One of the least-known aspects of governance during the ancien régime is how the lower-court system was integrated with the sovereign courts, Estates, and intendants at the pinnacle of provincial administration to provide order and authority in the countryside. In Normandy, this relationship changed dramatically after the mid-seventeenth century. With the demise of the Norman Estates after 1665, and the only very specialized interests of the intendants in provincial matters, the Parlement and the bailiwick courts were perfectly poised to inherit the mantle of power. By 1665, over 90 percent of the 1,219 principal royal officers of the généralité of Rouen served in the judicial administration. Yet this concentration of power in the judiciary was paradoxically accompanied by the growing isolation of bailiwicks from provincial and even national politics. Excluded from ascension into the closed elite of the Parlement and no longer seated in either the defunct national or provincial Estates, bailiwick officers were increasingly sealed into the world of local governance.

The loss of the Estates of Normandy, which had traditionally seated a large contingent of bailiwick officers in the third estate, was especially acute for the lower judiciary. Through the Estates, bailiwick officers had enjoyed not only a deliberative role in provincial affairs but a vital lawmaking role as well. The bailiwick was the level at which the Custom of Normandy and the local customs of the province were collected and redacted in 1583–87 to form the province's primary law code.