Gripla - 2019, Síða 174

GRIPLA174
bishops and also one strongly associated with following the letter of the
law; it is in any event notable that this privilege is specifically addressed
in his saga.78 In Kristinréttr Árna a similar authority is assumed without
comment.
It is from the 1290s, as Lára Magnúsardóttir has shown, that Icelandic
bishops began to delegate Si quis suadente cases to other officials, wheth-
er provosts or officiales.79 These later statutes again emphasize that the
decision-making is to be at the hands of the bishop and that people need
to be disabused of the assumption that any priest can release them from
excommunication. In a later statute some offenses are still reserved to the
bishop alone, including the cases of violence against clerics at the heart of
the original canon: according the an archepiscopal statute of the 1340s,
those who laid heiptuga hnd on a “learned man, monk or nun” could only
be absolved by the bishop.80 It is also of note here that for the first time in
the Icelandic sources and more explicitly than in the original canon or the
Liber extra, nuns are listed in the protected group of clerics.
Helmholz, focusing on England, found that almost all Si quis suadente
excommunication cases were resolved in local church courts.81 In Iceland,
although the pope is only a distant figure in much of the legal material,
he is invoked as the authority through which bishops asserted their cleri-
cal privileges, not least over lesser clergy. Sometimes this was also done
indirectly, through the mention of papal legates, the most important of
whom was William of Sabina. It is not possible to say if any individual
pope would have approved of the Icelandic legislation, but it was adapted
to geographic realities that many popes did acknowledge.82
78 For a recent discussion of Árna saga see, Haki antonsson, “Árna saga biskups as Literature
and History,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 116 (2017): 261–85. Fifteenth-
century papal letters grant an Icelandic bishop the right to absolve in reserved cases, Lára
Magnúsardóttir, Bannfæring, 431 note 420, citing Diplomatarium Islandicum, 4.723–28.
79 Lára Magnúsardóttir, Bannfæring, 431–33. This is also suggested in some manuscripts of
Kristinréttr Árna as in aM 135 4to, fol 77r.
80 Diplomatarium Islandicum, 2.763: “a lærdan mann mvnk eda nvnnv.”
81 Helmholz, “‘Si quis suadente.’”
82 See, for instance, Pope Innocent IV’s confirmation of the relaxation on work on holy days:
Norges gamle love 1.456–58, and Pope Nicholas III’s concessions regarding Greenland and
other islands in Niðaróss province: Diplomatarium Islandicum, 2.160.