To a young lawyer such as François Papillon, just beginning his practice at the king's bench in the Caux, the problem of applying the king's law to the countryside might seem a formidable task. French royal law was a vast filing cabinet of disorganized directives, many unheeded or even contradictory. These positive laws of the French crown were impressive in their volume, if not in their congruity. By the late seventeenth century, royal law amounted to a collection of well over a million ordinances, edicts, arrêts, and declarations that had never aspired to the coherence of English common law. Astoundingly, the crown issued more than eight hundred thousand royal arrêts alone in the 119 years separating the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV.

By contrast, the provincial Custom of Normandy, a compact book of six-hundred-odd customary laws, was almost Lilliputian in size. Yet the more closely we examine provincial court dockets, the more the king's law begins to resemble a French Gulliver, tied down by a thousand tiny threads of customary law. Distilled into this ancient provincial code were a few concise rules that laid out the jurisdictions of the royal and seigneurial courts and governed the actions of families, communities, markets and seigneuries.