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A NOTE ON USAGE The vernacular language of late medieval Marseille was a form of Proven~al that incorporated a number of loan words from Latin and French. Latin was the most common language of record, though notaries of the court sometimes chose to leave insults and certain phrases in witness testimony in the vernacular. Wherever possible, I have translated names from Latin into their Proven~al equivalent. Thus, a man known as Johannes in Latin records and as Jean in modem French was known as Johan in Marseille , the form I have used throughout this book. Surnames are more diverse than forenames, and there are some surnames for which I have been unable to find a Proven~al equivalent; these I have left in Latin. Married women normally took their husbands' surnames though in a feminized form, and I have followed this convention in naming women. To take an example , a woman namedJohana who was married to a man with the surname Robaut will appear as Johana Robauda in this book. All dates in this book are given in the new style, with the new year beginning on 1 January rather than 25 March. Thus, a case whose date is given in this book as "2o March 1343" will be dated "2o March 1342" in the record. For reasons discussed in the appendix, judicial registers were rarely paginated , and the material nature of the record makes it difficult to note the folio of a quotation or passage with much accuracy. The notaries' habit of sewing elements of the record into the register, often sheets or quires of paper with very different trim sizes, means that there can be no modem consensus about the foliation of a given register. Dates are not particularly helpful either, for although registers consist of a series of cases usually ordered by the date of initiation, the cases themselves internally proceed in rough (though not exact) chronological order. As a result, references to a given date will occur at various intervals throughout a given register. Dates are especially unhelpful in appellate cases, for the record of a given appeal includes transcripts of prior cases and therefore jumps around in time a [xi l great deal. For these reasons, the citation style consists of the foliation and date on which a given case was initiated along with the folio on which the specific reference appears. Thus, to find folio n8r in the following reference -ADBR 3B 86r, fol. n8r, case opened 5 May r4o8 on fol. 69r-one should flip through register 3B 86r until one finds a case initiated on 5 May r4o8 that is on or near fol. 69r. Counting approximately forty-nine more folios will then get the reader in the vicinity ofwhat I call folio n8r. The problem arising from the almost inevitable divergence in opinion about foliation is somewhat lessened by counting folios from the beginning of the trial itself . In early fourteenth-century Marseille, the standard unit of currency was the royal pound, at twenty shillings per pound and twelve pennies per shilling (see Henri Rolland, Monnaies des comtes de Provence, Xlle-XVe s. Histoire monitaire, iconomique, corporative. Description raisonnie [Paris, r956]). Most sums were expressed in this currency, though the florin was infiltrating the local economy by the mid to late fourteenth century. The value of the florin was nominally fixed at thirty-two shillings though notarial records note that the exchange rate fluctuated considerably over the course of the century. In the places where I have made arguments based on the cost oflitigation I have not tried to adjust either for this fluctuating exchange rate or for inflation: references in the sources themselves are generally too spotty and uncertain to warrant such care. Other coins, such as silver marks, were also in circulation. [xii ] A Note on Usage THE CONSUMPTION OF JUSTICE ...

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