The Christian Law and the Laws of the Land
According to sagas, King Olav Tryggvason built a church on Moster in 995. Three decades later, King Olav Haraldsson (r. 1015–1028) and Bishop Grimkjell are said to have put in place some of the content of what became the first Christian legislation in Norway.
The Christian Law laid down rules for peoples’ everyday lives from cradle to grave and prohibited older, pre-Christian rituals and customs. Churches and clerics were also given rules for church building, properties, and the establishment of the first church organization.
Whether it was really Olav and Grimkjell who introduced the Christian Law and how many of the rules may have been established so early are highly uncertain. However, a Ting assembly may have been organized on Moster around 1024, at which the king, the bishop, peasants, and local nobles negotiated the basis for a change in cult and religion in Norse society.
The Christian Law was created over a long period, with legislation formulated and transmitted orally before it was written down. Under Kings Håkon Håkonsson and Magnus Håkonsson, the older provincial laws and, along with them, the Christian rules were revised. The Christian legislation in the older Gulating law was replaced with the newer Gulating law in 1267, which was in turn superseded by the Christianity section of the Laws of the Land in 1274.
The Christianity section of the Laws of the Land is a bare text that contains the creed, the basic ideology in the Laws of the Land concerning the king’s and bishop’s swords, and what is essentially a royal section about succession to the throne and oath taking. The change from the Christian rules in the provincial laws to the Christianity section of the Laws of the Land was the result of a power struggle between the Church and the monarchy and the ensuing separation of royal and ecclesiastical power in the legislation of the Christian Law.
A self-conscious and ambitious Church with the powerful archbishop Jon Raude at the helm (in office from 1267 to 1282) wanted to have control over its own affairs. This was part of international developments within the Church and logically a result of the ideology promoted by the Laws of the Land. The king and bishop were to hold the two swords together (doctrine of the two swords) and divide authority over ecclesiastical and secular matters. Where the boundaries went, it was a battle of swords in the decades that followed.
