A week before the Christmas feast of 1728, Judge Jean Rousselet, in his black robes, took the bench at the Croix Rouge tavern, opening the year's last royal assizes in the town. The tavern was a warmly familiar setting for the villagers and townspeople assembled at the audience. Rousselet's court had circulated from inn to inn in Grainville-la-Teinturière for more than two decades, after his chambers were flooded by the Durdent River in the winter of 1703. Royal edicts and arrêts repeatedly forbade holding court in taverns, but finding the village publican a more congenial landlord than the king, some Norman judges cheerfully violated the rule. Under the sign of the Three Merchants, the Red Cross, or the Image of Saint Francis in Grain-ville-la-Teinturière, the tavern was a natural crossroads where state and local justice merged.

Rousselet's assizes remind us that justice was a far more fluid and community-based practice in the early modern world than in our own. Local judges relied less on written law and considerably more on equity, case precedent, and community traditions than do modern courts.