Blood Court (German: Blutgericht) or high justice in the Holy Roman Empire referred to the right of a Vogt (a reeve) to hold a criminal court inflicting bodily punishment, including the death penalty.
Not every Vogt held the blood court. Up to the 18th century, for example, the blood court of much of what is now the canton of Zürich lay with Kyburg, even in the territory ruled by the counts of Greifensee. The self-administration of the blood court was an important factor of Imperial immediacy.
The Blood banner (Blutfahne or Blutbanner) was a solid red flag. It was presented to feudal lords as a symbol of their power of high jurisdiction (Blutgerichtsbarkeit) together with the heraldic banner of the fief. Some feudal houses adopted a red field symbolic of the blood banner into their coat of arms, the so-called Regalienfeld. The Talschaft (forest canton) of Schwyz used the blood banner as a war flag from ca. 1240 (see flag of Schwyz, flag of Switzerland).
Famous quotes containing the words blood and/or court:
“Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker’s pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel-house for the sign of blind Cupid.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Follow a shaddow, it still flies you;
Seeme to flye it, it will pursue:
So court a mistris, shee denyes you;
Let her alone, shee will court you.
Say, are not women truely, then,
Stil’d but the shaddowes of us men?
At morne, and even, shades are longest;
At noone, they are or short, or none:
So men at weakest, they are strongest,
But grant us perfect, they’re not knowne.
Say, are not women truely, then,
Stil’d but the shaddowes of us men?”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)