In the year 1386, in front of the abbey of Saint
Martin in Paris, two iron-cladded knights fought in one of the last judicial duels held in France.
Under the eyes of the King of France, the grandest nobles of the Realm, and the citizens of Paris,
Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris fought to determine if the latter had raped Marguerite, wife
of de Carrouges, or if the couple had slandered Le Gris. The practice of trial by combat, or
judicial battle, is one of the more romanticized customs of medieval Europe, with knights fighting
to the death for their innocence; but where does it come from and how did it take place, will
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of history documentaries anytime, anywhere! The trial by combat is a judicial practice that
took place, particularly in Medieval Europe. It could occur in a civil or penal trial, where the
allegations of the accusers were hard to be proven or where testimonies could not be trusted or
were lacking, and so statements or evidence could not be trusted. To resolve this problem
and to determine if the defendant was guilty, the two sides could agree on a judicial battle, a
duel between the two parties that was sanctioned by the judge. The idea was that God would look
favourably on whoever was in the right and would thus favour that party, and grant a victory in
a duel that would be enough proof for the trial. This is how they generally took place, but of
course, elements of it could differ in various periods and places. To clear up any confusion,
this practice was different from a duel of honour, the classic duel between two
men fighting for their honour, or the splendid duel to exercise
that took place at tournaments, to show off one's strength and valour, both
of which we will not cover in this video. The origins of the trial by combat can likely
be traced back to Germanic tribal rules, as Roman sources mention that the Germanic people
on their borders would often settle disputes with a show of force and arms. We also have testimonies
of Goths and Scandinavian peoples partaking in these duels. To strengthen this thesis, no
example of this norm can be found in Roman law or in other European, North African, or Middle
Eastern legislations, from where they might have been influenced. This is not to say that trials by
ordeals were exclusive to the old Germanic people: the ordeal, or iudicium dei, was a proceeding
where a deity was called to manifest its will in a controversial fact and was present in many
different cultures: it combined the divine, the moral and the judicial, which was
perceived as indistinguishable at the time. The Germanic people had many other examples
of ordeals, such as the ordeals by fire, by heated metal, or by water, where the outcome
of a test determined the innocence of a person, but the duel was peculiar to them.
The first legal code that mentions the judicial duel is the Lex Burgundionum: the laws
had been enacted in the year 501 by Gundobad, King of Burgundy, who was probably influenced by
the Visigoth’s code of laws now lost to us. The Burgundian had been an important figure
in the last years of the Roman Empire where he had been patrician, de facto king, and
emperor-maker in Rome. After his father died he had returned to his people who had settled
the lands of modern-day Savoy and ruled them. During his reign he enacted the customs and
law for both his Germanic and Roman subjects, drawing elements from both. The Lex
Burgundionum influenced nearly all the other Germanic law codes, and so the judicial
duel was codified in the rest of the continent. It seems that the purpose of its codification
was to speed up trials and to avoid perjury, in a time where the old imperial bureaucracy in Gaul
was crumbling, and also to limit the power of the Christian clergy who had quite a lot of power in
the judicial system as it had been based on oaths. The Church, in fact, would in all its history
have a controversial relationship with the duels, as they took from elements of the old
pagan traditions, but on other hand, it was also a show of strong faith, and most
of the times the duel was preceded by mass, oaths sworn on relics and nights spent in Church.
One of the first recorded examples we have can be found in a testimony of the Frankish
chronicler Fredegar: the Lombard queen Gundeberga, daughter of Agilulf and Theodelinda, had
married the duke Arioald making him king. During their reign, around the year 624, she
refused the advances of the courtier Adalulf. To cover himself, knowing that his life
was in peril after his reckless attempt, Adalulf went to king Arioald and accused
the queen of conspiring against him, to remove him and to kill him. Arioald believed
him and imprisoned his wife in a castle, but an embassy of the Franks came to inquire of the
situation and proposed that the truthfulness of the claim be tested in a judicial duel. The king
accepted and ordered Adalulf to participate, while a certain Pitton volunteered for the queen as
her champion. In the clash, Adalulf was slain and thus the innocence of Gundeberga was proven, and
she was freed after three years of imprisonment. In Lombard Italy, the practice would slowly
fall out in favour as the old Roman system of testimonies and documents became the preferred
method since the royal power preferred this system. However, the conquest of northern Italy
by the Franks and later the Ottonid Saxons, where the judicial duel was still v ery present,
consolidated it again in the region. In England, it seems that it was brought in by the Normans,
as the Anglo Saxons had lost the custom. It was limited in origin to only the free men
in society, which with the evolution of feudal society in Europe meant that only the men who
bared arms, the aristocrats, would participate, and thus by the twelfth century the nobility
had a monopoly over the practice, that had also been sanctioned by the law in many kingdoms.
