Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Rex and Lex: The Problem of Legislative Sovereignty
- Chapter 2 Howling with the Wolves: The Normans and Their Courts
- Chapter 3 Officers and Gentlemen: The Local Judiciary
- Chapter 4 Law and Lawyers in the “Empire of Custom”
- Chapter 5 The Red Robe and the Black: Common Courts and the State
- Chapter 6 Villagers and Townspeople: Civil Litigants
- Chapter 7 Uncivil Acts: Crime and Punishment
- Chapter 8 Unruly Governors: Functions and Dysfunctions of the Common Courts
- Appendix A Courts of the Généraliteéof Rouen
- Appendix B Jurisdictions of the Ordinary Courts
- Appendix C Criminal Trial Procedure
- Notes
- Glossary of Legal Terms
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Rex and Lex: The Problem of Legislative Sovereignty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Rex and Lex: The Problem of Legislative Sovereignty
- Chapter 2 Howling with the Wolves: The Normans and Their Courts
- Chapter 3 Officers and Gentlemen: The Local Judiciary
- Chapter 4 Law and Lawyers in the “Empire of Custom”
- Chapter 5 The Red Robe and the Black: Common Courts and the State
- Chapter 6 Villagers and Townspeople: Civil Litigants
- Chapter 7 Uncivil Acts: Crime and Punishment
- Chapter 8 Unruly Governors: Functions and Dysfunctions of the Common Courts
- Appendix A Courts of the Généraliteéof Rouen
- Appendix B Jurisdictions of the Ordinary Courts
- Appendix C Criminal Trial Procedure
- Notes
- Glossary of Legal Terms
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Nestled densely in the countryside of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France lay the largest permanent bureaucracy in Europe: twenty to thirty thousand royal bailiwick and seigneurial benches, dispensing justice to more than 85 percent of the French population. The ordinary crown courts and lords' courts were far more than arenas of litigation in the modern sense. They had gradually become the nexus of local governance by the middle of the seventeenth century, a rich breeding ground for men who both administered and governed the villages and towns. The judges of the common courts were the front line of the French state. They kept the king's peace in thousands of parishes, on that vital border where the public commonwealth met the private realm of families. Yet from their court benches, these same magistrates and officers confidently controlled the law in ways which often expressed a startling independence from royal aims. The baron de Montesquieu put his finger on the central paradox of the French tribunals in his Persian Letters. They were “the sacred treasure of the Nation,” he wrote, “and the sole one of which the sovereign is not the master.”
To understand this paradox of sovereignty, we need to look in a place that had long lain neglected: the bailiwicks of France, with their local worlds of judges and lawyers, jailers and clerks, and the ordinary men and women who daily beat a path to the assize courts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The King's BenchBailiwick Magistrates and Local Governance in Normandy, 1670–1740, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008