kingship and law 468 what created the conditions for expanding royal judicial authority and functions. Instead it is argued that the king’s increased judicial power should be viewed as a stage in the ongoing centralization of political and judicial power. There was a strong incentive for the king to assume judicial functions since these gave an income while simultaneously strengthening the king’s political position and his authority in society. Royal claims to greater judicial power were also nourished by the Christian ideology of kingship. A new observation is that the king, in all three Scandinavian countries, first appears to have become interested in ensuring the execution of penalties after he came into possession of significant judicial power. Executive royal power first became a royal priority when there were signs that it was the king’s laws and judgements that people did not comply with. One of the main conclusions of the book is thus that executive power can ultimately be regarded as a means by which to strengthen royal authority. A main thesis in the book is that the growing power of the medieval kings and the extension of their sphere of responsibility should primarily be understood as the result of conscious political action with the inspiration of Roman law and the ecclesiastical rex iustus ideology. These aspirations had different degrees of success in the Scandinavian countries, and different societal factors acted, to varying extents, in a direction that generated more favourable conditions for the expansion of royal power. The changes in the law-regulated power of the king in the Scandinavian countries comply well with the development outlined by the British historianWalter Ullmann for kingship in continental Europe. In the Early Middle Ages, kings were considered to obtain their power from below, from the free men, but this was gradually displaced by the concept that the king acquired his power from above, fromGod. The idea that a king was first and foremost answerable, not to the people, but to God, who had entrusted him with his power, established the conditions for more authoritarian royal power, which in the Scandinavian countries was most clearly expressed in the law texts in Norway. To be able to decide the extent to which the expansion of law-regulated royal power in the Scandinavian countries may be said to have constituted a state formation process, the book has studied the presence or absence of specific characteristics of state power according to three different definitions of the termstate. The increasing institutionalization, centralization, and hierarchization of royal power mean that most of the criteria for state power are wholly or partly fulfilled according to all three definitions of the concept,
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