‘He Grabbed his Axe and Gave Thore a Blow to his Head’: Late Medieval Clerical Violence in Norway as Treated according to Canon and Civil Laws

Abstract

One of the fields in which supranational and national currents crossed each other in medieval Europe was that of law and legislation. Roman Law, and in turn canon law, seem to have influenced most local and national law codes. On the northern Scandinavian fringes of Europe we find a legislative tradition which to some extent contains older indigenous elements originating from a system of provincial laws. As for Norway, the drawing of a demarcation line between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction was a matter of dispute from the late thirteenth century onwards and throughout the Middle Ages. This article presents the main steps of this historical process and focuses particularly on the issue of clerical violence in order to exemplify how matters were actually resolved. On the basis of two diplomas, one addressed to the pope and one to the king, written by or on behalf of clerics who had killed someone, this essay will outline and discuss the similarities and the differences between the treatment of these cases within the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictional systems. An overarching aim of this book is to search for particular Nordic imprints on, or variants of, general European traits of development. With similar kinds of cases dealing with clerical homicide treated in Rome and Scandinavia respectively, we have sources at hand that open up this kind of comparative outlook. The main points of this essay will be the status of the principle of privilegium fori, relevant provisions of the law, the format of the supplications, and the aspect of mitigating and aggravating circumstances.