summary. the open window to dispose of property. This study examines how these circumstances were manifested in practice for wives by probing the city’s land register records and the city’s so-called “minutes of the town court” which contain a mix of notices, memos and court decisions. The sources for this study are rooted in approximately 2,500 court decisions and the approximately 500 real estate transactions recorded in land registry records. Supported by previous research on what the title of wife in the Middle Ages meant, this study presumes that both the woman and the man in the marriage were the heads of households during the period examined, although it was usually the man who represented the household in the community, especially when it came to the immovable property of the household. In Stockholm, the husband kept the couples joint register of accounts. It is this ledger of accounts that was often used as evidence before the court for the credits the household gave and received. From a property ownership rights perspective, the study examines marriage in Stockholm as an “economic company” in which both parties should have an equal share of household property, including the parties’ inherited property. In this study, the ancient Nordic concept of faelig (system of joint property), which the legal historian Inger Dübeck differentiated into three different types of “companies” in her studyKvinder, familie og formue from 2003, is used. According to her definition of the marriage company, the husband within it could not autonomously decide over the household’s immovable property. Both parties must agree on how to dispose of the immovable property, which is a fundamental principle put to the test in this study. According to Swedish town law, as was the case in many other cities in Europe, the husband did not have to ask for his spouse’s consent regarding household property, except in cases where he wanted to carry out a transaction with the wife’s inherited property. The reason a husband needed to ask his wife for such approval was based on the general belief in Europe that inherited property belonged to a family’s specific lineal heirs; this was especially the case among the aristocracy. Such inherited property would preferably remain with lineal heirs or it would go to the new lineal heirs formed by the pair. In many marriages in Europe, there284
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