One King – One Law
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King Magnus the 6th is a man of action. He is born in 1238 and reigns as king from 1263 until his death in 1280. He is later given the nickname ‘the Lawmender’ because he revises the laws and decides that one and the same body of laws should apply for the whole country. He also creates a coin system that is the most modern in Scandinavia.
The king’s coins give him visibility throughout the country. ‘Magnus Rex’, which means ‘King Magnus’, is on the obverse, the front of this coin. He is pictured with a royal crown, but we do not know whether this portrait actually looks like him. As king, Magnus must promise to follow the Church’s teaching. This is why the words ‘Blessed be God’ are on the reverse, or back of the coin. The coin must have been minted in one of the medieval royal cities – in Bergen, Tunsberg, Oslo, or Nidaros.
Magnus is the son of King Haakon Haakonsson. Haakon put an end to the civil wars in Norway. Magnus grows up in Bergen, at the time when Franciscan monks establish themselves in the city. These friars follow St. Francis of Assisi’s ideals about helping the poor. As king, Magnus builds hospitals and, through his laws, promotes the interests of the weakest people in society. During the reign of King Magnus, the period of peace in Norway continues. The king acquires a good reputation after his death. ‘During his reign there was good peace in the land’, writes the author of a medieval saga. In his words, Magnus ‘was the first to reign as sole king without being envied by anyone in Norway’.
Announcing the Thing
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The sound of church bells should remind us that to pass laws and set penalties are serious activities – yes, almost sacred. The new Laws of the Land states that “the royal magistrate is to have a great bell rung when he wishes to go to the assembly with the law book.” The sound of bells purifies the air, as it were. It separates what is about to happen from the tasks of everyday life. Before the men who have gathered enter the precinct where the governing assembly takes place, they are to cease with small talk, stop eating and drinking, and put down their weapons. Now it is the letter of the law and the words of the participants that matter.
The sound we hear in the exhibition comes from the old bell of Hvaler Church. The bell might have been cast in the Netherlands in the 1200s, and it was used until the 1980s. The uppermost of the bells in the exhibition was last used at Akershus Castle Church. But it probably comes from an earlier church in Oslo, maybe the monastery church on the island of Hovedøya. The lower bell comes from Lunde in Telemark. The bells are cast in bronze and weigh altogether close to 200 kilos.
Some medieval church bells have inscriptions in runes or Latin letters. This is also the case with these two bells. Around the bell from Akershus Castle Church, there are two rows of runes that read from right to left. The longer sequence contains 19 runes – the 16 characters of the runic alphabet with three added runes, while the shorter one contains the first seven characters in the runic alphabet. Both rows are here linked to the calendar. In runic calendars the first seven runes were used as letters for days and thus showed when Sundays would occur. As long as the Julian calendar was in use, these were used to calculate when Easter was to be celebrated. Around the second church bell we see reversed, gothic letters that provide the beginning of the prayer Ave Maria, ‘Hail Mary’.
The hammer for ringing a church bell is called a clapper. This clapper comes from Askim Church in Østfold. It too has a runic inscription. The name “Andres” is written here, then “p”, which perhaps is an abbreviation of the word “priest”, and finally another name or nickname, Farmann. Farmann means a traveller, often a seafarer or merchant, but it was also a common name in the fourteenth and fifteenth century Norway.
Counterfeiters outlawed
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Crime and punishment
During roadwork in Bergen in 1910, workmen found almost 1,800 pennies from the time of King Eric Magnusson. Here you can see a few hundred of them. The person who engraved the dies that were used to strike these coins has done an excellent job. Except for one spelling mistake: here it says NOSVEG instead of NORWEG. As it happens, the coins only contain 1 % silver, and not 25 %, as the king’s coins usually do. The coins are counterfeit. The plan was probably to ‘silver-wash’ them, which is the devious practice of applying a film of silver to the pennies to make them look genuine. These counterfeit coins are so well-made that coin experts today wonder: Did people from the Royal Mint participate in the swindle?
King Eric is Magnus the Lawmender’s oldest son. He is king from 1280 to 1299. Eric’s coins are the first to show a lion holding an axe in his front paws. The axe is the attribute of St. Olaf, and this motif is still on Norway’s coat of arms.
The smaller pile of coins also consists of counterfeits, this time from the early 1290s. These were found at the Alstad Farm in Toten. People in the Middle Ages use coins to pay for goods and services, but also to pay fines. Being fined is the most common punishment for breaking a law. Imprisonment in the modern sense does not exist. If you do not meet up to fight when the country is under threat, the fine is 1 silver mark, which is equal to 240 pennies. But some crimes are so grave that they cannot be compensated for with a monetary fine. The Laws of the Land from 1274 states: “And it is an inexpiable crime to forge our king’s mint, letter or seal”. The penalty for counterfeiting coins is to be declared an outlaw. An outlaw is not under the protection of the law, so anyone can kill a coin-forger without being punished. This is the most severe punishment.