However, the duel became also quite popular among the free city-states of Italy, the Comuni,
where richer members of society also partook. How the duel functioned depended on the
customs of where and when it took place, but some elements of the duel could include
the requirements of the parties to pay for the organization and the staff of the event, while
the judges had to be nobles or city consuls. Sometimes the charges that could
be disputed in a trial by combat were limited by local laws, and it could
require the approval of a judge to take place. In France, it was necessary that the accuser
declared that there was no other way to prove the charge, and then he had to throw a symbolic
object on the ground, often a glove or a gauntlet, that had to be picked up by the opponent to accept
the duel. Some places, like Bologna in Italy, hired professional champions that had to duel,
where the participant would not know for what they fought for. Before the battle religious
ceremonies took place and oaths were taken, often in front of the king or his representative,
while the weapons used and the use of horses was decided by the judge. The duels could take more
than a day if the participant had the stamina and the outright death during the duel was
rare, as one usually lost or surrendered by exiting the fence delimiting the battlegrounds,
or by touching the ground with one’s head. By the twelfth century, the judicial duel began
to fall out in favour of a more robust legal system that characterized the first attempts
of centralization of power by the monarchs. Emperor Frederick the Second condemned the duels
and limited them to only a few exceptions, such as in case of death by poison or of lese-majesty
- insult of the sovereign. It was also criticized and disciplined by the French kings Louis the
Ninth and Philip the Fourth, and by the Castillian King Alfonso the Tenth, though not banned as
there was still strong popular support for it. It is in the following century that the most
scathing critiques of the duels emerged, as the jurists of the newly founded European
universities examined them, on a basis of Roman and canonical law. The most important
work on the subject was the Summula de pugna by Roffredo Beneventano, where both the juridical
side and the customary side were looked at. The opposition on the matter was even stronger
in the Church, after having been more lenient in the early middle ages: many clerical
scholars outright condemned the practice, as did both Pope Nicholas the First and Gregory
the Ninth who also forbade clergymen to partake and did not allow men who had participated
to be barred from religious functions unless given permission to by the local bishop. Their
reasoning was that it was an affront to God, as the parties basically demanded a miracle
from God, and if one partook only because he was confident in his martial abilities then the
religious element of the trial lost its meaning. One of the last trials by combat that took place
in the Kingdom of France has become the stuff of legends for its protagonist and charges: in
the second half of the fourteenth century, the knight Jean de Carrouges and the squire
Jacques Le Gris were vassals to the count of Perche and duke of Alencon, Peter of Valois. They
had been friends in their youths and were both highly regarded in their liege’s household, but
as they grew up friction arose between the two. Carrouges was jealous of his friend who was
favoured over him at the court in Argentan: after the death of his first wife and son,
he went to fight in the Hundred Years War. At his return, he married Marguerite de
Thibouville, a daughter of a Norman knight, but more importantly claimant to estates
that had been given to Jacques Le Gris, exacerbating their relationship even more and
losing the favour of his liege. In winter 1386, after having campaigned in Scotland, de
Carrouges went to Paris to settle some affairs. While he was away, Jacques le Gris visited his
castle on the 18th of January: it seems that their relationship had improved in the previous year
and since le Gris was an important servant of the duke, he was welcomed by Marguerite. While showing
him the castle alone, le Gris locked themselves into a room and professed his love for her, mixing
promises of gifts and harassments. As Marguerite refused the advances, Le Gris allegedly raped her.
She kept silent until the return of her husband, where she broke and recounted the events: enraged,
but not blaming his wife, de Carrouges took his adversary to court, but as Duke Peter was the
judge of the case, he dismissed the claims against his favourite, as the testimony of a woman
was not enough evidence for any conviction. The couple, who had not attended the trial as they
already knew the outcome, appealed to the King in Paris, hoping for a fairer trial. Since the
word of a woman was weak evidence for the time, de Carrouges challenged le Gris to a judicial
duel to let God determine who was in the right. Although by the time the duels were rare,
the court in Paris was fascinated by such an occurrence and let the appeal begin in the
Parliament of Paris in the summer. Here once again the accusations and the request for a duel were
made, with both men and their entourages present: witnesses were called on both sides, but
the court could not reach a final verdict so the judicial duel was allowed to
take place, as both parties accepted it. It would take place on the 29th of December
1386, after having been postponed for a month so the King could be present: the battleground was
set up at the abbey of Saint Martin in Paris, and thousands of Parisian citizens and other people
coming from far away attended as an audience, not to mention the king himself, his family and
many other nobles of the realm. Both men were fully armed and on horseback: at the given signal
they charged against each other a few times: after an initial blow dealt by Le Gris’ lance to his
opponent's thigh, they dismounted and continued the combat on foot. Both excellent men at arms,
they continued their duel until de Carrouges overcame la Gris and pinned him to the ground: he
asked for his surrender, which Le Gris refused. With his opponent not yielding, de Carrouges
trusted his sword through Le Gris’ chest, killing him and winning the judicial duel. He thus
obtained vindication for the rape of his wife, who was also risking her life in the duel as she
would have been burnt at the stake if her husband lost. The victor approached the king and was
rewarded with monetary compensation and a position among the royal guards, where he carried out his
duty with distinction until his death in 1396. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
trial by combat definitely lost its prominence: it’s hard to pinpoint exactly
the last occurrence of a duel, but in England and in Italy, we have our last
mentions on the topic in that period, while it survived another century in Scotland and Ireland.
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