Violence and Late-Medieval Justice

Summary

According to Christiane Raynaud, an expert on medieval justice, French law had reached a certain degree of sophistication by the early fourteenth century. Judicial duels were suppressed by the king, after convictions some appeals were possible, and proof was established by enquête. Still, because law was an amalgamation of revived Roman law, influences of canon law, and a great deal of customary laws, violence persisted. The best collection of customary laws was by Philippe de Rémi, sire de Beaumanoir, c.1283. Municipal courts were established, as the town population and its trading activities grew; the legal ‘system’ of town and country was neither feudal, Roman, nor customary, really. Slowly, the king's role as lawmaker and proper legal authority for appeals developed. In this study we show how violence influenced late-medieval life and justice; however, general aggressiveness ultimately assured the perennial existence of certain groups. If we describe the situation of France in this essay, we can assume that circumstances were similar (if not the same) in other European countries.

Royal Justice and Violence

In the late Middle Ages, royalty prided itself on its judicial institutions, sometimes in order to conceal arbitrariness and denial of justice; in reality, royal justice appears to have been severe and cruel. Often, the executive branch even cut into Church jurisdiction. On the other hand, the development of trials in the registers of the Parisian parliament reveals, for example, that legal procedures frequently ended in letters of remission. In these cases the preliminary investigation had hardly begun, when remission was granted. Certain sources yield little evidence of executions: the texts of chronicles were often silent on this point. The images in chronicles show the rituality and technicality of an execution, as well as the attitudes of persons present; the excess of violence noticeable herein contributed to the showiness of the punishment. Valuable sources are the Fleurs des Chroniques (fourteenth century) and the Grandes Chroniques de France (1274–sixteenth century), although the person who commissioned the images, the author of the text, the copyist, or the miniaturist may have added certain touches—or omitted essential detail.

By comparison, there are fewer miniatures extant on justice than there are on wars. Imaging trials, the illuminations show mostly the moment of accusation (fig. 1), the sentence, and its execution (fig. 2); demonstration of proof and defense did not even appear in the texts of the proceedings.