If you are caught stealing something small and you do not pay the fine, you are to be flogged. The third time you’re caught stealing and do not pay the fine, you are to be whipped until your skin tears, and then branded with a key on your cheek, as it is written in Magnus the Lawmender’s Laws of the Land. Then everyone will see that he is a thief – for the rest of life. If you continue stealing, you are declared an outlaw.
An orderly assembly
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The sword and the law-thing
Early in the Middle Ages, men who attended the governing assembly took their swords with them to the negotiations at the Assembly. If they agreed with a certain decision, they lifted their swords to demonstrate consent. In Magnus the Lawmender’s Laws of the Land, however, there are strict rules stating that swords should be left outside the boundary of the precinct. We know that this boundary marker was called a vebånd, but we do not know what it was made of. The ban on weapons makes it even clearer that it is not the power of weapons, but the king’s law, that determines what is right and wrong.
The swords in the glass case are called longswords or two-handed swords. They are from the 1300s and were initially the weapons which rich people used to fight each other. Some of them have been found in churches because the most powerful people were often buried with their swords. Over time, longswords spread to the lower classes and are used for both waging war and for duelling. It is when the knights exchange their chain mail for steel-plated armour that the older and shorter swords become inadequate. With a longsword, a warrior finds it easier to stab the vulnerable points in plate armour, for instance, armpits, crotch, and the inside of elbows, and knees. Both hands are now free to swing the sword because there is no shield to carry.
With Magnus the Lawmender, it becomes crystal clear that it is the king who makes the laws, not the governing assembly, which in Old Norse is called the Thing. There is a clear expectation that the king should only change the laws if it is to the people’s benefit. But there is also another difference in law-making before and after this period in Norwegian history. Previously, the men who attended the local assemblies passed judgement on individual cases, and these decisions were then used as precedents when new cases were to be decided on. Therefore, any new laws looked backwards in time. But, according to Professor Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde, to make lots of laws all at once in order to solve future problems is a phenomenon that emerges when royal power increases and society changes through the implementation of Christianity. This development is completed with Magnus the Lawmender. His inspiration comes from ancient Roman law, which his advisers in Bergen studied in continental Europe, not least in France.
Moderate food and drinks
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The Christian faith changes what people in Norway can eat and drink.
Now the idea of eating and drinking in moderation is introduced. On certain days, eating meat is forbidden. This applies, for example, to all Fridays and to the 40 days leading up to Easter. During this period called Lent, fish is served. People often talk about the days of the year as either fish days or meat days. The monk Alan of Lille, in France, writes about fasting in the 1200s: fasting is “medicine to soul and body. It preserves the body from disease, and the soul from sin”, he says. On some days, food made with milk products is also forbidden.
But what if you nevertheless eat meat on a Friday? Well, if you claim you were confused over which day of the week it was and you spit out the piece that was in your mouth, you avoid having to pay a fine. But you need to confess it to the priest, as it says in the older legislation called the Borgarthing Law. Another rule that came with Christianity is the ban on eating horse meat, because it is associated with the Old Norse religion. But people in the Middle Ages do enjoy tasty food and strong drink. Beer or ale is served on all holidays. As early as in the 1000s, the king makes the brewing of beer mandatory. On ordinary days, people drink a weak home-brew called mungåt. But even though beer is important, the Laws of the Land from 1274 prohibits people from “malting grain for sale in the countryside during times of serious shortage, except when the king gives permission with his letters”.
On the large black jug, we read the words ‘Tap and drink’. The fact that many people follow this recommendation can be seen in the laws: ‘“If drunken men roam about our city and the guards run into them, they must guide them and not mislead them’, we read in Magnus the Lawmender’s municipal law from 1276. The king also forbids drunkenness and revelry at funerals, in order to avoid quarrels, manslaughter, and waste. At the governing assembly, alcohol is completely forbidden: “If anyone turns to food or beer and pays more attention to that than the assembly, none of their cases will be considered on that day”, says the law.
Standards hindering fraud
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New laws and new standards
The new laws in the 1200s ensure that weights and measurements are standardized throughout the country. This is to avoid cheating when people buy and sell. Or, as the Law of the Land states: ‘so that ignorant people are less likely to be fooled, wherever they might be in the country’. This reflects one reason why Magnus the Lawmender makes his laws, namely, to protect the weakest in society. Scales and measuring vessels are to be checked every year at a regional assembly called the lagting, or law assembly. Farmers must have their weights and measuring instruments checked by the local sheriff who has responsibility for law and order. Nevertheless, the Law of the Land’s attempt to introduce a common system never quite succeeds in the Middle Ages.
