Sieur Pierre Doré rode into the town of Grainville-la-Teinturière in late December 1699 to hold his first assizes as chief judge of the royal bailiwick. No one in the community would have been surprised to see him don the long black robe as a royal justice in court that day; he was already a prominent figure in local circles. Doré had been a practicing barrister before the bar of Grainville for at least five years, and before that an avocat au Parlement in Rouen. He held a parish office in his home village as treasurer of Bosville, a twenty-minute walk through the woods from the court. Three years earlier, in 1696, the rising lawyer had bought the judicial post of councillor-inquestor-examiner in the tax élection of Caudebec, the principal tax court for the entire pays de Caux. His banner year would be 1699, though. In the space of a few months he took over from the late sieur de Mongrime as the chief bailiwick judge of civil, criminal, and police affairs and ascended yet a third royal bench as president and councillor of the salt tax court (grenier à sel) in the port of Saint-Valèry. To the parishioners in Bosville, Doré was omnipresent: dispensing poor relief and leasing church lands for the parish, sitting in judgment on their direct tax and salt tax disputes, policing the bailiwick as the lieutenant general of the assize court, and for a luckless few, being their landlord into the bargain.