ABSTRACT
In the Court of Appeal records, however, the keeping of social peace was connected with pacifying a heated situation. It has been claimed that punishing crimes was essential to the collective culture of early modern society in order to prevent God’s wrath from descending on the whole community. However, the court records, both lower court and in the case of murdered children the Court of Appeal, show quite a different emphasis: they were willing to mitigate the law for the sake of preserving the social status quo. It may be significant here that in some cases when persons had confessed to several years or decades old crimes, the court of appeal tended to give out considerably more lenient sentences than in recent crimes. This was in accordance with the laws on killing in general, and at least in one case the crime was so old that infanticide had not yet been separated into a category of its own when the crime was committed, but it still suggests that a harsh punishment was no longer felt necessary when the perpetrators had for years been able to live in their communities without causing a major disruption. The Court of Appeal indeed verbalized the same thought in a case of poaching in 1667.9 Peace was what the court was concerned with, not necessarily punishment.
