the house of lords as a court of appeal Its institutional successor, the High Court (Højesteret) established by King Frederick III, was more professionalised, with equal numbers of judges drawn from the nobility and the “learned and bourgeois” estates; indeed after 1675 all its judges were supposedly “well experienced in the law”, although that stipulation presumably did not imply the possession of any formal academic legal qualification.23 Finally, as Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen has shown us, the twenty judges of the Svea Court of Appeal were men of very mixed backgrounds and qualifications – statesmen, diplomats, and civil servants; clear evidence of legal training or experience is lacking for the majority during at least the first century of the court’s existence. John Gerdes, appointed president of the court in 1753, seems to represent something of a watershed; his career might be taken as exemplifying the gradual process whereby a largely lay body was gradually “lawyerized”. For Gerdes had risen up through the court’s own ranks, starting as a twenty-one year-old trainee, then holding successively the positions of “extraordinary clerk, extraordinary notary, extraordinary Crown prosecutor, vice Crown prosecutor, protonotary, Crown prosecutor, assessor and appeal court councillor”, and finally revision secretary and Chancellor of Justice just before he reached the presidency.24 The prominence of aristocrats and elite servants of the Crown in various early modern European appeals courts helps us to recognize that the seventeenth and eighteenth-century House of Lords was not a wholly unique institution, but an outlier on a broad spectrum, ranging from the fully lawyer-staffed court at one extreme to the entirely lay and nonprofessional tribunal at the other. While the notion of a supreme appellate court composed solely of members of the titular nobility (whether by birth, office or service) may strike us today as verging on the bizarre, our own democratic, meritocratic and broadly pro-professional or utilitarian assumptions and sensibilities would doubtless have seemed equally odd and on various grounds objectionable to most right-thinking opinion – formers and policy –makers three or four centuries ago. Nor is it unreasonable to insist, with the legal historian Sir William Holdsworth, 23 Rhee, C.Hvan – Wijffels, Alain (eds.) 2013 pp. 115-116 24 Vasara-Aaltonen, Marianne 2014 pp. 319-323 and 325. 186
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