the tale of two courts in one town – marko lamberg 113 gent or the Archbishop, were also occasionally present during the sessions of the Town Court. On particular occasions, the burgomasters and the councillors were part of a larger special court which dealt with matters such as piracy or high treason.303 Moreover, the Town Court frequently referred cases to the Council of the Realm or ecclesiastical courts or rural courts or even other, more specific courts depending on the matter in question, or at least permitted people to do so.304 The Canon Law had also restricted the influence of the Town Court, and not merely in cases dealing with clerics. For example, matrimony and problems relating to it belonged to the religious sphere. The communal power of the Town Court shrank further when the Stockholm Consistory was formed during the early 1590s, after which organizational unity the local priesthood had more to say in matters dealing with spiritual circumstances and offences. Differences of opinion occasionally arose, so that the secular courts were sometimes inclined to more leniency or severity than the Consistory and vice versa.305 Previous research dealing with the relationship between the Svea Court of Appeal and the Stockholm Town Court has sometimes emphasized the tensions and clashes,306 and sometimes the cooperation and common understanding.307 In this chapter, I explore this relationship between the two courts during the first ten years of the Court of Appeal’s existence (1614– 1624); the main context being the legal processes undertaken by each court. I am interested in the actions and reactions of the Town Court in a situation that the burgomasters and the councillors were partly familiar with but that still was somewhat new for them. The sources of the analysis consist of the records of the Town Court (tänkeböcker) as well as records (protokoll, domböcker) of the Court of Appeal. There are usually two kinds of sources covering the same year: draft records (konceptprotokoll) and finished records (renskrivna protokoll). The analysis in this essay is based on case studies which can be reconstructed relatively well given the fragmentary source material. As the previous research on these materials has pointed out, all series are incomplete in their 303 For example, Stockholms stads tänkeböcker (hereafter Stb) 1504–1514, p. 262. See also Almqvist, Daniel 1940 pp. 31-43. 304 For example, Stb 1483–1492pp. 219, 254, 277, 308, 312-313, 385, 430, 495, 498, 567, 593. 305 Murray, Robert 1949 pp. 82-91, 251-252. 306 Petrén, Sture 1964 pp. 53-54; Einonen, Piia 2005 p. 72. 307 Ericson, Lars 1988 p. 166.
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