3. Society and societal groups
In the fast-growing society of the High Middle Ages, men and women were divided into groups, which gradually became defined by royal privileges and laws. The secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy began to stand out increasingly clearly as a distinct group above all others. Townspeople came to form a completely new section of society, and, in the countryside, social conditions changed as slavery disappeared and it became common for tenant farmers to pay rent to the aristocracy. This section provides a description of the different social groups, followed by an outline of the laws that bound them together.
The top and bottom of rural society
At the start of the period, in 1050, society was relatively stratified. At the bottom was a large group of slaves and, above them, a group of so-called bønder (singular bonde), who themselves were divided into many social strata. A bonde was simply a householder with full rights and responsibilities – in other words, the head of a household, and bønder thus included all men who were not enslaved. It was only during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the term gradually came to be used to refer exclusively to farmers. At the top of society there were powerful aristocrats, both men and women. They were still classified as bønder, but they received dues from the farmers under them, and they often had a group of soldiers and took part in the country’s government. Around 1100, the duties the aristocracy received from dependent farmers were still not formalised, and were often called ‘gifts’. Members of the aristocracy had very large farms, which they ran with slaves, sometimes under their own management and sometimes with the help of a bailiff (bryde), who kept an account of the farm’s operations and handed over part of the farm’s surplus to the owner.
In the years leading up to 1200, an even clearer distinction developed between the powerful – the king and the secular and newly established ecclesiastical aristocracy – and the ordinary farmers. The term bønder came to refer exclusively to farmers who owned their own land. Slavery gradually disappeared. The laws mention that slaves were manumitted and bought free, and the king actively tried to prevent free men and women being made into slaves in the late twelfth century. Powerful individuals could still operate large farms with the help of bailiffs, but they obtained their labour from cottars (gårdsæder) and tenants (landboer). Cottars owned little or no land (some rented a house on a farm) and thus had to earn a living by seeking work on large farms for cash wages. In the first part of the Middle Ages, many large farms were divided into smaller farms. This was partly a consequence of the new medieval inheritance laws, which allowed women to inherit, and also an operational strategy of the aristocratic landowners, who divided some of their large farms into smaller ones in order to maximise their rent income. The aristocracy also bought land from poorer farmers.
Provincial laws from the thirteenth century state that a bonde could become so poor that he would be forced to sell his land and become a tenant farmer (landbo). From the late twelfth century, tenants gained the right to use the farm for a given period, against an annual payment or land rent to the landowner. The tenancy was entered into by a handshake in the presence of witnesses. The tenant farmer in the High Middle Ages can be said to be the forerunner of the Early Modern tenant (fæstebonde). With the establishment of tenancies, the aristocracy’s income was bound not to individuals with undefined taxes but instead to specific tenancy farms and fixed amounts. There were still many bønder with their own land, however.
The aristocracy
Around 1200, the aristocracy ruled in collaboration with the monarchy. This elite group, which consisted of secular aristocrats and ecclesiastical leaders, such as bishops and abbots, began to work more closely together. From the end of the twelfth century, important members of the secular aristocracy were awarded the title ‘knight’ (ridder) – meaning they had been knighted – and, from the thirteenth century, the less important title ‘squire’ (væbner). The aristocracy was a broad group and also included the royals. Among the country’s secular aristocrats were the so-called herremænd (men of a lord), who were exempted from taxes in exchange for serving a king, duke, count or bishop, to whom they swore allegiance. Herremænd were obliged to go to war for the king, but in return they did not have to pay tax. The position was not inherited and its status was not particularly high. What later became the nobility grew out of this group of knights, squires and herremænd.
All of these men received an income from their own farms and increasingly from the tenants under them, but the amount varied significantly. There were great social divisions within the aristocracy. Some members could own up to five hundred tenant farms and others only a handful. There was also great social mobility within the group, as sons could inherit equally and daughters could inherit half this amount. Inheritance, death and marriage could completely change a family’s land ownership. Many died childless, and large amounts of property could suddenly be inherited by a single family member.
