288 Norivay and the Norivegians 



king to do away altogether with the claims of the Xor- 

 wegian Church, founded upon the compact between 

 Archbishop Eystein, on the one side, and Erling, for his 

 son Magnus, on the other, the well-known compact of 

 A.D. 1164 — ^just twenty years before this battle in the 

 Sogne Fjord. The kingdom was not to be held any 

 longer ' as a fee of St. Olaf ' from the Church. But men 

 were to go back to the old ' Law of St. Olaf ; ' and the 

 crown should once more be a freehold possession, as it 

 had been of old. Sverri, moreover, as we have seen, took 

 measures that, through the bureaucracy which he estab- 

 lished, the position of the throne should be much firmer 

 than it had been in old days. And no doubt he intended 

 that the law of primogeniture should be still preserved. 



It was his attempts to wrest the kingdom from the 

 hands of the Norwegian Church which raised for Sverri 

 his most formidable opponents. And though a number 

 of different parties sprang up to contest his position, it 

 is only one of these which calls for mention here. This 

 was the Church party properly so called. It was 

 founded in 1196, not by the Archbishop of Thrond- 

 hjem — the great Eystein was dead before the foundation 

 of the party — but by Nicholas Arnason, Bishop of Oslo. 

 This party got the name of Baglerne — the Baglcr, i.e. 

 Crozier Party. It gained great strength from the support 

 of Pope Innocent iil., who in A.D. 1198 excommunicated 

 Sverri. 



By this time, however, Sverri had so firmly estab- 

 lished himself in the affections of his own followers 

 that nothing could shake him. The Birkibeinar were 

 no longer a poor and ragged regiment ; they were half 

 the people of Norway, with a fixed tradition and policy. 



