Table Of ContentTHE LIBER LEGIS SCANIAE
The Liber legis Scaniae: The Latin Text with Introduction, Translation and
Commentaries forms the second volume of The Danish Medieval Laws and is
dedicated to the Latin text based on the Danish medieval Law of Scania.
A lso known as the “Old laws of Scania”, t he Liber legis Scaniae is ascribed
to Archbishop Anders Sunesen and traditionally belongs to the corpus of Danish
medieval laws. It was translated from Old Danish in the thirteenth century and until
now has often been considered a subsidiary text. In this book, the importance of t he
Liber legis Scaniae is reexamined and its role in the fi rst redaction of the Danish
medieval laws is revealed as far more central than previously thought. This is the
fi rst time the text has been translated into English, and both the original Latin and
the new English translation are included together.
Beginning with a detailed introduction providing key information about the text,
its author and its place in Danish legal history, and including a chapter dedicated
to the Latin language of the text, this book will be ideal for students and scholars
of medieval Scandinavian legal history. It also concludes with an extensive Latin-
to-English glossary.
Ditlev Tamm is a Professor at the Centre for Studies in Legal Culture at the
University of Copenhagen. He has previously published in Danish and other lan-
guages, and his previous publications in English include T he Supreme Court: A
Historical Perspective (2015), the conference paper H ow Nordic Are the Old Nor-
dic Laws: Ten Years Later? (2014) and (as editor with Helle Vogt) The Danish
Medieval Laws: The Laws of Scania, Zealand and Jutland (2016).
MEDIEVAL NORDIC LAWS
Series editors: Stefan Brink and Ditlev Tamm
Medieval Nordic Laws, edited by S tefan Brink and Ditlev Tamm, is part of the
Routledge Medieval Translations series. These translations are the fi rst transla-
tions into English of the earliest laws of Scandinavia, and are some of the earliest
written sources for Scandinavia. These translated laws emanate from an inter-
national project of the same name and have never before been introduced to an
international audience.
GUTA LAG AND GUTA SAGA
The Law and History of the Gotlanders
Christine Peel
THE DANISH MEDIEVAL LAWS
The Laws of Scania, Zealand and Jutland
Ditlev Tamm and Helle Vogt
THE LIBER LEGIS SCANIAE
The Latin Text with Introduction, Translation and Commentaries
Ditlev Tamm
T H E L I B E R L E G I S
S C A N I A E
The Latin Text with Introduction,
Translation and Commentaries
Edited by Ditlev Tamm
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Ditlev Tamm; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Ditlev Tamm to be identifi ed as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-68084-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-11472-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
A general introduction to the Medieval Nordic Laws translation vii
Foreword ix
List of abbreviations x
PART I
Introduction 1
The author 3
The text 8
Household and family 8
Land 8
Offences against life, body or property 9
Contracts 9
The Liber legis Scaniae in Danish legal historiography 14
The manuscripts 16
Bibliography: introduction 18
PART II
The text 21
The Latin text with English translation 23
Antique leges Scaniae 24
I Liber legis Scaniae 25
Correspondence between Liber legis Scaniae and the
Law of Scania 150
Liber legis Scaniae – the Law of Scania 150
The Law of Scania – Liber legis Scaniae 152
Bibliography: text 155
v
CONTENTS
PART III
Vocabulary 157
Andrew Sunesen’s language 159
1. How did Andrew learn his Latin? 159
2. Pronunciation and spelling 161
3. The vocabulary, syntax and style of Lex Scaniæ 163
Bibliography: vocabulary 174
Glossary Latin – English 175
Index 189
vi
A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO
THE MEDIEVAL NORDIC LAWS
TRANSLATION
T he oldest laws of the Nordic countries are written in the vernacular. The earliest
manuscripts stem from the thirteenth century and are younger than the texts of the
laws, some of which date back to the twelfth century. They are, of course, impor-
tant in Nordic law and legal history, but they are equally signifi cant for different
branches of history, being the oldest written sources we have in the Nordic coun-
tries of the society at that time, dealing with the household and social, sometimes
administrative, ecclesiastical and agrarian matters and also for philology.
