To a visitor in 1670, riding north across the great sweep of plains that angled down to the Atlantic Ocean in Normandy, the pays de Caux would have looked aptly like a golden loaf of bread rising out of the English Channel. Cut across the crown with deep river valleys that drained into the ports of Rouen, Dieppe, and a half dozen other towns, the district looked like the rich, rural cereal producer that it was. But the countryside surrounding the old Roman towns hid myriad complexities by the late seventeenth century. Fields of blue flax now covered the downs in spring, making it one of the most intensively protoindustrialized regions of France. Weavers, spinners, dyers, and cloth merchants were almost as common a sight in town and countryside as those farming wheat and rye. For a close observer, change would have been just as marked in the streets of the towns and villages. The crown of the loaf had become the administrative center of gravity for the central and northern Caux, a place where local self-governance had firmly taken root (see map 1).

This vibrant Cauchois economy and its social life formed the subsoil for its judicial institutions. The villages and towns of the district were governed through several hundred king's and lords' offices, most in the ordinary royal bailiwick and seigneurial courts.