ABSTRACT
The incest of Gudmund Gers will serve as an introduction to the shifting boundaries of the jurisdiction of sexual crime in medieval Sweden and to the changes in the equilibrium between secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the later Middle Ages. The Statute of Heinous Crime was included in the Council's register and it became well known in the country, spreading both in Swedish and Latin versions. The Norwegian medieval Church also experienced friction with the secular authorities as the bishops granted absolution and prescribed penance to homicides without ensuring that the culprit paid the secular fines. The scant Swedish legal texts provide no explicit justification for the harshness of the punishment, but as elsewhere the crime was probably believed to threaten the whole community with divine wrath and revenge. This chapter focuses on the church in the provincial laws, the punishment was usually death for both man and beast.
