prolonged noble property disputes – anu lahtinen 143 ing that they might not have had the right to the landed property (I will return to this argument a little later). In addition, many of the estates, Claes Claesson argued, were landed property bought by Lars Torstensson and thus free to be given, and not within the sphere of law of inheritance. This argument alluded to Jordabalken, Chapter on Land, section 9, the passage that offered at least an indirect guideline for bequests and grants in the time before the Statute of Wills of 1686. Last wills and bequests were otherwise paid very little attention in the law texts, and the validity of a will was unclear.393 Claes Claesson also referred to the fact that he had offered Planting 200 dalers as reconciliation; the latter, however, had wanted to persist with the lawsuit.394 Finally, when it came to the injustice allegedly suffered by Anna’s paternal grandmother, Agneta Torstensdotter Ram, Claes Claesson claimed that he could prove that Agneta had lost her right of inheritance through her indecent life against the advice of her parents and brothers and a marriage to a commoner, and that her descendants thus could have no claim to these lands in the first place. More precisely, he claimed that Agneta had been “a whore, a witch, and a murderer” (en hoorkona, en trulkona, och en Mörderska). Indeed, he later presented some written testimonies in which the distant elderly relatives of Agneta attested the claims of her promiscuous life. In other words, Claes Claesson made an appeal to fornication and misalliance, the two offences of noblewomen that, as has been shown by Mia Korpiola, were being used to justify the confiscation of their landed property.395 However, in the early seventeenth century, the judicial consequences of this misdemeanor were far from straightforward. Since the 1540s, there had been voices among the nobility claiming that noblewomen who married commoners should not have access to the landed property of the nobility.396 It seems that some families had already implemented the principle of confiscation in the sixteenth century, usurping the inherited land393 Court session 23 October 1620, RA, SHA, E VI a 2aa, Liber causarum26. For inheritance rights, see KrL, Jordabalken, section 9; Trolle Önnerfors, Elsa 2010 pp. 175, 297. See also Elsa Trolle Önnerfors’s article in this volume. 394 Court session 26 June 1622, RA, SHA, E VI a 2aa, Liber causarum 26. 395 See, for example, Korpiola, Mia 2007. For information about misalliances in the Svea Court of Appeal, see also Elsa Trolle Önnerfors’s article in this volume. 396 Anthoni, Eric 1966.
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