papal administration and the rights of clergymen to make a last will these troublesome situations, the Church developed a practice according to which the property connected to ecclesiastical benefices needed to be strictly separated from the private property of the clergyman. Ecclesiastical norms stipulated that property belonging to the Church (that is, property belonging to a benefice or prebend) had to be transferred in its entirety to the successor in the ecclesiastical position. However, clerics were allowed to bequeath their own private property to whomever they wished, so long as they also remembered in their will the poor and the Church. However, in order to bequeath his private property, a clergyman necessarily needed to make a will, since according to the ecclesiastical rules (the so-called ius spolii) the private property of a clergyman went automatically to the Church if he had not left a will.9 The customs and situation in medieval Sweden differed somewhat from these general ecclesiastical rules applied to the whole of Christendom. In principle, Swedish civil legislation – that is, the regional laws until the mid-14th century and after circa 1350 the Swedish Law of the Realm10 – regulated matters of inheritance. The only exceptions to this regulation were members of the clergy; they were supposed to follow the regulations of canon law. In Sweden, the clergymen’s right to private property was under discussion for a considerable time, from the consolidation of Christianity in the territory in the 12th century until the late 13th century. One of the much-disputed issues concerned what was the private property of clergymen and what was the property belonging to the Church. In the 12th century, Swedes drew a distinction between clerics with a foreign background and native-born Swedes: the property of the foreigners went en9 Generally, about jus spolii, see Paravicini Bagliani 1980. 10 Until c. 1350, Sweden was divided into several regions that all had their own laws valid within the region but not outside. In circa 1350 the first Swedish law of the realm was proclaimed by King Magnus Eriksson, but it took several decades before the national law was in use everywhere in Sweden. On Swedish legal history, see Sjöholm 1988 as well as Korpiola – Lahtinen 2018 and Bjarne Larsson 2019. 170 Priests and Inheritance Rights in Sweden
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