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Gulating
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Gulating is both the name of one of the first Norwegian legislative assemblies or Þing and one of the present day law courts of western Norway.
The practice of periodic regional assemblies of leading men predates recorded history, and was firmly established at the time of the unification of Norway into a single kingdom (900 - 1030 AD).
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Gulating is both the name of one of the first Norwegian legislative assemblies or Þing and one of the present day law courts of western Norway.
The practice of periodic regional assemblies of leading men predates recorded history, and was firmly established at the time of the unification of Norway into a single kingdom (900 - 1030 AD). These assemblies, or lagting, functioned as judicial and legislative bodies, resolving disputes and establishing laws. The Gulating (Old Norse Gulaþing), held in Gulen north of Bergen on the west coast of Norway, received delegates from Lyngør in the south to north of Ålesund, and its laws were observed from the eastern inland valleys of Valdres and Halligdal to the Faroe Islands in the west.
The Gulating served as the model for the establishment of the legislative assemblies of Island, the Althing and of the Faeroe Islands, the Løgting, areas settled by people from western Norway. A fairly complete manuscript of the Gulating laws from the middle of the 13th century is preserved in Codex Ranzovianus at the University of Copenhagen.
While the Gulating was not a democratic assembly in the modern sense of an elected body, it effectively represented the interests of a large number of people rather than a small elite. The laws were typically crafted as social contracts. §35 for instance states, "None of us shall take goods from others, or take the law into our own hands" (Robbestad, 1969). The laws nevertheless applied for every person inside the "law area" Gulaþinglog. If a stranger stole from a Gulatingsman, that was also in breach of the laws, but the law set no limits to how he could be punished.
Violence was dealt with by fines, which were imposed not only on the murderer, but also on his relatives -- a practice that distinguishes Old Norse law from the Roman practice of holding only the individual responsible. Homicide of an heir to a property, according to Gulating law §218-228, is punished by a collective fee of 189 cattle, where each responsible party's share is spelled out in detail. If we assume a fair price of $2,000 per bull or cow, that translates into modern money approximately as follows:
- Murderer's fine: $200,000
- Murderer's brother: $72,200
- Murderer's paternal cousin: $39,000
- Murderer's paternal uncle: $20,000
More remote relatives were fined from $300 to $8.800. Murder was expensive, and so was personal physical injury. The cost to the convicted party's extended family of chopping off another's arm or a leg, for instance, was fixed at the equivalent of $186,000; a thumb, $19,200.
Gulating, along with Norway three other ancient regional assemblies, Borgarting, Eidsivating, and Frostating, were joined into a single jurisdiction during the late Viking era, and King Magnus Lagabøte had the existing body of law put into writing (1263 - 1280). They provided the institutional and legal framework for subsequent legislative and judicial bodies, and remain in operation today as superior regional courts.
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