english summary 467 regulated authority and functions in each Scandinavian country. The royal power that is expressed in Danish and Norwegian law texts seems to have been in phase with—and in certain respects even at the forefront of—development in continental Europe, while change in Sweden lagged behind. It is particularly worth emphasizing the fact, also pointed out in previous research, that there are striking similarities between English and Norwegian royal power.6 The opposition to the expansion of royal power in Denmark and Sweden in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the absence of any such opposition in Norway, is reflected in the law material through constitutional rules for Denmark and Sweden but not for Norway. On the whole, many of the actual political circumstances known from the period are reflected by the law-regulated power possessed by the different actors. Increasing institutionalization, centralization, and hierarchization of royal power is noticeable from the law texts in all three countries. An interesting, and perhaps somewhat surprising, finding is that the texts do not reflect any increasing territorialization of the exercise of royal power. What we see instead is a growing centralization, with stronger and more direct royal control, over existing territorially based exercise of power. To study the reason for the inter-Scandinavian differences observed in the development of institutionalized and law-regulated royal power would be beyond the scope of this book. The differences are of such a kind that it may be tentatively claimed that they should be sought in four different local factors in each kingdom which gave rise to different conditions for the emergence of stronger royal power: (1) different times for conversion to Christianity; (2) different geographical and material conditions; (3) different cultural orientation and contacts; and (4) individual political events and actors. The book has focused on studying the king’s law-regulated power. How strong the king’s power really was is thus beyond the scope of this study. Since the king’s executive power, as demonstrated in chapter 3, developed later than his judicial power—and in many respects also later than his legislative power—it seems unlikely that the lack of an executive power was 6 Among other things, the extensive right of the king to collect fines, the strong royal influence over the judicial power, the more prominent royal right of legislation, and the more developed royal monopoly on force distinguished Norway from both Denmark and Sweden and from most countries on the Continent and the British Isles. The existence of a hierarchical scale of fines, which distinguishes free men from each other as regards the size of the fines to which they are entitled, and a representative assembly instead of a general assembly, also makes Norway different from Denmark and Sweden.
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