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APPENDIX THE NATURE AND FORMAT OF THE RECORD T he archives ofthe city ofMarseille hold a remarkable series of judicial registers from the city's secular courts during the later middle ages. Though most of the original registers have perished, enough have survived for us to be able to extrapolate the original size ofcourt caseloads. Over the course of the fourteenth century, between thirteen and twenty thousand suits were formally initiated in the local civil courts, and a great number of simpler requests involving minor debts, disputed successions, and related issues, possibly as many as eighty thousand over the course of the century, were brought to the attention ofthe judges. The criminal court undertook as many as fifty thousand inquests and the appellate courts of Marseille heard around a thousand appeals. Notaries of the court kept transcripts of all these proceedings bound in large registers, and required a steady supply of ink, quill pens, parchment, string for binding, and above all paper. The quantity of paper consumed by the courts, as a measure of judicial activity in fourteenth-century Marseille, was immense. Around the middle of the fourteenth century, notaries of the secular courts were generating around forty-five hundred pages of documentation per year. All judicial orders , summons, and proclamations existed in duplicate, since messengers had to carry them to their destination, and most suits and inquests required or generated enormous quantities of loose paper-notarial instruments, citations , summons, judicial orders, proclamations, juristic advice, witness depositions, and other acts, all of which had to be delivered, on request, to litigants and defendants. All this autonomously generated paper must be reckoned into the total and it is reasonable to suggest that it added as much [ 247 1 again to the registered material, bringing the total to nine thousand pages per year. The quantity ofdocumentation produced for the law courts of late medieval Marseille may have been inferior, on a per capita basis, to that of comparable modern bureaucracies, let alone to late medieval Florence or England and other precociously centralized European jurisdictions. Still, close to a million pages of documentation was generated over the space of one hundred years by the judicial bureaucracy of just one late medieval political jurisdiction, and a tiny one at that, about one three-thousandth of the population of western Europe in 1300. Even so speculative an estimate as this raises many questions, not the least of which is the symbiotic relationship between the paper revolution of the later middle ages on the one hand and judicial and archival habits on the other. As rule of thumb, the desire to archive is as much a function of the cost and convenience of storage media as it is one of perceived administrative needs. The rapidly decreasing costs of paper freed notaries to record the minutiae of court cases in a way that would have been fiscally irresponsible in earlier medieval Europe, thereby adding a whole new layer to the rapidly evolving legal environment of late medieval Europe. The massive quantities of court records from medieval Marseille and other jurisdictions result from this change. Little of this original richness, of course, has survived. With several important exceptions, England and Florence foremost among them, the European capacity to generate records generally outstripped the techniques, the will, or the luck to preserve them from the ravages of time and political and natural disasters. The vast losses from the period suggest that the ability to preserve an archive in later centuries-and the investment necessary to do so-is an aspect of governmentality that does not necessarily come easily to states or societies. In Marseille, for example, various clues show that elements of the public record were stored in private hands or semipublic institutions rather than in a secure municipal archive. Most notarial casebooks from medieval Marseille remained in the possession of notarial offices until the early twentieth century. Marseille's judicial registers, remarkably, did not find their way into the archives until the 195os.1 The losses, accordingly, have been enormous. The modern archives of the city of Marseille retain the more-or-less complete records of about three thousand civil cases from the years between 1264 and 1423, and synopses ofanother two or three thousand criminal cases have also survived. Survival of particular series has been sporadic at best. Eight registers recording fines collected from criminal sentences have survived, and all but one ofthese registers are from the fifteenth 1 Gerard Giordanengo, personal communication, Dec. 2001. [ 248 ] Appendix...

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