Tallinn’s medieval legal order was founded on privileges bestowed by the ruler of the land and on Lübeck Law. The city’s corpus of legal texts primarily took shape during the era of Danish rule. The era of rule by the Teutonic Order did not bring all that much to Tallinn that was new in a legal sense. The Order affirmed the more important old rights and regulations. The rights bestowed by the Danish kings also formally remained in effect in the era of Swedish rule and partially in the era of Russian rule.

The content of Danish era sources of law has reached us as original documents or copies, and also as translations into Low German or High German. Additionally, brief summaries of these documents were made in the 16th–18th centuries in the course of the business of the town council, not out of antiquarian interest. Such summaries bear witness to how Tallinn’s town council interpreted the content of historical privilege documents several centuries after they had been issued. The question is whether these interpretations correspond to the original idea of the documents, and if not, then when and why did legal documents start being ascribed with meanings that differed from their previous meanings, and how has this affected the understanding of Tallinn’s 13th–14th century legal order that prevails in historical literature? One of the problems that arises in connection with this, for instance, is the attempt to ascertain exactly when Lübeck Law was granted to Tallinn and the circumstances under which this was done, yet some other Danish era documents may also offer surprises. At the same time, the research of sources of law that have been preserved allows us to answer the question of whether the privilege documents and legal codes granted to Tallinn could have been lost over time.

If we exclude the privileges of King Valdemar II, Tallinn was probably not granted important privileges during the Danish era, the detailed content of which would be unknown nowadays. Yet it emerges that transcripts of legal codes and presumably also of privilege documents that once existed have not survived. The town council’s endeavour to give 13th century legal documents meaning that they originally did not have emerges starting in the 16th century. Hence ordinances in the field of the administration of justice from the 13th century that Danish kings had issued have later been interpreted as the transfer to the town council of the exclusive right to administer criminal justice. This and many other new interpretations were the point of departure for Tallinn’s town council especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the central authorities started vigorously curtailing the city’s autonomy. These understandings of the age and meaning of Tallinn’s rights that took shape under pragmatic considerations have affected the understanding of medieval sources of law in the historiography of the 19th and 20th centuries as well.