RB 54

74 vanced, but slowly. The High Court of Svea, the first of the Swedish royal high courts, has been shown to have been influenced by legal rules of proof during the latter half of the seventeenth century, although not to have followed the rules too rigorously. One witness was, in the Court’s practice, considered a half-proof. Confession was important, but not decisively so, in criminal cases. Whenever a half-proof or a strong presumption was at hand, a juramentum credulitatis could be made, unless there was the danger of perjury."^- In the latter half of the 1600s, an increased interest rose in the novel system of proof. On November 19, 1689, king Charles XI let a high court know that he did not consider oath-helpers appropriate. Later, when the king demanded the Court’s statement on witness proof, the Court gave out a statement referring explicitly to the legal rules of proof, backing themup with biblical authority (Matthew 18:16, Deut. 19:15) and Rilamb’s “Observationes.” According to the Court, there were two principal rules. First, two or three witnesses always sufficed. Second, one witness made a half-proof only, unless his or her statement could be completed with an oath."^^ For the Court, it was confession, however, and not the witness statement, that was the true reginaprobationum. In the Court’s practice, the death sentence required a confession supported by other evidence. To extract a confession, the accused was sometimes prepared for death and even taken to the execution site.^*^ In 1690 (the Royal Letter of April 30, 1690), the king expressly prohibited the death sentence in treason cases with one witness and indicia only. But the old medieval systems, the one of private composition and that of oaths and oath-helpers, vanished slowly and gradually. Heikki Ylikangas has shown that in Finland private composition was employed in homicide cases during the entire sixteenth century,^^ ^^d the use of oath-helpers continued until the very end of the seventeenth.'^^ Thus, the old systems existed side by side for a long time with the oldest layers gradually wearing off: the restitutive, communitarian systemas the oldest layer; next, a state systembased on oaths, oath-helpers and nämnder, and, the newest layer, the systemof statutory rules of proof. Jägerskiöld 1964 p. 291. At this point, the Court referred to the Instructions of Olaus Petri. Ibid. p. 292. Ibid. pp. 294-295. “^5 Ylikangas 1976 (b) pp. 117-123; Ylikangas 1986 pp. 110-131. As part of what Lenman and Parker call “restitutive” justice, private composition was a common way to avoid feuds between kind-groups in many parts of Europe. According to Lenman and Parker, this changed with the emergence of “punitive” law from the sixteenth centurv- onwards. Lenman - Parker 1980 pp. 23-28. The oaths were expressly prohibited by a Royal Letter of October 30, 1696; “Decree on How Courts Shall Deal with Oaths” (“Lörordning huruledes med Edegånger wid Domstolarne förhållas skal”). The ordeals had probablv disappeared by the fourteenth century.

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