Granite block from Satrup Church in southern Schleswig depicting an aristocratic knight on horseback with lance, sword and shield, c. 1200. Here we can see the new elite fighter, who took over from the bønder. It was only aristocrats such as this man who could master the use of the lance and afford the expensive armour. Photo: National Museum of Denmark
Aristocrats on horseback
The aristocracy, later called the nobility, were united by the ability to fight on horseback with armour, shield, sword and lance. Following the German model, this form of fighting became common in Denmark in the twelfth century. Around 1200, the chronicler Arnold of Lübeck wrote that Danes bred horses on their rich pastures and that they could fight on both horseback and at sea. However, fighting on horseback became too expensive for many farmers, both for tenant farmers and for land-owning bønder. From the twelfth century they had to compensate for not providing military service by paying a military tax; the aristocracy, by contrast, were not required to pay tax. The mounted aristocracy became the main force in the wars of the period, and, in the thirteenth century, tournaments were arranged for the warriors to practise using their weapons. These were large, well-choreographed events. In 1311, for example, the Danish king Erik Menved together with his men and a host of foreign princes gathered for a festival outside the German town of Rostock. One hundred men were knighted, and, as stated in a German chronicle, ‘many lances were broken in tournament’.
Life in the towns
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the word bønder described all those living in Denmark with full legal rights. As towns were founded, there emerged a distinction between the ‘townsman’ (bymand) and those living in the countryside, who were referred to as ‘countrymen’ (landmænd) and, gradually more pejoratively, as bønder. Between 1250 and 1400, the word ‘townsman’ was replaced with ‘burgher’ (borger). With the development of a particular type of urban life there appeared a new distinction between people in the towns and in the countryside.
Life in the town was full of smells, noise and the chiming of the many church bells. People lived closely together. Visiting the public bathhouse was a popular pleasure, sometimes available even to the poor when gifts from pious people allowed it. A decree of 1295 from Flensburg stipulated that men and women were to bathe separately: women on Mondays and Thursdays, and men on the other days of the week. Those who did not adhere to these rules had their clothing confiscated.
The town population was divided into merchants and skilled craftsmen. Over time, more and more craftsmen came to the towns. Blacksmiths were numerous and bakers and butchers became commonplace during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it stopped being customary for people to bake their own bread or slaughter their own cow. The processing of hides and skins also became professionalised, as people started to buy from the shoemaker. Specialised businesses such as goldsmiths, glove-makers and bowyers (who made crossbows) also appeared. However, in every town, there was also poverty and prostitution. The town court in Lund stipulated that, if somebody entered a brothel and caused damage, the case should be settled privately and not before a court.
A degree of self-rule in towns
The king and his representative were influential in the governance of towns, whose inhabitants paid taxes and duties to him, but various forms of local self-rule developed from the twelfth century. ‘Aldermen’ represented the community and negotiated with the king, and from the middle of the thirteenth century there were town councils, often consisting of twelve councillors. The aldermen and councillors were important people, members of the local guilds (Knudsgilder), and they had weight behind them, since townsmen made up a large part of the country’s military. However, power in the town had to be shared with the clergy. Bishops were tremendously powerful in the episcopal towns, where the cathedral building dominated physically. In the thirteenth century, there were also mendicant orders and leprosy hospitals in most large Danish towns.
The towns’ relative independence in relation to the royal power was marked by the fact that they were given their own seals and laws, approved by the king. These laws varied, but they all contained provisions on criminal law, municipal matters such as road maintenance, and business and trade. They also all contained the declaration of the ‘town peace’, meaning that breaches of the peace within the town’s boundaries should result in capital or corporal punishment. In contrast, punishment in the countryside took the form of fines or outlawing.
The weak position of clergy and monks
The people of the Church consisted of the bishop and his priests, who worked in the countryside and towns, and of monks and nuns, who lived a secluded life in monasteries. In total they accounted for at least 5% of the total population. As foreigners, the clergy and monks were socially marginalised when they first came to Denmark. They remained highly dependent on the king and secular aristocracy until the twelfth century, and contemporary sources emphasise that the royal powers were required to safeguard the monks, who lived in poverty. The king and secular aristocrats were mostly in charge of church construction, and it was normal for churches around the country to be built in connection with royal estates or manor houses. A good example of how the aristocracy took care of church matters in this early phase can be found in the Chronicle of Roskilde, which states that, around 1123, the aristocrat Peder Bodilsen imposed the following requirement for clergy in Sjælland: ‘those who have wives should send them away, and those who do not should never take one’. Married priests were persecuted, and some were killed. Secular men fought for the chastity of the clergy, even though celibacy was not introduced until the end of the thirteenth century.