Folding scales were in use as far back as the Viking Age. We do not know whether this particular folding scale from Fyresdal in Telemark is from the Middle Ages or even earlier. When the weight has a specific shape, it is easier to detect whether someone has filed way part of it to make it lighter. Attempts at cheating nevertheless occur. In 1318, a woman named Gudrun, from Jostedalen in Sogn, is caught hiding turnips in the butter she pays as tax to the king.
Many weights are shaped as horses. The horse loses the religious significance it had in the Viking Age, but it is still a useful and a prestigious animal in the Middle Ages. The Laws of the Land mentions horses more than 50 times. To the question of whether a horseman can let his horse eat grass alongside the roadside, the answer is Yes. He can do this without paying a fine: he can “take as much as his horse needs to eat there”, the law confirms.
These types of “brass horses” were also used as toys. In the Saga of Víga-Glúm, from Iceland, a four-year-old boy asks to borrow a horse from his older brother. Yes, says the six-year-old: “I will give it to you because a toy like this now suits you better than it does me.”
To write gives power
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Latin letters come to Norway along with the church and traveling scholars, such as monks. The kings build a literate bureaucracy that resembles the bureaucracy the church already has – with roots stretching all the way back to the Roman Empire. The new laws in the 1200s require that marriages and the purchase of property above a certain amount must be documented in writing. One must “draw up” a letter, as the Laws of the Land puts it. In the “Trade Section”, we read that for “All the terms people negotiate regarding the marriages of women, and so, too, if people buy or sell property or farms, and for every contract amounting to ten marks or more, both parties are to make a written document about their agreement and terms …”.
People who know how to write travel around and ensure that such agreements are written down. On a journey or at the assembly, it is practical to bring along this sort of box made of birch wood. Inside it, a scribe can store valuable objects such as candles, writing tools, and documents.
In Northern Europe, official documents are written with ink on parchment. Parchment is made with thin, specially prepared calfskin. The ink is made using so-called “gallnuts”, which are small, round balls that grow on oak branches in the autumn. The number of written documents increases rapidly after the new laws are made. One of the texts that is most often copied is the Law of the Land itself. Scholars estimate that there are several hundred hand-written copies of the law code in circulation in the 1300s. This would mean there is, on average, one law code for every 1,200 people in the country.
Since parchment is so expensive, medieval students practice writing with a stylus on a wax-covered wooden tablet. Professional scribes also take notes on such wax tablets. A stylus is a sharp writing tool made of bone, metal, or wood. With the blunt end of a stylus, you can correct mistakes or erase the text – just as with a modern pencil with an eraser on the end. After the writing is erased, you have a clean tablet – a tabula rasa. However, slight traces of sharply cut letters may still appear in the wood underneath the wax.
New king, new coins
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Magnus the Lawmender not only produces a new law code for all of Norway. He also reforms the monetary system. When his father Haakon Haakonsson dies in 1263, Magnus removes his father’s coins from circulation and replaces them with his own. In this way, he gets silver to produce his own coins and makes them the only legal currency within the realm. The coins show Magnus’s portrait and thus legitimate his status as king.
Notice the coins that are only struck with a motif on one side. They are called bracteates. The word brakteat comes from Latin and means “thin metal”. These bracteates are mostly made of copper and contain between 5 % and 25 % silver. Haakon Haakonson had issued bracteates with many different designs, but King Magnus chooses a single design for all his coins, namely, his own portrait showing him wearing the royal crown. We do not know whether the engravers really tried to present a naturalistic portrait of the king or whether it was the idea of a king. Even so, this is how Magnus creates a standardized monetary system. This is the king’s own coin. A coin everyone recognizes. Production took place in one or more of the large cities: in Bergen, Tunsberg, Oslo, or Nidaros.
Eventually, Magnus replaces his own bracteates with new coins, this time with solid two-sided pennies. The legend circling the royal portrait reads REX MAGNUS, which means “King Magnus”. On the back – the reverse – is a cross, which is modern in Europe at this time. One reads BENEDICTUS DEUS, which is Latin for “Blessed be God”. Magnus also issues quarter-pennies, such that Norway now gains a coin system with multiple denominations or values. With King Magnus’s monetary reform, Norway has the most advanced coin system in Scandinavia.
Coins function well for smaller transactions such as paying for groceries or the services of a craftsman. You also need coins for church offerings. Around the year 1300, you can buy a loaf of rye bread for one penny. A helmet of the best quality, however, costs 150 pennies – which is almost as much as a farm worker in Gudbrandsdalen earns in a whole year. The fine for those who do not muster and meet up ready to fight when an enemy threatens the country, must pay a fine of one 240 pennies.