per andersen until the beginning of the nineteenth century did the now learned judges become impartial and objective in a modern sense. The conservative traits that characterised the Danish development both when it came to learned law, educated judges and procedural law does not necessarily mean that the Danish development was unique compared to the rest of Europe – there are clearly too many regional variations from all over Europe to form any kind of ideal European model. However, where most other European countries adopted the inquisitorial procedure developed at the Church’s courts in the High Middle Ages as a procedural step to support the efforts of the courts to compel defendants to confess to their misdeeds in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this never happened in Denmark, not even at the Royal Court and the royal central administration, which in other countries were the origin of the inspiration and the demand to implement the learned procedural law. Danish conservatism was probably not caused by the fact that Danes did not follow developments outside the realm, so there must have been conscious choices to adapt or reject, possibly caused by a lack of clarity in power-politics that gave local and regional society a large measure of influence. It is clear, however, that where Danish procedural law in the thirteenth century had been a part of the common European way of conceptualizing and implementing the administration of justice – of the European ius commune – it remained unusual because of its conservative attachment later on. The development away from a horizontal system of courts towards a hierarchical system of courts including the Royal Court/ Supreme Court took a long time in Denmark. The first step was the increased use of king’s letters in the thirteenth century, but this was followed by the development of a legal hierarchy in the fourteenth century – which required both parties’ agreement to send a case or to appeal a sentence to another court. It found its conclusion towards the end of the fifteenth century and the start of the sixteenth century when the appeal of a sentence or the transfer of a case that had been initiated but not concluded at a lower court only required the initiative of one party or a 273
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