prolonged noble property disputes – anu lahtinen 133 365 Famous and lengthy disputes on inheritance include the one between the heirs of Jakob Frese (Donner, Gustav Adolf 1930), another between Lucia Olofsdotter Skälge and her relatives (Klockars, Birgit 1979 pp. 100-105; Lahtinen, Anu 2000 chs. 3.3 and 4.4; Lahtinen, Anu 2004 p. 41), and one of the lengthiest, the dispute over the inheritance of Görvel Abrahamsdotter Gyllenstierna; see, “Rättegångsinlagor i tvisten rörande fru Görvel Abrahamsdotter Gyllenstiernas arv” in Historiska handlingar 27, ed. Almquist, pp. 95170. For the organization of the court system, see Trolle Önnerfors, Elsa 2010 pp. 101111. 366 See Lahtinen, Anu 2013 for an analysis on the progress of a sixteenth-century dispute on landed property, from local agreements, disagreements and law courts to the High Council of King Erik and to the royal investigation assizes known as räfsteting. Key sources available in the Archives of The SundholmManor (Sundholman kartanon [Kalanti] arkisto), Provincial Archives of Turku, also available online in Finnish National Archives Service (Arkistolaitos); see, for example, http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-al20130 40313254677434838 ; http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-al2013040313254867651192 (last accessed on 5 July 2014). oon afterhaving been established, the Svea Court of Appeal was Sproducing huge amounts of archival material in which many kinds of disputes were recorded. In one way or another, many of these cases dealt with inheritance disputes. In earlier centuries, too, there had been very lengthy disputes that had been taken to various law courts – local courts, and finally to the High Council, the local investigation assizes (räfsteting) – and often to the regent or, in some cases, the pope.365 It was not uncommon for such disputes to go on for decades, and for the seeds of discord to have been sown a long time before.366 This article sets out to analyse some lengthy property disputes recorded in the Svea Court of Appeal in the first part of the seventeenth century. In these cases, noble families were arguing about their right to certain landed property and rental income related to it. In order to prove their rights, they would rake up documents reporting of old sales of property, old debts and liabilities, and old scandals that had the potential to overturn the rights of particular heirs. Introduction
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