summary. the open window beneficiaries in certain situations. The city altered the order of succession so that not only one parent, in all contexts, would be the initial beneficiary of a deceased child but rather the deceased’s siblings and parents sometimes became equal beneficiaries. This change can be interpreted as a desire to strengthen the younger generation’s occupational opportunities. When a parent’s child died as a young adult without children, Stockholm chose to give the parent preference over the deceased’s siblings, as the law provided. Hence, the deceased child inheritance was then added to the property of the surviving parent. But when circumstances were different, examples of Stockholm wanting to strengthen the situation of the deceased’s sibling by offering the opportunity to share the inheritance with the surviving parent were found. In instances when a sibling of a deceased became a co-beneficiary with a parent, the parent was either elderly or otherwise incapacitated and the sibling of the deceased was deemed to be in his or her best productive years. In such a co-beneficiary situation, the order of succession in Swedish town law was circumvented so that the parent and sibling equally inherited from the deceased. Parents and siblings of the deceased had also become co-beneficiaries in the revised law of the realm, which may have played a role in Stockholm’s altered views on inheritance. It could also be said that individualized distribution of inheritance made it possible so even younger siblings could access real property more quickly. At the end of the period studied, King Gustav Vasa impacted the inner workings of Stockholm. Shortly after his accession as king in 1523, he became involved in the city’s business. He influenced the election of councilors, appeared at the council house and got involved in court decisions. At the riksdag (parliament assembly) of 1527, Gustav Vasa saw to it that the church’s properties, to a large extent, would be transferred to the crown. In Stockholm, the king seized the properties of religious institutions and homesteads that the well-to-do guilds had at their disposal. Many of these properties were used by the king to reward loyal employees. The king had managed to enter the Stockholm housing market without being a burgher of the city or related to any city burgher. When the Dominican convent was dissolved in 1528, there was a brother who, 301
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