the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 82 name, there are also some occasional criminal cases (some cases of slander andex officio treason trials). It was first composed in 1635 by the actuary Carl Johansson Lundius (1600- after 1667) and updated after that.216 This diary contains information on the parties to the case, the stages of the process and in which volume of theLibri Causarumseries the cause paper can be found. For our purposes, it is most useful the causes are entered chronologically under the alphabetic order, giving the date when the case was initiated at the court. The diary also contains information on and dates of the decisions in the cases: both interlocutory and final decrees (sententia interlocutoria; sententia definitiva).217 This information allows some statistical analysis of the civil litigation in the first years of the activity of the court. In nine causes out of 78 (or 11.54 per cent) the register indicates that the plaintiff mentioned in the register was female. This number is relatively low and may conceal many women whose husbands or male relatives were involved in property or inheritance disputes on their behalf. Mentions of such instances can be found in some of the other records of the Court of Appeal. For example, on 27 May 1614, the Court issued a precept at the request of Måns Nilsson, a burgher and town councillor of Stockholm, about a debt that his wife had been trying to collect for years while still a widow.218 In general, historical research on litigation and courts has usually shown that relatively few of the cases initiated in earlymodern courts ever reached a verdict or decree. For lower courts, Julie Hardwick, for example, has argued that court proceedings were only used as one of many different “negotiation strategies.” In fact, she has ventured to estimate that the number of cases in early modern France “dropped before a sentence […] may have been as […] high as 15:1.”219 Results suggest considerable numbers of cases that were dropped before a sentence even in higher courts. For example, in the sixteenth-century royal court of appeal (cancillería) of Valladolid in Castile, for every case in which a verdict was given, fifteen were dropped or abandoned before that stage.220 Kirsi Salonen, studying the activity 216 On Lundius, see Anjou, A. 1899 p. 212. 217 RA, SHA, D I:1 [unpaginated]. 218 See also Anu Lahtinen’s chapter in this volume. 219 Hardwick, Julie 2009 p. 76. 220 Kagan, Henry L. 1981 p. 84.
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