a spatial history of swedish rural courts administered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 In 1800, most purpose-built courthouses were single-floor, timbered constructions with a vestibule, a courtroom, a kitchen, one room for the judge, one for the clerk, and one for either the panel of lay judges or the local official, who also took on the role of a prosecutor. The buildings were relatively small, about 130–200 m2, sometimes with a few additional rooms in the attic. The rural district court gathered at least three times a year and sessions could last up to a fortnight. Spectators entered and left the building and courtroom as cases were underway. Lighting was poor and windows had to stay open for lack of ventilation; still, the smell of cooking and baking mixed with the odour of a crowd of people. There was little room to keep people and activities separate. Courtroom furnishings offered few barriers to physical proximity. The members of the court were normally seated on plain chairs at an ordinary table at the far end of the room, and a few seats were available for the audience.13 Abar was sometimes put up to prevent people fromcrowding the principals or bodily hindering the court’s work, but there were also courtrooms that had nothing by way of a barrier. We cannot know if the intimacy produced by spatial conditions disturbed the social order or the authority of the court. However, as Foucault might agree, societal conditions were characterized as much by physical proximity as by socioeconomic distance.14 The social organization within the courtroom was primarily based on collective agreement. Having noted that Swedish eighteenth-century purpose-built court architecture, as rare as it was, integrated the court’s actors and activities, I will now turn to the changes that followed on the Code of 1734. As pointed out by Clare Graham and Linda Mulcahy, the very dedication 12 Ibid. 202–225. 13 Löfgren 2011. 14 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison(Paris: Gallimard, 2004) (first pub. 1975). 147 Social segregation, spatial integration
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