292 The Appendix had an influence on judicial development in that the death penalty was prescribed for a number of crimes which had previously been subject to fines, especially crimes of adultery and incestuous marriage. However, penal lawwas not as profoundly brutalized as has previously been claimed; for example, the death penalty for single adultery (when only one of the parties was married) was never applied. The extended use of the death penalty on account of the Appendix was thus moderate; apart from this, there was a eontinuous mitigation of sentences. The principle that historians have often called realistic lenience often set its stamp on the way the high court applied the law'. It took into consideration the age of the offender, poverty, and other mitigating circumstances, as well as the prospect of the offender’s improvement and readjustment to society. When all hope of improvement was lost, the opposite principle applied; cruelty, in the formof the death sentence or banishment. 3. Deterrence and retribution were prominent principles in penal law, but so was the idea of reintegrating the offender. The severest sentence in the seventeenth century was the death penalty, which took the form of either beheading or hanging. Ever since the Middle Ages, the most common form of punishment was fines; one-third of the fine normally went to the plaintiff as compensation. In the lower courts, fines were the maximum penalty for a large number of crimes, whereas in the high court fines were mostly imposed as commutations; a death sentence passed by a lower court was mitigated to a fine. If the convicted person could not pay the fine, the penalty was commuted once again, this time to corporal punishment, the birch for women, the gauntlet for men. There was only one ordinance about banishment as a penalty, which meant that there were great variations in the geographical area the convict had to leave and the length of the banishment. Banishment was generally part of a commuted sentence; for example, a death sentence could be commuted to a fine plus banishment or corporal punishment plus banishment. The explanation for the variations is that the high court, in the absence of legal provisions, was forced to adjust the punishment to suit the special circumstances of the case. The old punishment of declaring an offender to be an outlaw(biltog) had taken on a new meaning in the seventeenth century, which in practice meant banishment from Sweden. This was the punishment for breaches of the king’s peace (edsöreshrott). Nor were there any fixed rules for imprisonment as a penalty. In the practice of the high court, however, there were prison sentences with bread and water for spells varying from eight days to a month. The penalty was often combined with a fine, corporal punishment, or banishment. It was not until the eighteenth century that imprisonment became a common form of penalty. Yet
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