Bruken av vold som straff i norske middelalderlover
Master thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3136409Utgivelsesdato
2024-05-21Metadata
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- Master theses [238]
Sammendrag
This text’s aim is to take a closer look into the use of violence as a punishment in the Norwegian medieval laws. I wish to see under what circumstances the laws allow for the use of violence to punish criminals. By studying three medieval laws, the Gulathing Law, the Frostathing Law and Magnus the Lawmender’s Laws of the Land I have created four categories: corporal punishment, revenge, execution and outlawry. I have based my research on the modern definition of “violence”, as defined by WHO as«"the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."» My main goal with this is to argue against the most common perception of the Middle Ages as a time when violence was almost uncontrolled and unstoppable. Although we can never see the full picture by just looking at just one type of source, I believe that the normative sources can tell us a lot about how people wanted things to be. Studying the laws has shown that the use of violence changed a lot from the Gulathing Law to Magnus Lawmender’s Laws of the Land. Corporal punishment was mainly used to punish the “outsiders” such as petty thieves and slaves. Revenge was present in all three sources, but was noticeably more restricted in the Laws of the Land. The use of the death penalty was also present, but again to a much lesser extent in the latest laws. Finally, outlawry was by far the most common form of punishment of the four categories I have worked with here. And unlike in the previous cases, it appears that it became more common in the Laws of the Land than in the older Gulathing and Frostathing Laws.