kingship and law 466 Several noticeable differences appear in power relations between king and church in the three Scandinavian countries. It is only early Swedish law that regulates the royal investiture of bishops. Another palpable difference is that the judicial immunity of ecclesiastical office holders was acknowledged in principle in Denmark and Norway but not completely in Sweden. The degree of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over laymen in breaches of ecclesiastical law also varied, being greatest in Denmark and least in Sweden. Unlike the case of Denmark and Norway, the provincial laws of Sweden largely regulated breaches of ecclesiastical law, which were tried at the local or regional legal assembly and mostly, when the fines were high, gave the king the right to a share. The Swedish king thus almost always had a share of fines for breaches of ecclesiastical law, while the Norwegian king had this right only for higher fines. In the Danish and Norwegian law texts the king and the church appear as two parallel and equal forces, unlike the Swedish laws, which have a greater tendency to subordinate the church to the king. The study confirms the picture revealed by previous research, based partly on other source material, that the Danish church had the strongest law-regulated position vis-à-vis the king, while the Swedish church had the weakest. What has not been adequately observed before, however, is the consequences of the absence of an ecclesiastical law in the Danish laws. It meant that the king, unlike in Norway and Sweden, had no right to collect fines or exercise jurisdiction at all in breaches of ecclesiastical law. chapter 7 sumsup the findings of the four empirical chapters in the book and links up with the introduction. The conclusions that can be drawn by combining the results of the separate studies are presented and then viewed in the context of the existing European discussion of the medieval state formation process. Thi study, like previous research, shows a clear expansion of royal power and a vigorous extension of the king’s spheres of competence over time. A growing number of societal functions were placed under royal control, and there was a growth in the king’s economic and political resources, parallel to a more institutionalized form of royal power. A key observation in this book is that the law-regulated royal power, in most respects, was strongest in Norway and weakest in Sweden. While this in itself is not a new finding, this study has been able to give a more detailed and nuanced picture through a stringent comparison of the king’s lawChapter 7: Conclusions, Feedback, and Future Prospects
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