wilfrid prest Ages, thus in this respect also quite unlike most European supreme appellate courts. For these were specialist tribunals, mostly established by earlymodern monarchs as part of a broader strategy designed to enhance their authority and power within the geographical territory over which they ruled. Third, the judicial functions of the House of Lords were not discharged by formally qualified and trained lawyers or judges, but by a heterogenous asssortment of aristocrats and high-ranking clergymen, the lords spiritual and temporal, among whose number past or present members of the legal profession never comprised more than a tiny minority. These are certainly real and significant considerations. But I propose now to try to complicate the picture, by suggesting that the gulf between the institutions and practices of the early modern House of Lords, and contemporary appellate jurisdictions of Continental Europe, was by no means so broad and deep as might at first appear. Let us look first at the matter of formal procedure. Legal mechanisms enabling dissatisfied litigants to have judges of a central superior court rehear cases originally tried in local courts of first instance began to appear in Europe from the thirteenth century onwards. Indeed the right to lodge appeals, at which both matters of law and of fact determined in one jurisdiction are reconsidered by a higher court has been characterised as “a general rule” of civil law jurisdictions.2 Nor can there be any doubt that in this as other respects the common law is (and was) different, as Professor Baron van Caenegem has put it. For to medieval English common lawyers the term “appeal” signified a form of private indictment for a serious crime, not the review of a lower court’s decision by a superior jurisdiction. As the English civilian Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577) noted in his De Republica Anglorum, first published in 1583, “That which in England is called appeal, [is] in other places accusation.”3 Indeed the classi2 Caenegem, Raoul C. van 1987 pp. 5–6; Merryman, John Henry 1969 p. 27. 3 Cf. Bilder, Mary S. 2001 pp. 50-51, et passim. 177 Appeals and the common law
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