a safe haven in the shadow of war? – mia korpiola 77 as changing the system created the previous year and as the dramatic result of a conflict.195 Moreover, in the Middle Ages it had also been unclear in the norms themselves whether the royal relegated courts gave final verdicts or whether their sentences could still be referred to the king in person. In practice, the latter took place at least occasionally.196 Similarly, the royal delegates adjudicating in the name of Gustav Vasa in Southern Sweden in the early 1540s referred several criminal cases to the king.197 In unclear cases and in the case of death penalties, the king had the final say. The difference between a wager/appeal and the benefit of revision is also evident in the terminology of the 1615 Rättegångs-Process, which calls the wager from the lower to the higher courts up to the Court of Appeal Appellatio, while the opportunity to “humbly petition” (ödmiuk Böneskrifft) the king after the sentence of the Court of Appeal was called aBeneficium Revisionis. Although this could be dismissed as semantics, there was also a difference between the financial inputs required in the appeal (wager) in contrast to the extraordinary petition (benefit of revision). In the wager, both the appealing party and the judge(s) set a sum of money as surety whether the appeal succeeded or failed. This made the lower court in a sense a party to the appeal. This was not the case in the revision. The 1615 Statute explicitly stated that the petitioner, and the petitioner alone, had to pay the sum of two hundreddalers regardless of whether the King confirmed the decision of the Court of Appeal or not.198 This made the Beneficium Revisionis into a kind of extraordinary monitoring service to be purchased from the king for a hefty sum. This article does not attempt to resolve the question of the stage at which the drafting process the article on the beneficiumwas added to the text. Indeed, Petrén has persuasively argued that this was a late addition.199 However, it should be observed that the Court of Appeal had already commented on a draft – the content of which we do not know – by late June 1614. The Court’s letter to the King welcomed the statute as “much needed” (nödhtorfftigh och sÿnnerligen behöfues wele) and ensured that the Court 195 Jägerskiöld, Stig 1984 p. 219. 196 E.g., Hemmer, Ragnar 1949 pp. 14-15, 36-38. 197 “Några handlingar till Gustaf I:s historia,” pp. 194-198. 198 Articles 24 and 35, Rättegångs-Process (1615), inKongl. stadgar, ed. Schmedeman, pp. 158 and 161. 199 Petrén, Sture 1964 p. 16.
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