the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 426 e have decided to translatethe SwedishSvea hovrätt Was Svea Court of Appeal. Strictly speaking, this is misleading as the new court only became known by that name at a later stage in history. Moreover, appeals formed only one of its functions at the outset. Yet, for the sake of clarity and consistency, Svea hovrätt is called the Svea Court of Appeal, its current term, in this book. As several of the Swedish legal and historical terms do not have exact English equivalents, we have discussed them many times. We have decided to use an English term if one exists; e.g., jury for nämnd although the Swedish nämnd is not the same institution as the English jury. In some cases, we have aimed at an Anglicized version that is less a literal translation than catches the significance, e.g., theRättegångsordinantie of 1614 has been translated as the 1614 Ordinance of Judicial Procedure rather than Trial Ordinance. Some institutions, such as the lagmanor drots that have no English equivalent have either been left in the text as such or the translation in the glossary below has been used. For the names of Swedish kings, the variants used in the Encyclopædia Britannica have been used. However, for the period when they were only royal dukes, their Swedish first names have been used. This is why King Charles IX is referred to as Duke Karl of Södermanland before he became first the de facto ruler and later king. As for other dignitaries, the customary forms used in for example the Svenskt biografiskt lexikon [Swedish biographical dictionary] and the FinnishKansallisbiografia[National Biography of Finland] have been used. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, most nobles did not use family names, being known by their first name and patronymic. Only relatively few noble families used family names in the Middle Ages. In research literature, they are normally referred to by the later surname of the family, often deriving from the images on the family arms. For example, the Bielke family had its name from the fact that the shield was parted per Note on Some Editorial Principles
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