Hidden deep in the countryside of France lay early modern Europe's largest bureaucracy: twenty- to thirty-thousand royal bailiwick and seigneurial courts that served more than eighty-five percent of the king's subjects. The crown courts and lords' courts were far more than arenas of litigation, in the modern sense. They had become the nexus of local governance by the middle of the seventeenth century, a rich breeding ground for men who controlled the villages, towns, and bailiwicks of France. Yet even as the centralizing state was reaching its zenith under Louis XIV, the king's largest permanent bureaucracy became increasingly alienated and cut adrift from the crown, many decades before the French Revolution.
In The King's Bench, Zoë Schneider vividly brings to life the teeming world of the local courts, with their magistrates and jailers, townspeople and peasants. Together they contested that vital border where the private world of families and property collided with the public commonwealth. Schneider chronicles the transformation of local governance after the mid-seventeenth century, as judges and their courts became the face of public order in the countryside.
With this richly detailed local study of Normandy in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, Zoë Schneider opens a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France.
Zoë A. Schneider has taught at Georgetown University and with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Reviews
The King's Bench is an outstanding book. It is based on an impressive amount of research in archives that are unwieldy and difficult to use. It makes a major contribution to the debate concerning the functioning of the absolutist state. --H-FRANCE
Details
First Published: 01 Dec 2008
13 Digit ISBN: 9781580462921
Pages: 340
Size: 9 x 6
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series:
Changing Perspectives on Early Modern EuropeSubject:
Modern HistoryBIC Class: HBLL
Details updated on 31 Jul 2010
Contents
- 1 Rex and Lex: The Problem of Legislative Sovereignty
- 2 Howling with the Wolves: The Normans and Their Courts
- 3 Officers and Gentlemen: The Local Judiciary
- 4 Law and Lawyers in the "Empire of Custom"
- 5 The Red Robe and the Black: Common Courts and the State
- 6 Villagers and Townspeople: Civil Litigants
- 7 Uncivil Acts: Crime and Punishment
- 8 Unruly Governors: Functions and Dysfunctions of the Common Courts
- 9 Appendix A: Courts of the Généralité of Rouen
- 10 Appendix B: Jurisdictions of the Ordinary Courts
- 11 Appendix C: Criminal Trial Procedure
- 12 Notes
- 13 Glossary of Legal Terms
- 14 Bibliography
- 15 Index
