General Scandinavian law

Question 1

What is mannhelgi?

Answer 1

• The sanctity of a free man
• the idea that freemen have a natural immunity. If they are hurt or killed, it’s not a violation of their rights per se, but rather a violation of their cosmic position as a freeman.
• • There was no legitimate excuse to harm a free person and this is an underlying assumption in the laws

Question 2

What was the previos historiographical trend regarding Iceland?

Answer 2

19th and 20th centuries, scholars liked to think that these were egalitarian meetings of chieftains and farmers, but we now have a lot of evidence to suggest that Viking society was highly hierarchical.

Question 3

What does Heimskringla tell us about law in the Saga of St Olaf?

Answer 3

the Saga of St Olaf, tells the story of Thorgny the law-man who held this position after generations of his own family at the Uppsala assembly, and that he had his own escort/ retinue. And that he was an important and rich man.

Question 4

How did Scandinavian people declare assent at assemblies and evidence for this?

Answer 4

• It seems that in early-Scandinavia, people made noise with their weapons at an assembly to signify agreement or assent. Hence, the word ‘wapentake’, which evolved to mean the area the assembly had control over, but only in the Danelaw areas.
• This custom of signalling assent is also preserved in English place names, and is also mentioned in the much later law of King Magnus the Law-Mender of Norway. So it was not something that happened only in the English landscape.

Question 5

What are a banished man’s/ outlaw’s rights?

Answer 5

A banished man does not have a right to property or inheritance and is no longer protected under law, and his property is confiscated (apart from any money that the wife can prove is hers, which she keeps).

Question 6

Where was outlawry used in Scandinavia, and where was it not used?

Answer 6

In Iceland people could be outlawed for seriously injuring someone, and the same was true in Norway.
- But in Sweden and Denmark, injuries cannot be responded to with vengeance and only with fines, and different categories of wounds were distinguished.

Question 7

What was the place of the courts in the legal system?

Answer 7

They imposed the fines for compensation and organised the confiscation of property.

Question 8

What is something to consider about the source material and the punishments they tell us about?

Answer 8

• Society gradually evolved into a society where physical punishments are the norm, rather than fines, and this is the legal milieu in which the sagas were written down.

Question 9

What does Scandinavian law make a distinction between?

Answer 9

• Scandinavian law makes a distinction between killings where the perpetrator acknowledges responsibility and deaths were nobody takes responsibility.

Question 10

Considering outlawry in Iceland was basically a death sentence- why not just kill them?

Answer 10

Maybe the guilty party being removed from society was in itself the point, or perhaps it was just as there was no institutionalised executioner.

Question 11

Why was outlawry basically a death sentence in Iceland?

Answer 11

It was almost impossible to survive on your own in the harsh Icelandic landscape. So why not just kill them?

Question 12

What was Icelandic laws based on?

Answer 12

Their laws were based on Norwegian laws, but they had to have different mechanisms for maintaining said law.

Question 13

What could outlawry mean?

Answer 13

Outlawry could mean either that they were banished from the local area or from the country as a whole

Question 14

what was usual punishment for killing or serious offences?

Answer 14

outlawry

Question 15

Area we have the most information for and why?

Answer 15

There is a lot of focus a lot on Iceland, as we can supplement the law-codes with evidence from the sagas, so we have much more evidence over all for Iceland when compared to the other Scandinavian nations.

Question 16

Indication they wrote down laws when they weren’t relevant any more?

Answer 16

They also seem to have written down laws when they weren’t relevant anymore. For example, in 1117 slavery was practically non-existent but people still wrote down the laws concerning slaves.

Question 17

Discuss situation of law in Norway

Answer 17

Norway had 4 law provinces, and each was totally separate with its own law codes; national law codes covering entire areas comes very late in the Viking Age.

Question 18

What was the normal penalty for a crime in Scandinavia?

Answer 18

The penalties that were imposed by the law were usually financial, with the scale of the compensation depending upon the severity of the injury and the status of the victim (apart from in Iceland, where all freemen had the same price).

Question 19

Who was responsible for enforcing sentences?

Answer 19

Enforcing sentences was the responsibility of ordinary farmers, which could be difficult without the added enforcement of a higher power.

Question 20

What is there a lack of in Scandinavian law and how does this compare to Anglo-Saxon England

Answer 20

• There is no substantial evidence of royal law making until the 11th century, which is totally in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon situation. Both Olaf Haraldsson and Knut are credited with making laws.

Question 21

How are modern law and oral law fundamentally different?

Answer 21

• In the modern world we are used to having an absolute wording of law, but in oral law more important was the content. Some of the material might even be speculation about what the earlier law was.