suum cuique tribuere – elsa trolle önnerfors 177 appeal court in the second half of the seventeenth century. The number of noble disputes increased towards the end of the century. In 1690 alone, the nobility were parties in thirty-five percent of all cases settled by the Svea Court of Appeal. One explanation for this was that the number of noblemen had increased greatly due to the increased ennoblement in the 1680s. No monarch before Charles XI, not even Queen Christina, had ennobled so many families as he did. During his reign, more than six hundred new noble families were introduced at the House of the Nobility.488 Another explanation was that the late seventeenth century was a time of severe economic instability. The repossession of Crown lands (Sw. reduktionen) in the 1680s undermined the higher nobility’s economic and polit-ical position. By the completion of the repossession, the estates owned by the nobility had been reduced by approximately fifty percent.489 It is not easy to draw a clear line between civil disputes and criminal disputes in the seventeenth century. The division into various types of dispute was not as distinct as in our time. Previous research has claimed that the number of civil disputes increased from the beginning of the seventeenth century onward. Admittedly they did, but that does not mean that the increase was at the expense of the number of criminal cases. A probable assumption was that all types of court case were on the increase.490 Even though the types of cases with noble parties varied over time, the Svea Court of Appeal disputes where the appeal court was a privileged forum for the nobility can be categorized into four groups, which were almost equal in size: disputes about economic matters, disputes about real estate and land ownership, disputes about family law matters, and disputes about defamation, theft and violence: 488 von Konow, Jan 2005 pp. 171-172. 489 Trolle Önnerfors, Elsa 2014 pp. 180-187. 490 Sundin, Jan 1992 p. 418. Diagram1 Disputes with Parties from the Nobility in the SCA from the Years 1650, 1660, 1670, 1680 and 1690 Disputes about economic matters Disputes about real estate and land ownership Disputes about family law (e.g. inheritance and marriage) Disputes about defamation Disputes about violence and theft Other types of disputes A B C D E F A B C D E F
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