In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 An Ecclesiastical Administrator of Justice In his roles as a master of the Norman Court of the Exchequer and a member of the Parlement of Paris, Eudes Rigaud was deeply involved in the administration of justice in both the Norman province and the French kingdom as a whole. The Franciscan archbishop was also invested with seigneurial rights in several areas of his province, including Pontoise, Gaillon, Dieppe, and Louviers. In these areas, he exercised high and low justice. But although Eudes was no stranger to the secular courts, his primary loyalty rested with the ecclesiastical courts of Normandy, over which he was the principal judge. The archiepiscopal court, which was run on a day-to-day basis by the archbishop’s official (officialis), heard all cases involving not only clerics but also other persons under the jurisdiction of the church, such as lay conversi, child oblates, canonesses, beguines, hermits, and brothers and sisters of hospitals.1 There was debate among thirteenth-century canonists over the legal status of other groups, such as penitents, pilgrims, crusaders, widows, orphans, students, and the wives of clerics. Whether cases involving these groups fell within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical or secular courts depended largely on the custom of a particular region.2 In Normandy, many of the customs established during the twelfth century survived the Capetian conquest of 1204. Private collections of customary law, referred to as the Très ancien coutumier, the first part of which was compiled around the time of the conquest (the second part was composed about twenty years later), and the Summa de legibus, the first version of which was composed in the 1250s, together demonstrate the extent to which twelfth-century customs first defined by Henry II and Thomas Becket, and later modified under Richard the Lionheart, were codified with some modifications in the thirteenth century when Normandy was under French rule.3 At Caen in 1258, An Ecclesiastical Administrator of Justice 131 with Eudes sitting as one of the judges, the Norman Exchequer took up the question of jurisdiction over widows. Guillaume de Voisins, the bailli of Rouen, had been holding a certain Emma la Hardie in a royal prison for a debt she had admitted before the vicomte. The court found that the bailli did not have the right to pursue the case because Emma was a widow and widows were under the jurisdiction of the church.4 This ruling confirmed twelfth-century Norman custom, as reflected in the Très ancien coutumier.5 At the same session of the Exchequer, the court settled a dispute between the bishop and the bailli of Coutances over the bailli’s attempts to hear cases involving widows and crusaders.6 Once again, the court sided with the church, ruling that both widows and crusaders fell within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. Disagreements also arose between lay and ecclesiastical courts over the types of cases each court could hear. Would the church retain its authority over cases involving marriage, legitimacy, and wills? What about cases involving arson, rape, and pillage—were they under the purview of ecclesiastical or secular courts? Often there were no simple answers to these questions . According to one Norman custom, for instance, dowries were under the jurisdiction of the church, but in one place the Très ancien coutumier stipulated that only movables that were part of a dowry or marriage portion (maritagium) were within the church’s domain, whereas real property fell within the purview of the royal court.7 Elsewhere, the Très ancien coutumier seemed to shift jurisdiction over dowries from ecclesiastical courts to lay courts, with the justification being that the ecclesiastical appellate system was too slow.8 At the end of the twelfth century, the Norman clergy had tried to argue that all breaches of oaths and faith should be under the purview of ecclesiastical courts, a claim that if successful, would have shifted an enormous number of cases from lay to ecclesiastical courts, since most contracts involved the swearing of an oath or a pledge of fides guaranteeing the obligation contained in the contract. The clergy’s claim, however, was not accepted, and in his inquest of 1205, Philip Augustus confirmed that breaches of pledges of faith and oaths involving lay fiefs or movables were not to be judged by ecclesiastics. The church had jurisdiction over breaches of pledges of faith or oaths only when they involved personages or issues...

Share