per andersen law, being fundamentally equal to contemporary learned law outside Denmark, both when it comes to clearly defined institutions for the administration of justice and the different steps in the legal procedure introduced in the law. The great difference between the Law of Jutland and other contemporary collections of law across Europe is thus not found in the substantial content of the law of procedure, but in the level of detail with which the law of procedure – which by and large corresponds to the Roman-canonical law of procedure – is implemented in individual collections of law. While the Roman-canonical procedure is present at avery sophisticated, technical and conceptual level in many other European kingdoms, especially in Southern Europe, we do not find it as explicitly or in such detail in the Law of Jutland. The reason for this is probably that while the Southern European collections of laws clearly were the results of royal initiatives, the Law of Jutland seems to be the result of an interaction between royal central power and regional magnates or local communities in the province of Jutland. There was not a particularly large distance, at the level of the provincial court, between royal central power and local or regional magnates in terms of their power politics and their attentiveness to new development. And no one really had enough power to press the other part to accept anything unacceptable. Therefore, the Danish legal system did not consist of a hierarchy of courts in which a case could be appealed from a lower court to a higher court. The Danish legal system was horizontal so that all courts could be courts of first instance, depending on the nature of the transgression. While most cases were probably conducted and decided by the nearest/ local court (ting), the provincial court usually only functioned as a kind of second-instance court in unusual cases, namely when the defendant did not appear before the local court or did not comply with a sentence. In such cases, it was possible to conduct the case once more at the provincial court. A sentence that had been passed was thus not appealed, meaning that another court scrutinised the evaluation of a case in a lower court; instead a case that was heard by the provincial court as a second instance was to be conducted as if it was a new case. Thus the district- and 249
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