per andersen most of the post-Reformation legal reforms.24 Thus the legal pluralism of 1282 based on provinces became so established that it remained a fundamental feature of the legal system until the beginning of the seventeenth century even though the legal institutions were finally institutionalised in a way not yet seen. The royal recess issued by ChristianIII in 1558, one of the major recesses confirming the new state of the art for the reformed kingdom, pulled together and reassured the central elements of the new hierarchy of courts already found in the recess of 1539. The stipulation of a now functioning hierarchical system was reiterated in many individual cases when the parties wished to present their case directly to the king.25 From the end of the sixteenth century, it was even common practice to explicitly state the sequence of appeals – and thus reject cases out of hand that had not previously been decided by the district courts and provincial courts – at the public proclamation of when and where the Royal Court would be convened.26 We can find information in the surviving act books about how often the Royal Court was used from 1537 to 1660, but we do not have a comparable survival of pre-Reformation sources and therefore cannot gain an equally satisfying overview of the pre-Reformation situation. 7,407 sentences dating to the 123 years between the Reformation and the introduction of absolutism survive, which gives us an annual average of 65 Royal Court decisions (if we compensate for missing years).27 However, there are marked fluctuations in the sentences passed in the different reigns: during the reign of ChristianIII(1537-1558), an average of 60 sentences were passed each year – about half of them presided over by the king – but during the reign of Frederick II (1559-1588) there were only 24 Kongens retterting, vol. 1, pp. 80-88. 25 Andersen, Per 2010 pp. 302-312; Tamm, Ditlev – Johansen, Jens Chr. V. 1992 pp. 76-77; Tamm, Ditlev 2003 pp. 6-9. 26 See the examples inKancelliets Brevbøger: KB1566-70, 160 (1567); KB1580-83, 426 (1582), 676, 680 (1583); KB1584-88, 436-7 (1586); KB1635-36, 555, 565 (1636); KB1642-43, 639 (1643). 27 Henningsen, Gustav – Johansen, Jens Chr. V. – Tamm, Ditlev pp. 100-113; Knudsen, Pernille Ulla 2001 p. 22. 259
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