Lawspeakers and Nordic Customary Law

Lawspeakers and Nordic Customary Law gathers the lawspeakers and legal officials of the medieval Nordic and Norse world, the office holders who memorized, recited and interpreted a community's customary law before its systematic writing down, presiding over assemblies such as Iceland's Althing and Sweden's provincial things. Their tradition represents an oral and customary mode of law distinct from the written civil, common, canon and religious codes grouped elsewhere in this subcategory, and several members of this group also served as royal justiciars or councilors once Nordic law began to be written and centralized.