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slighting word might cause a deadly strife, as may be
seen from the prohibition by king Magnus of
injurious expressions, they employed their
dependents in mutual feuds, and made use of their
influence on the common people for the instigation of
revolts. Dangers of this kind threatened especially
when the king convoked the men of his realm to a
parley, on which occasions likewise the multitude
of men that was assembled and claimed to live at
the king’s charge produced delay and heavy
expense. It is thus we understand the strict
injunctions issued by king Magnus for the preservation of
general peace in every place where the king should
come to hold a conference, the cessation of all
deadly feud at the same time between individuals,
“howsoever highly born they might be,” and even
the removal of all weapons of strife, under penalty of
loss of property and perpetual banishment; thus is
to be explained the prohibition against appearing
on such an occasion without a summons, or with a
greater retinue than the king, and the right of
legislation which he claimed to himself “with his
council and his good men (goda män)” in various
cases which were “not guarded against by the law,
nor set down in it [1].” In that age this was an
improvement, and was so deemed by the people, for
this power it was which enabled the king to give
new force to the laws, passed by his father for
the maintenance of peace, in virtue of which he
took under his especial protection widows,
fatherless children, and old men, especially those who
had done service to him, and issued edicts against
exacting quarters from the peasants by force, or
against “that abuse which had long existed, that
all who travel through the country, be they ever
so rich, demand entertainment without paying for
it, and spend in a little while what the poor man
has earned by the labour of a long time [2].” By
these laws and the general strictness of his
administration, king Magnus acquired the surname of
Ladulas (barn-locker), because he was a lock for
the peasant’s barn. “And this name of Ladulas,”
says Olave Peterson in his Swedish Chronicle, “is
an honourable title, which has conferred greater
praise and fame on king Magnus, than if he had
been called a Roman emperor. For there be
found not many in the world, who can be styled
barn-lock; barn-breaker has ever been more
common.”
It is necessary not to forget, that both the great
rulers who enacted laws to secure the maintenance
of public peace in Sweden, had themselves stained
their hands with blood treacherously shed; as
Magnus seems not to have reflected upon the
transactions attending his own accession to the
crown, when he obtained from the clergy assembled
at the Synod of Telje in 1279, a declaration, that in
future every man who offered violence to the
person of a crowned king of Sweden, should be placed
under the ban of excommunication, and never be
acknowledged as a legitimate sovereign. But his
age is incontestably distinguished by new and
extended ideas of the rights and power of the
sovereign, a spirit which shows itself so manifestly in
all directions, as long afterwards to allow of several
ordinances, fabricated in the same view, being
imputed to Magnus Ladulas with some appearance of
probability. This is the case with the so-called
statute of Helgeand’s Holm [3], whereof no one had
heard anything till in 1587 an individual, otherwise
notorious for his striving after court favour,
produced a memoir on the subject. According to
this, the crown obtained in 1282 an exclusive
right of possession over all mines, all fisheries in
the great waters and streams of Sweden, all
settlements upon unenclosed forests and lands, whereon
a general assessment of taxes was asserted to have
been ordered and carried into effect, on the ground
that the estate of Upsala was no longer adequate to
the supply of the king’s necessities and the public
expenditure in general. This statement, although
its truth was doubted almost from the first,
attained a kind of prescriptive credit in our history,
which however cannot be sustained against
indubitable evidence. Mines in Sweden were
formerly, as now, demonstrably the property of
private persons [4]. So too were fisheries, as for
example, those in the great streams of Norrland [5],
although there were instances in which property of
this nature was held by our kings. With regard
to common forests a similar tenure prevailed. In
the provincial laws these are said to be the
property of the several parishes, although common
(allmenning) is also sometimes mentioned as
belonging to the king [6], and where no right of
property existed, the crown naturally bestowed an
authorized possession, as may be seen even in the
time of the Folkungers, from royal ordinances
concerning the disposal of the waste tracts surrounding
the upper portion of the Gulf of Bothnia. Touching
the general assessment of the taxes, that repartition
of the ground, which is said to have served
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