These laws were intensely studied by legal historians as the foundation of
national law. During the last decade there has been a revival in the interest in
these early laws in the Nordic countries manifested in, for example, an infl uential
conference series in early law at the Carlsberg Academy in Denmark, an initia-
tive of an interdisciplinary network project called Medieval Nordic Laws (MNL),
funded by The Leverhulme Trust and based at the University of Aberdeen, and
some other local initiatives. In order to open up the fl oodgates for international
interest and research on these laws and to facilitate comparison, it was decided in
the MNL project to translate the laws into English. Besides the obvious scoop of
an international interest in the laws based on new translations, another gain with
this initiative was the rethinking of the position of the laws in connection with
the redaction of new introductions to the laws. The Nordic medieval laws were
previously subjected to thorough analysis from both legal and historical points
of view, and they have been translated into modern Nordic languages. This hap-
pened mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, but the laws have long played a central role
in Nordic legal history. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Nordic
laws were seen in German scholarship as important expressions of the so-called
Germanenrechte, and intense learning was used in developing and describing a
specifi c Nordic variant of such law. This approach was never fully accepted in the
Nordic countries, and a more critical study of the laws based on the idea that they
refl ected both older and newer layers of law started in the 1920s and continued up
to the 1980s in Scandinavia. Today’s legal historians in the Nordic countries tend
to see the laws in a European context, as new law written down as such. However,
most of the Nordic scholarship was only published in Nordic languages. Research
into the medieval legal world has continued in later years, and a translation and
vii
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
introductions in English will make the newest research accessible to an interna-
tional audience. Iceland holds a somewhat different position and has already seen
two of the old law codes, the Grágás and the Jónsbók, given modern translations
and introductions recently. The edition of the old Icelandic law has been an inspira-
tion for the present project.
T he work has been pursued on a national basis by local teams with occasional
meetings to discuss it. The original plan for these new translations was either to
establish a team of scholars working with the laws, as in Denmark, or individual
experts already acquainted with the law in question, as in Norway and Sweden,
to do the work. To assist these translators, reference groups were assembled with
some of the most prominent scholars in the fi elds of law, legal history, canon
law, history and philology. A crucial issue when dealing with translations of this
kind is to fi nd a ‘normative’ text to base the translation on, chosen from the many
(sometimes diverging) manuscripts which some laws can display. It has been up
to each team or translator to make this decision; it would have been desirable but
technically very complicated to use the original text. To make the volumes acces-
sible to a broader readership, we have decided not to have the Old Nordic texts
included; in most cases these can be found online.
Stefan Brink,
Professor of Scandinavian Studies,
University of Aberdeen
Ditlev Tamm,
Professor of Law,
University of Copenhagen
viii
FOREWORD
This second volume of the edition of The Danish Medieval Laws is dedicated to a
text in Latin based on the Law of Scania. The text is ascribed to Archbishop Anders
(Andrew) Sunesen, and it stems, like most of the Danish medieval law texts, from
the fi rst part of the thirteenth century. The Latin text with a Danish translation as
it was edited in 1933 in a scholarly critical edition formed the basis for the present
edition, however, with changes in the orthography to make it more readable and
without the apparatus of the Danish edition. This text belongs traditionally to the
corpus of Danish medieval laws in which it may, as will be explained, play a more
important role than hitherto acknowledged. The editors therefore have consid-
ered the publication of this text as a necessary supplement to the texts in Danish.
However, in order to make it possible to bring both the original text in Latin and
an English translation, the choice has been to bring this text in its own volume.
T his present edition is the fi rst attempt of translating this text into English. The
translator and editor received invaluable support from a series of persons who
dedicated their time and knowledge to this project. First of all Kate Gilbert should
be thanked for her dedication over a long period to the making of a draft translation
of most of the text. Important suggestions and contributions have at later stages
been made by Tue Søvsø and Ken Pennington. The editor wants to express his sin-
cere gratitude for this help to Merike Ristikivi, who prepared the Latin text for this
volume, and together with Tue Søvsø redacted the Latin glossary. Sten Ebbesen
contributed with a brilliant chapter on the Latin language of the text. Helle Vogt
generously offered valuable practical help and her competent advice during the
entire work on the translation.
Ditlev Tamm
Copenhagen, July 2016
ix
