73 mune theory. He remained silent on the complicated theories of circumstantial evidence; he did not say a word about poenae extraordinariae; he outrightly condemned torture as a method of producing judicial confessions. And he extended the requirement of two (sometimes three) witnesses to all crimes, both “Hals- och Gäldzsaker.” Why? In a moment, we shall come to the reasons. More than anything, Swedish seventeenth-century legal treatises, when it came to the law of proof, were a Roman-Germanic reconstruction of the Swedish medieval legal order. They were intended not to describe lawas it was practiced in courts or to interpret the text of the statutes, but to represent the medieval Swedish lawof proof with the help of the Roman-Germanic conceptual apparatus, thus offering the law of proof neatly packaged and witha scientific legitimation. At the same time, however, the seventeenth-century treatises writers aimed at a rather thorough reform of the medieval systemof proof. In this sense, works of scholars like Ralamb and Kloot were part of the radical changes of the Swedish lawof proof at the end of the 1600s. Legal Practice: The Reception of the Main Rules To what extent and when was the legal theory of proof adopted in the court practice? This question is surely at least as broad as the main theme of this study and merits a study of its own. Nevertheless, I will attempt a preliminary hypothesis. In Swedish legal practice, the Roman-canon type of confession began to take shape in the sixteenth century. Confession was by itself sufficient evidence for conviction, but it was also starting to be required that confession be voluntary and given before the court. Should it have been extrajudicial, it had to be restated before the judge in order to serve as sufficient proof. If it was not renewed this way, it did, however, serve as circumstantial evidence, enough to torture the accused.Inger takes this as clear influence of Roman-canon and German-Roman law. It seems obvious, thus, that the reception of legal rules of proof had begun by 1614, the year the High Court of Svea was founded, although the modes of proof were not rank-ordered in the juristic writing and practice the way they were in continental jurisprudence. Not much empirical work on the law of proof of early sixteenth-century Sweden exists.^' Yet it is clear that the reception of legal rules of proof adIngcr 1976 (a) p. 181. Inger draws the conclusion on the basis of certain insinuations in court records, and makes a convincing point of torture’s existence towards the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century in Sweden, but limiting his conclusions mainly to citv courts. Ibid. pp. 232—234; see also Munktell 1939 p. 109. In general, see Inger 1994; also Munktell 1939 and 1940; for the High Court of Svea, see Jägerskiöld 1964. Thunander’s otherwise excellent stud\' on the High Court of Göta contains very little on evidence, see Thunander 1993.
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