From Swords to Plowshares: Space and the Peace of the Home in Medieval Nordic Law, c. 1150–1350

This book explores how peace legislation was used to regulate the home and the domestic space in high medieval Scandinavia (c. 1150–1350) through an inter-Nordic comparison of the extant medieval Nordic laws. It is the first work of its kind to subject all of the provincial and "national" laws for Denmark, Iceland, Gotland, Norway, and Sweden extant from the period to an inter-Nordic legal comparison, and to employ a spatial theoretical perspective in such a study. The domestic peace regulations contained in these laws form the focus of the empirical investigations. These established special protections for the space of the home and farmstead against different types of violence. The investigations explore how the peace of the home was spatially delineated, what its intended subjects were, and which sanctions were applied on certain types of localized violence by which the protected peace zone was demarcated from its surroundings. Examining how the answers to these questions developed and changed over the period, the book argues, sheds light on how the space of the home was used as a vehicle by which to transform social relations. A gradual enlargement of the spatial area in which the domestic peace applied took place over the course of the period. This expansion was driven as part of a royally-sponsored peace programme frequently supported by the Church. But, as the study illustrates, this trend toward expansion was successive and uneven. The type of violence that the peace was intended to protect against was characteristically exercised by outside actors against the householder and his household. But, in all of the medieval Nordic polities, homicide and assault committed on another at their home lagged behind other, more general, serious offences in being classified under the most severe criminal category. When this reclassification took place in the latter half of the thirteenth century, it did so in conjunction with an augmentation of plaintiff rights; but also, in Denmark and Sweden, the inclusion of a requisite of intent which increased the burden of proof for a crime to qualify as a violation of the peace. At the same time, modest steps to regulate intra-household violence under the domestic peace can also be identified in the Danish and Swedish material. As the book shows, royal authority was becoming increasingly asserted over the space of the home in this period. Previous scholarship has identified the inclusion of special requisites and increased plaintiff rights in peace regulations as evidence of resistance to royal power. But this book offers a more nuanced interpretation: a royal power accepting limitations on itself as part of a process in which new claims were pressed within pre-existing frameworks. The successive and uneven development of the domestic peace at this time led to a complex layering of legal protections, behavioural demands, and restrictions that transformed the space of the home and wider farm into a patchwork of norms, captured under the concept of "peace zoning". This patchwork, the book contends, is itself evidence of the heated negotiation of the domestic space taking place in the Nordic legal arena during the High Middle Ages.