The Danish Assemblies - An Arena for Ritulised Legal Action

Scholars investigating the medieval thing, the public assembly in Scandinavia, have focused primarily on its legal and political function. From such studies, an image has been created of the orderly and well-functioning assembly, concerned with testimonies of legal negotiations, political decisions, and public announcements. Narrative sources of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the legislation from the early sixteenth century onwards, paints a different picture, of the assembly as a place also for drinking and quarrelling. By examining sources that reveal both legal and public behaviour at the Danish assemblies in the Middle Ages, as well as regulations against such practices and behaviour in the century following the Lutheran Reformation, we consider how the function of the assembly may be better understood in both a legal-ritualised and a social context.