The period from the late thirteenth century up to the middle of the fourteenth century was one with intense legislative activity in the emerging kingdom of Sweden. As in the other Scandinavian realms, the creation of a more complicated political structure and the making of extensive written laws are concurrent phenomena. State formation is, of course, a very complicated process, which includes the introduction of permanent taxation and the rise of an administrative literacy. What this chapter focuses on, however, are the ideological consequences of the entirely new judicial culture emerging then. As outlined by Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde, the laws were necessary for regulating the growing complexity of social relations and hence essentially contributed to a wholly new definition of the political and social community. This chapter will thus explore the visions of community propagated in three Swedish provincial law codes: the Västgöta (Westrogothic) Law from the period after 1220; the Guta Law from the late thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century; and the Uppland Law confirmed in 1296.

Laws and Communities

The notion of an imagined community has been associated with the rise of nationalism in Europe after the Napoleonic wars and the congress of Vienna. Imagined communities and the styles of their making are mostly associated with the modern nationalist concept of citizenship. But there were definitely deliberate pre-modern ways of creating polities and new communities. In a community too large for its members to know each other, the laws constituted a useful tool for its own imagination and provided its members a sense of belonging. Such an imagined community rested also on some notion of – admittedly stratified – equality of its members. Nevertheless, the laws give the impression of a social order without differences between classes or groups, which stands in stark contrast with the actual contemporary tendencies towards increasing social differentiation.

Still, the very idea of law suggested some degree of commensurability of those subjected to it. The community through law was thus predominantly based on horizontal relations. This was, as notably pointed out by Susan Reynolds in her study of the notion of communitas, one of the fundamental principles of organizing social relations in medieval Europe and one of the cardinal terms designating what we nowadays call society.