Up to the days of the Comnenian Emperors the greater part of the Varangians were Swedes, and in Sweden have been found a number of runic stones which bear the names of various men who died in Byzantium, and had these stones raised in their memory. How frequent the journeys to the Empire will have been in the tenth to the twelfth centuries we may see from the old Swedish legal codes, where there are provisions for inheritance for men who were resident in Greece. The older manuscript of the code states that no one may receive an inheritance (in Sweden) while he dwells in Greece, while the younger code determines that no one may inherit from such a person as was not a living heir when he went away. There are similar enactments in the older Norwegian Gulaþingslög, ‘but if (a man) goes to Greece, then he who is next in line to inherit shall hold his property’. The composition of the Västgötalag is usually attributed to Askell, brother to Earl Birger of Bjälbo, who was lawman of Västgötaland in 1219–25, but many of their enactments were obviously much older when they were codified, and this is one of these.