part iv • intellectual legal history • lars björne colleagues, who often had no academic legal education, and for example David Nehrman (1695–1769), a professor in Lund who had studied in Halle and was influenced by Christian Thomasius, gave lectures and wrote textbooks in Swedish. In Denmark the university lecturers also needed textbooks in Danish, because so-called unlearned persons – meaning those who had no Latin – could take a lower legal degree. After the Great Northern War (1700–1721) the centuries-old animosity between Danes and Swedes dwindled to nothing. There were sporadic wars between the two Nordic kingdoms in thereafter, but personal relations had been established, and the twomost important legal scholars in the eighteenth century did manage to visit their Nordic neighbours. Nehrman visited Copenhagen in 1726 and later corresponded with his Danish colleagues. The famous Danish legal historian Peder Kofod Ancher (1710–1788) spent a year in Stockholm in the early 1770s to conduct research on mediaeval Danish manuscripts (which the Swedish forces had plundered during their occupation of Denmark in 1658), and he was very impressed by the warm reception he received. In the late eighteenth century, legal science in both kingdoms also became ‘Nordic’ in the sense that it was influenced by an early Scandinavian movement – then a cultural movement, unlike the later political Scandinavism of the mid nineteenth century.Legal scholars became aware of their common Nordic legal history. Contacts between Nordic legal scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were still sporadic, though, and took the form of individual visits to universities in neighbouring countries. The leading Nordic legal scholars of the early nineteenth century were the Dane Anders Sandøe Ørsted (1778–1860) and the Norwegian Anton Martin Schweigaard. Ørsted, who published prolifically on all legal subjects, was a well-known and respected authority in all the Nordic countries including Finland; Schweigaard was mainly known in Norway, especially for his opposition to German legal science and philosophy. Both authors’ production was pragmatic and addressed to judges and practising lawyers. The German historical school, naturally especially Savigny, was well known to Nordic legal scholars, but was only accepted 194
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