Magnus Ladulås
Magnus Ladulås was Birger Jarl's second son, who took the throne from his brother Valdemar in 1275 with Danish troops and in fifteen years gave Sweden a nobility, a council of state, the beginnings of a written common law and the tax exemption for men who served on horseback that created the class the country called frälse. The nickname, barn-lock, is supposed to record the ordinance that stopped travelling lords and their retinues from helping themselves to the peasants' stores. He had been Duke of Sodermanland under his brother, and the two fell out over Valdemar's affair with his wife's sister, a nun. The affair took the king to Rome to do penance and left Magnus with the chance. He beat Valdemar at Hova in Tiveden in June 1275 with an army borrowed from the king of Denmark, was elected at the Mora stone, and kept his brother in and out of prison for the rest of his reign, Valdemar dying a captive at Nykoping two years after Magnus himself. The statute of Alsno, issued at the royal manor on the island of Alsno in Lake Malar in 1280, is his monument. It forbade the great men to quarter themselves on the farmers without paying, which is the barn-lock, and it exempted from tax any man who served the king with a warhorse, which made a hereditary aristocracy out of a habit; the same year he ended a rising of the magnates by executing their leaders. He gave the council of the realm a fixed shape, with the bishops and the great lords sitting as the king's advisers, and appointed the first officers who answer to a chancellor and a drots. He founded the Franciscan house on Riddarholmen in Stockholm and was buried in its church, the first king in what became the burial church of the Swedish kings, though when the tomb was opened in 2011 the bones turned out to belong to other people. He died at Visingso in December 1290 and left a son of ten, Birger, under a regency that would end in the sons of Magnus starving each other to death.
- Lived: 1240 CE – 1290 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: king, monarch
