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CHAPTER FIVE THE PUBLIC ARCHIVE J udges of Marseille's court of inquest went to great lengths to uncover the facts in cases of homicide and serious assault. They conducted preliminary interviews in an effort to identify the likely suspect, fingered the blades used, and took the depositions of expert medical witnesses. The facts in place, judges then embedded them in a convincing storyline: "Mathea Sadaroni, a Catalan of Barcelona, was a friend ofMaya de Anycellis, and she lived with her in the house ofDruda de Lingris, one of the suspects, which is located in the Prostitutes quarter. There she shared a room with Maya, lying in the same bed, drinking and eating and sleeping with her by day and night." So begins one sad tale of treachery culminating in the murder of Mathea at the hands of two male friends oftheirs in a dispute over clothing.' Other stories were just as artful. Sworn witnesses reaffirmed under oath what they had already suggested informally, and judges subsequently mulled over the resulting transcripts , annotating the margins copiously and confirming, or at times altering , the preliminary narrative of events. But it was a curious thing to do, all this fact-finding. The public nature of virtually all homicides and assaults in fourteenth-century Marseille ensured the prior notoriety of all killers and assailants, a notoriety sealed by their very visible flight into sanctuary. Asked to say whether Peire Guibert was guilty of the 1355 killing of]acme Bertran, one witness, a little surprised, replied , "It is common knowledge in Marseille that the sub-viguier is in the campanile of that church," perhaps pointing to the spire of St. Antoine's, 1 ADBR 3B 96, fol. nr-v, case opened n June 1380 on fol. wr. [ 207] which may have been visible from the court space.2 Peire's guilt, in short, was already manifest. The inquest procedure merely took the common fund of vernacular knowledge and burnished it with the scientific authority afforded by medicine, legal terminology, and a formal narrative. But the factfinding was useless anyway because killers were almost always condemned for contumacy, not for homicide. Facts and stories were ancillary to this charge, which was wholly and easily proven simply by the absence of the killer. Reading through the inquest into the murder of Guilhem Tomas, it is hard to escape the impression that the fact-finding procedures that were so prominent a feature of this case were driven less by a desire of the judges to know the truth than by a desire of the victim's kin to blacken and besmear the name of their common enemy, Guilhem de Belavila. From its inception in the twelfth century, Roman-canon law developed a sophisticated science of the fact, supposedly designed to root out hard-toknow facts. But in the vast majority ofcases brought before Marseille's court of inquest, truth wasn't really a problem: the fanciful "hard cases" discussed in the law schools were simply irrelevant to the ordinary practice of justice in a city such as Marseille, where personal conflict remained a largely public affair.3 Facts were similarly ancillary in the majority of civil trials. As noted earlier, most civil court cases ended in arbitration or simply fizzled out for one reason or another. In the case of arbitration, the threat of a sentence based on facts may well have pushed obstreperous litigants into more conciliatory postures. This surely happened in some cases. But if this were a commonplace one would expect to find a close correlation between the conclusion of the proof phase and the move to arbitration. There is no such correlation. Most cases never got to the proof phase at all, and either fizzled out or moved to arbitration well before facts were officially introduced into a case, suggesting that arbitration was not motivated by the need to minimize the damage posed by damning facts. Finally, many cases that did end in a ruling turned not on the facts of the dispute but rather on rulings over exceptions . An exception does not deny the relevance of facts to trial procedures . Like the ordeal, what the posing ofan exception does is to change the facts under dispute. The issue becomes not one of "Did the defendant repay 2 ADBR 3B 819, fol. 53r, case opened 28 May 1355 on fol. 5or. 3 In his Treatise on Fama, the obscure thirteenth-century legal scholar Thomas de Piperata did address the probative value of publicity...

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