mixed legal systems – kjell å. modéer 405 The printed Swedish legal material of the seventeenth century includes many printed editions of the national law book and the town law book as well as the regional laws emanating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the legal literature of the time, the mixed law volumes left by the individual judges from that period exhibit interesting but convoluted inter-relations of fragmentation and coherence. It was a period during which the mixed legal systems became apparent through the law books of the judges. A law book of 1629 in my possession, in a binding from the royal bookbinder Marcus Sigfridsson in Stockholm, probably once belonged to the Bishop of Västerås, Johannes Rudbeckius (1581 – 1646). It contains a remarkable mix of handwritten manuscripts of laws and statutes by different hands and printed law-books, demonstrating the problematic situation for the judges of this period in getting a grip of actual law valid for the legal situations in the courts. This literature demonstrates that each judge had his own “lawbook” consisting not only of printed material but also individually chosen material. In the historical perspective, the oscillation between harmony and fragmentation is not new. European legal and political history reflects a continuing interaction and sometimes even tension between tendencies towards integration and disintegration. European law has been both fragmented and coherent since the medieval times. It was fragmented because of several bodies of ius particulare until the nineteenth century (town law, mercantile law, royal law, customary law) and has continued to be fragmented since because of the predominance of national legislations. Coherence, however, has been produced since the High Middle Ages in large parts of Europe by Roman law and Canon law, and by their confluence in theius commune, the common law of Europe, at first in the nineteenth century as the function of the ius commune was largely taken by comparative law and legislative co-operation. The judicial revolution, however, applied to Swedish legal culture is a complex and difficult concept. As emphasized by Jussi Sallila in his contribution to this volume, the ongoing dynamics between external and internal influences made the “development from the establishment of appeal courts in the early decades of the century to the commencement of the codification project in the 1680s […] not necessarily straightforward”.1157 1157 See Jussi Sallila’s article in this volume, p. 285.
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