danish courts of appeal Thus, in the medieval Danish legal system one finds four kinds of secular courts, namely the local courts of the rural district og the rural peculiar, the town court (supplemented by the court of the town council), and the provincial court, mainly also dealing with transgressions in rural society. The system was aiming at securing that a legal decision could be made, no matter where you lived, but originally it did not give the opportunity to have a case heard by more than one court. The beginning of the thirteenth century saw the introduction of a legal institution challenging the other courts in the horizontal system. This is revealed in some of the older provincial laws originating from the first decades of the thirteenth century in which we learn that the possibility was available to initiate proceedings before the king instead of the ting in several kinds of dispute over public land. It is likely that this third institution, which was originally on the same level as the district and provincial court, was dating back to the time before the laws mentioning it were written down, and that the king had held the authority to pass sentence in certain kinds of cases since the last quarter of the twelfth century, which was a period of consolidation for the royal dynasty. However, the traces of this activity are so faint that it is difficult to reach firm conclusions about it. On the other hand, royal sentencing is much more visible in the thirteenth century. It is not a trend found in sentences – for this kind of source is only available in numbers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – but there are traces of evidence that Danish kings in the thirteenth century worked to tip the balance of the horizontal system of courts in their favour, probably intending to encourage more business in the royal court to provide more glory and authority for the king and to increase his income from fines.14 The first trace of an attempt to influence the balance between the horizontal courts is found in the Abel-Christopher Decree around 1250. 14 Andersen, Per 2011 pp. 220-221. 252 The evolution of a hierarchical system
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=