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CHAPTER FOUR BODY AND BONA T he system ofcoercion and sanction as it was practiced in fourteenth-century Marseille was built around the simple principle that whereas people were mobile their property was not. It was easy for a person to escape the law. Outside the walls of the city, the jurisdiction of the courts ended at the fuzzy boundary between the city's territory and the world beyond. Inside the walls, jurisdiction ended abruptly at the threshold separating the secular space of street and plaza from the ecclesiastical space of church and monastery . Criminals and bankrupts made free use of these boundaries, and the system of coercion and force was built around their existence. Sanctuary, exile, and banishment were the norms in this legal world: murderers were expected to run away, and other men as well if circumstances warranted so drastic a decision. Women too, though rarely, and more to escape abusive husbands than the law. From afar, those in exile used their wives, relatives, and procurators to make peace with their enemies or recover as much ofthe estate as possible. Assessed unreasonably large contumacy fines by the criminal court, they negotiated reductions and scraped together the cash to pay off the fine. Once things had quieted down they slipped back into the city and reassembled what they could. Incarceration was available for women and also for men who were too inept to flee in a timely fashion, had no network of support in the countryside, or preferred their chances of resisting the accusations and the torture that might accompany them. Corporal punishments -limbing, ear-cutting, whipping through the streets, and even hanging on occasion-did exist. They were typically used on the unlucky, the unconnected, and the exceptionally wicked: foreigners, vagabonds, and [ r6o] out-and-out ruffians of whom an example was to be made. As many people suggested with some bitterness, torture was also applied to those unfortunate enough to have made enemies of officials of the court. But such punishments were not common. The punishment inflicted on Damiens the regicide, used to such effect by Michel Foucault in the introduction to Discipline and Punish, cannot but leave one with the impression that premodern legal systems routinely punished the body and delighted in so doing.1 Compared to this, the judicial system in fourteenth-century Marseille was decidedly squeamish about the body. Men and women missing fingers, hands, ears, or eyes or marked by scars on the breast, the left side of the head, and on the left arm, shoulder, or leg would not have been an unusual sight in fourteenth-century Marseille, but on the whole these scars were inflicted in face-to-face combat by their right-handed enemies, not by the courts. The body was eminently sanctionable in late medieval Marseille. On the whole, though, it wasn't the state that did the sanctioning. The state-sponsored apparatus of coercion and punishment that formed an element of the penal system of fourteenth-century Marseille, thus, was not principally organized around the body of criminals or debtors. Instead, it was organized around their bona. The Latin word bona, always in the plural , occurs thousands of times in the extant judicial records. It does not translate well into English. Its semantic range starts with goods, property, rights, assets, and inheritance, but extends beyond this to encompass the very source of one's social position and fama. As seen in chapter 2, to say that a man was incapable of managing his bona was to strike at the very roots of his public being. Some of the symbolic weight of one's bona came from the fact that one did not really possess it. Instead, it was attached symbolically to one's family or descent group and served an important economic role. Most people, especially women and nobles, relied on inherited bona to supplement what they could make from trade, artisanal production, retailing , or labor, and their community standing depended on this source of wealth. The symbolism was powerful and, in the form of allusions, surfaces often in the records. To seize bona, in this world, was not only to collect a criminal fine or recover a debt. It was to strike at the very roots of an adversary 's community standing and that of his or her descendants and potential heirs. Bona were the ready objects of penal fines and civil pursuits because they were not very portable. One's bona consisted of one's houses...

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