Legal reforms around 1200 in Denmark: archbishops Absalon (1128-1201) and Anders Sunesen (d. 1228)

Around 1300, the Christian church and the royal powers of Europe underwent a previously unseen institutionalization, both in real power politics and in ideology. A combination of learning through the newly established universities, a sustained increase in social stratification, and new power structures developed alongside a distinctive common European understanding of the nature of law and how law should reach its decisions. The persons succeeding in bringing the Danish part of the Christian church and the secular power of the Danish kings under the same arch of ideology and legal thinking were the two archbishops Absalon and Anders Sunesen. They succeeded in framing local law into a Christian structure according to fundamental Christian doctrines, but they did so without creating tension between the local way of practicing the law and Christian ideology. Their strategy was, that compromises were better than being rigidly doctrinal in order to develop a firm and grounded foundation for a Christian ideology of law. Thus, Absalon and Anders Sunesen were reformers of the Danish local law and ways of thinking about law, and they left a mental foundation that lasted through centuries, not fundamentally secularized until the nineteenth century.