Chapter 5 - Disputes and Dispute Resolution

Summary

Chapter 5 turns from the demography of the Court of Requests to the issues that its plaintiffs presented. It begins with a breakdown of the subject matter of petitions, including violent assaults, debt and goods disputes, and quarrels over the possession of land. Thereafter, the chapter abandons firm legal categorisations used in other single-court studies, observing that supplicants to the king more often framed their cases in terms of emotions, relationships, and social values – of personal status and a wider social order that they perceived to be at risk. Finally, the chapter examines claims made by Requests’ petitioners about their inability to find justice elsewhere, in other parts of the legal system. This serves to trace the various possible steps between the onset of a localised feud and the pursuit of litigation before the king, and therefore to better contextualise the Court of Requests and the conciliar justice network. It also demonstrates how subjects and supplicants perceived this new jurisdiction: not as a forum for trying particular areas of case law but as a mechanism for remedying tangled feuds that could not be so simply defined nor easily remedied elsewhere.