The Military Obligations of the Danish Church in the High Middle Ages

Evidence for the study of Danish military organization in the High Middle Ages comes in different forms. There is narrative evidence, like Saxo Grammaticus and Sven Aggesøn, the Norse sagas, items like the chronicle of the Cistercian monastery at Cara Insula, even saints’ lives, such as those of both saints Cnut, and of course annals of various sorts. There are charters, most of them exempting bishoprics or monasteries from military obligations. There are the provincial laws, describing how military service should be rendered and how the financial burdens involved should be shared. And finally there is the litigation between the Danish kings and the archbishops of Lund that occupied much of their time in the second half of the thirteenth century. ¹ Much of this litigation is about military service. What started me off working on these problems was the discovery of an apparently unbridgeable discrepancy between the leidang, ² Nordic for expeditio, as it appeared in the laws, and the leidang as it appeared in the narrative sources. They seemed to belong in different worlds. This went unnoticed by a generation of historians whose attitude was that legal documents always overrule narrative evidence.