The liberation of the Church
The Church was gradually liberated from secular dominance, and the eight bishops of the realm with their episcopal organisations began to stand out as independent and influential actors in the power games of the time. Bishops were now recruited from the country’s secular aristocracy. They held court, kept a number of soldiers around them and, like many other members of the clergy, were highly educated, having studied at the universities that were now emerging across Europe. In the middle of the twelfth century, Eskil, who later became archbishop, was educated at the cathedral school in Hildesheim, but soon the university in Paris became the preferred place to study. In the 1180s, the wealthy brothers Peder and Anders Sunesen of the Hvide family studied in Paris in preparation for becoming the bishop of Roskilde and the archbishop of Lund, respectively. It is thought that Anders also studied at the universities in Bologna and Oxford. To assist them, bishops were given a group of canons at the cathedrals, which also had their own schools to educate the clergy. Kings and aristocrats donated land to cathedrals, which became rich. Thousands of churches were built in the towns and the countryside, which were served by priests. The Church also became a social organisation, preaching that all Christians had a duty to help the poor so that they did not die of starvation. Many people therefore gave alms to the clergy, who could pass the help onto those in need, and there were often groups of beggars at the gates of Danish monasteries.
Magnificent stone churches were built in the twelfth century. This is the large crypt, which was inaugurated in 1131, under the St Lawrence’s Cathedral in Lund. The construction of the church was funded by royal donations. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The many village churches and priests
A number of Danish towns had large cathedrals by the eleventh century, and we know that these settlements often contained several other churches. However, less is known about early church development in the countryside. This is partly because we have no overview of how many village churches were built in the eleventh century, and partly because it varied whether it was aristocrats or a wider group of bønder who were responsible for their construction. In many cases, it was aristocrats. In Starup near Haderslev Fjord, for example, it is still possible to see the remains of a large, three-nave stone church from the late eleventh century, which was built by an aristocrat. Archaeological excavations have shown that the owner of a manor in Lisbjerg (seven kilometres north of Aarhus) had a wooden church constructed in the mid-eleventh century. Around 1125, the king or an aristocrat built the large, three- nave church in Tamdrup near Horsens, and, at around the same time, Roskilde’s Bishop Absalon’s father, the landowner Asser Rig, erected a church in Fjenneslev in southwest Sjælland, which is still standing today.
These more isolated manifestations of power did not yet amount to an orderly system of parish churches, however; such a system did not arise until the period leading up to the thirteenth century. Denmark was divided into more than 3,000 parishes, each with its own church, which the parishioners were responsible for maintaining. The aristocratic ownership of churches gradually gave way to parish communities, the central figure of which was the parish priest, who performed services, baptisms and funerals – and to do so he needed a salary.
The German monk Adam of Bremen wrote in around 1075 that the Danes were not prepared to pay the ‘tithe’ to the Church. The tithe – a type of Church tax that amounted to a tenth of annual production – was introduced in the twelfth century. It became customary to divide this into three: one part for the priest, one part for the church building and one part for the bishop. The parish priest received additional security when parsonages with land became common at the end of the thirteenth century. Parishioners were not always keen to contribute to the bishop’s funds, since he seemed distant and less relevant to their Christian life. People in Jutland for a long time continued to pay a smaller sum to the bishop, the so-called ‘bishop’s gift’ (biskopsgave).
Who Built the Churches in the 12th and 13th Centuries?
Watch this film in which Bjørn Poulsen answers the question of who built the churches in the 12th and 13th centuries. The film is in Danish with English subtitles, and lasts about ten minutes. Click 'CC' and choose 'English' or 'Danish' for subtitles.
The spread of monasteries
Monasteries were built across Europe, as foundations where men and women renounced secular life to seek a lifelong union with God. Monks and nuns found communities of faith and emotion behind monastery walls, and their prayers of intercession for people’s souls meant they were supported by the whole of society. In the monasteries there were daily prayers and masses. It was here that kings and aristocrats found their final resting place, so they donated land to the monasteries and many of them handed over their sons or daughters as monks or nuns. Lifelong devotion in a monastery also meant that there was one person fewer in the family to inherit, which could have practical advantages. The provincial law of Skåne from around 1220 stated that ‘If a householder gives his child to a monastery, it may not claim inheritance after his death unless he wants to give it something’.
Monks and nuns joined monastic communities that were built on established traditions. From the end of the eleventh century the Danish monasteries were, like the entire western monastic system, Benedictine, with their origins in Benedict of Nursia’s rules from the sixth century. Before this, monasteries were built in connection with cathedrals without formal affiliation to a monastic order. One example of a Benedictine monastery was St Peter’s near Næstved, which was founded in 1135 by aristocrat Peder Bodilsen and his brothers. Many Benedictine monasteries were founded in the years that followed.
