ABSTRACT
As most of the charters pertain to landed property in one way or another, property management becomes key when studying any legal practice in medieval Sweden before the time of court protocols. This chapter first describes the norms and then maps out the different stages of a property transaction. The rest of the chapter is divided according to the legal ways of acquiring property in medieval Sweden, which are in concordance with the divisions made in previous research. The results show significant differences in women’s participation depending on whether land was, for example, sold or donated, indicating that women had authority to act but chose to do so only in certain kinds of transactions. Women did not partake in a ‘property market’ but could and did use their own property for the benefit of themselves and their loved ones.
