wilfrid prest This brings us to the third apparent point of difference. For the House of Lords was something more than a court; it made laws as well as adjudicating, and trained lawyers were in a distinct minority among the noblemen who sat on its benches. In this latter respect the House of Lords appears in sharp contrast to the High Council (Hoge Raad) of Holland, Zeeland and West Friesland after the Revolt of the Netherlands, the Great Council of Mechelen, theParlement of Paris, theSacro Regio Consiglio of Naples, theSacra Romana Rota, and theSala de Justiciaof the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies: all supreme appellate courts whose judges generally held some form of recognized academic or professional qualification in law.19 Yet when we look at other courts of appeal, the overwhelmingly nonprofessional character of the House of Lords appears somewhat less anomalous. Take for example the Council of Justice of Castile, established in 1476, with “6 judges who were professional and academically qualified lawyers” but also “two judges from the nobility and one from the clergy.”20 Another later fifteenth-century foundation was theReichskammergericht of the Holy Roman Empire, established by the Diet of Worms in 1495, on the basis that “learned jurists and noblemen would be equally represented.”21 There the aristocrats and the lawyers occupied separate benches, as did their counterparts in the Emperor’s Reichshofrat, which Eva Ortlieb tells us was “headed by a member of the higher nobility” while “other members of the nobility without legal qualifications formed the so-called ‘Lay Bench.’”22 Even closer to Stockholm, from 1537 to 1660 the King’s Council of Denmark existed as a wholly lay court of appeal. 19 Rhee, C.H. van – Wijffels, Alain (eds.) 2013 pp. 25-27, 205-207, 211, 215-217 and ch. 3. I am also here drawing upon papers by Dolores Freda, Kirsi Salonen and Leopoldo Lopez Valencia forthcoming in Godfrey, Mark – Rhee, C. H. van. Of course the contrast be-tween legally qualified and lay judges was often blurred by venality of office and lax academic regimes: cf. Hamscher, Albert N. 1976 p. 159. 20 Rhee, C.H. van – Wijffels, Alain (eds.) 2013 p. 146. 21 Rhee, C.H. van – Wijffels, Alain (eds.) 2013 p. 97. 22 Rhee, C.H. van – Wijffels, Alain (eds.) 2013 pp. 91-92. 185 Lawyers and laymen
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