The strict Cistercian order was founded in 1098 in Cîteaux in France, in response to a need for reform in the monastic system. The first Cistercian monastery in Denmark was Herrevad Abbey in Skåne, which was founded in 1144 by the archbishop together with monks from Cîteaux. The Cistercians had a fixed organisation, with annual meetings for all Cistercian monasteries across Europe. The abbot of Øm in Jutland received a letter from Cîteaux in 1216 instructing him to live on bread and water on Fridays because he had failed to attend a meeting at the Cîteaux monastery. He probably had his reasons for staying at home and accepting the punishment.
Travelling monks
The hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church meant that many churchmen had to embark on long journeys across Europe, and these journeys were strenuous and dangerous. Around 1200 Abbot Vilhelm of the Augustinian Order, the head of Æbelholt Abbey in northern Sjælland, was returning to Denmark from Rome when his servant’s horse strained its leg on an Alpine pass. Luckily, Vilhelm was able to heal the horse by praying and stroking its hoof. This story originates from an account intended to document Vilhelm’s holiness. The dangers of travel are also underlined in a letter sent in 1216 to Børglum Abbey in northern Jutland from the Premonstratensians. It tells the story of one of the abbey’s monks, Eskil, who was sent to Rome to receive a privilege from the pope on behalf of the monastery. Eskil arrived at the holy city ‘naked and exhausted’ – and, later, on his way home, he was assaulted by thieves.
Most Danish monasteries were founded in areas that were already densely populated and highly cultivated, so their establishment often gave rise to conflict. The monasteries in Skåne and Halland met with protests from the population, as the monks appropriated parts of otherwise common land. It was quite different for the two orders that settled in the emerging towns – the Dominicans and the Franciscans. These orders often received land from a secular Danish aristocrat and simply built on this. The Dominicans arrived in Denmark in the 1220s, and the Franciscans built their first Danish institution in Ribe in 1232. The Cistercian monks in Ryde Abbey near Flensburg Fjord noted in their chronicle of this year that ‘The Franciscans came to Denmark with their bare feet and founded the house in Ribe’. In principle, the Dominicans and the Franciscans were not allowed to own anything and had to live off donations; they were therefore known as ‘mendicant orders’.
Provincial laws
The law regulated the behaviour of social groups and helped shape their values. In the Law of Jutland (Jyske Lov) from 1241, it is stated ‘with law shall the land be built’. The most important extant evidence we have of the law in the High Middle Ages is written legal texts. These laws were written for the heads of households, bønder, and concerned topics such as inheritance, violence, collectively regulated farming systems and military service. The law laid down, among many other things, the punishment for tethering cattle on a neighbour’s field.
The Danish laws, written in Danish, applied to certain legal provinces (lande), namely the Skåne provinces, Sjælland and Jutland (including Fyn). The first laws were written down in the decades either side of 1200, but laws continued to evolve thereafter. In the oldest laws, the accused, if they denied their guilt, could prove their innocence in one of two ways: either by finding a specified number of men to testify to their credibility or, in serious cases, by submitting to the judgement of God. This could require that the accused walk barefoot over red-hot ploughshares, or carry a piece of red-hot iron. If, after three days, there was evidence of infection, the accused was guilty and had to pay a fine to the plaintiff.
The last of the provincial laws, the Law of Jutland, was proclaimed at a large meeting held by the Danish king Valdemar II, his sons, the country’s most powerful aristocrats and several bishops in March 1241. This law contained no reference to divine judgement. Instead, it stipulated that juries should pass principled verdicts of guilt based on the circumstances of the case. This was an indication of the influence of the Church and its acceptance in Danish law. At the fourth Lateran Council, a large ecclesiastical meeting in Rome in 1215, judgements of God had been abolished, and this had a direct effect on secular Danish law. It was now necessary to establish innocence or guilt in a new way, and the Law of Jutland did this through a board of nominated men. The Church influenced all the Danish provincial laws, but it is in the Law of Jutland that this influence can be seen most clearly.
Legal developments: people, king and Church
The laws reflected the needs of society, but evolved under the growing influence of the Church’s jurisprudence, international Canon Law. In an attempt to break away from secular supremacy, the Church imposed its own penalties in areas such as marriage and murder, and ecclesiastical courts and laws developed in tandem with secular law. For example, the Church could use excommunication as a punishment. If the excommunicated person was not reconciled with the Church within a year, he or she was declared a heretic and had to be punished by the secular authorities.
