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 4 - Law and Lawyers in the “Empire of Custom”
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
Whoever would abolish an old law or establish a new one should present himself to the people with a rope around his neck, so that if the novelty is not approved by all, he can be forthwith strangled.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, “De la Coutume”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.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The King's BenchBailiwick Magistrates and Local Governance in Normandy, 1670–1740, pp. 95 - 123Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008