative competence is found in statutes inNorway from the early 1130s, inDenmark in 1200, and in Sweden in 1284. It was not until the king acquired the right to legislate in the form of ordinances that he gained the power to draft proposed laws. This right appeared first in Denmark, then in Norway, and last in Sweden. The king thus came to possess the real, if not the formal, normative power, while simultaneously the royal proclamation of law became increasingly important. The Danish coronation charters from 1282, 1320, and 1326 severely curtailed the Danish king’s legislative rights. A similar restriction of royal legislative power was enshrined in the Swedish law of the realm from around 1350. In Norway, on the other hand, there was no such opposition to royal legislative power. The Danish king did not succeed in making the kingdom into a judicial unit, but the Norwegian king had a countrywide law code adopted in 1274, while in Sweden the king managed this around 1350. In the case of Denmark, a limitation in the responsibility for executing punishments can be traced back to the year 1200 but is not really noticeable until the mid-thirteenth century. The Norwegian king had limited executive power in the provincial laws during the twelfth century but acquired this
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