The upholding of the law was originally largely in the hands of the people themselves. Under the older regional laws, a murderer and his family paid compensation, known as mandebod (‘man price’), to the victim’s relatives. It was only in this way that revenge and feuds could be avoided. In the older laws, it is likely that the Church contributed to defining the family as a fundamental element in the execution of the law, presumably to create peace and order. Over time, however, both the Church and the king wished to outmanoeuvre the family as an enforcer of law. As a result of this, in the Law of Jutland it was stipulated that premeditated murder should not be punishable by a fine but that the perpetrator should be outlawed. The Church and the king thus sought to make murder a personal offence. An outlaw was excluded from the protection of society and could be killed by anyone, especially the king’s men. Outlawing was clearly a punishment that became connected to the royal power, and it was used as part of an attempt to limit feuds between families. However, the sentence could be overturned if the outlaw paid a fine to the king and compensation to the victim’s family.
In this way the king gained a foothold in the legal sphere, but feuds continued nonetheless, without royal intervention. The provincial legal forums – landsting (provincial courts and assemblies) for the Skåne provinces, Sjælland and Jutland, and the local herredsting (district assemblies) for each of the approximately two hundred ‘hundreds’ (herreder) – were also relatively independent. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the king’s local representatives found themselves repeatedly chased away by the crowds at the ting, but over the course of the period, the royal men were increasingly able to have their say.
Household and gender
Violence was widespread, despite the king’s attempts to contain it. The Law of Skåne from around 1220 defined ‘gang crime’ (hærværk) as a crime in which a group assaulted others, either in the victim’s house or in the open. An example of this, according to the law, could be five armed men breaking down the door of a house – if the house’s owner defended himself, it might lead to head injuries severe enough to expose his brain. It was this type of breach of domestic peace that the king sought to limit, so there were large fines for gang crime. These fines had to be paid both to the victims and the king alike.
It says much about a woman’s position in the early part of the Middle Ages that rape was classified as a gang crime. Rape was primarily a crime against property: a violation of the honour of the household and its male representative, who as husband or father was the woman’s guardian and thus had to be compensated. But this changed. According to the Law of Jutland from 1241, rape was a crime against the woman herself. At this time it became a central factor in the law that the woman had not given her consent, and the rapist was outlawed. Only enslaved women found themselves in a different situation, since they were defined as property. It was, of course, against the law to rape other people’s slave women, but the fine for doing so was not overly large, and the women themselves were not protected by law.
Male honour was crucial. If a man found his wife in bed with another man, he had the right to kill them both, as long as he could present bloodstained bed linen at the ting. He could also chase the unfaithful wife away in just her petticoat. If a daughter had sex before marriage, the father had to be compensated by the man who had ‘lured’ his daughter.
From the 1170s, as the Church’s influence became ever greater, marriage required the consent of both parties. The Church regarded marriage as a sacrament, a sign of the grace of Christ, and it became the core around which everything should be built. Earlier in the Middle Ages, a man could have more than one wife – that is, mistresses and concubines were fully acknowledged. It was very common for men in the royal household to have a concubine, and many kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were the sons of such women. The married wife now attained a far better legal position than the concubine, the Church thus ensuring that lifelong and monogamous marriage was the norm.
The role of women
There were considerable differences between men and women in society. Women gained the right to inherit during the High Middle Ages, but unlike men they only had the right to half an inheritance. A man was the guardian of his wife, children and servants, and a woman therefore had limited rights over land and resources. If she made a business deal, a man could always revoke it on the basis of her ‘lack of understanding’. According to the law in around 1200, a woman living in the countryside was not allowed to sell goods worth more than five pennies. In the town, it was twelve pennies.
In practice, however, things were more complicated. Queens like Margrete Fredkulla, who married the Danish king Niels in 1103, could exercise a great deal of power. Margrete was the daughter of the Swedish king; she was married first to the Norwegian king and then, after his death, to the Danish king. As queen, she had so much to say that foreigners reportedly claimed that ‘Denmark’s governance lies in female hands’. Similarly, ordinary women could, in practice, act as sellers at the ting, provided they allied themselves with a man. In thirteenth-century towns ‘stallholder women’ sold horse feed and hay, and there were also many ‘alewives’, who sold beer. In 1243, Tønder town council allowed women who paid ‘purchase tax’ to trade without a guardian, and the laws in Flensburg around 1300 make it apparent that women could legally conduct transactions for sums of up to 120 pennies, ten times as much as the provincial laws allowed.