of a court that at least competing jurisdictions and some unhappy members of the laity considered to be overactive and overly punitive in its handling of the laity.
Sources that date to the five years in which Jean Braque served as bishop of Troyes (1370–75) offer both evidence that suggests an active—and perhaps even reforming—bishop and also evidence of an active officiality. During those five years, Braque issued synodal statutes and either went on parish visits in the diocese or required others to do so, two possible signs of a resident and active bishop, one interested in reforming morals in his diocese.146 Secular jurisdiction in Troyes at that time included at the highest level the Grands Jours de Troyes, a deputation of the Paris Parlement. In 1371 this body reproached Jean Braque for “l’immixion de son official dans les affaires purement temporelles et seculieres,” an accusation that has a good deal of resemblance to the conflict between officials of the king and those of the bishop between 1458 and 1462.147
That Braque was reprimanded by the Grands Jours de Troyes certainly suggests that the Troyes officiality may at least have had moments of regulation of lay morals prior to the fifteenth century. Théophile Boutiot, a nineteenth-century archivist and historian of Champagne and its institutions, goes so far as to describe Braque as continuing the traditions of his predecessors in pushing his jurisdiction into matters that secular officials claimed as fully secular. This description, however, Boutiot does not support with any examples.
To be sure, the activity of Jean Braque and his official may have had more in common with the court activity of fifteenth-century Rouen or Paris concerning marriage and morals, which is to say, they might have been more inclined to collect fines than to subject an offender to public punishment or imprisonment. Nonetheless, we have another example that suggests that the officiality of Troyes made use of its prison to punish laity, if for reasons unknown to us, prior to the fifteenth century. In 1391 the Grands Jours considered a defamation suit brought by Pierre d’Arcis, then bishop of Troyes, and his official. The bishop accused the bailiff of Rameru and two women, the widow and the mother of a man who had died in the official’s prison, of calumny against the bishop and his official. They had allegedly said that the bishop and his official had left the man, one Jean Hubert, to die in their prison.148 The bishop and the official won their case, but for our purposes, we know at least that the bishop made use of his prison and that the prisoners included at least one member of the laity. All this, of course, is only suggestive, but it is at the very least just that, and so prior prosecution of bigamy in Troyes should certainly remain in the realm of the possible, if not quite the probable.
If we can suspend any remaining disbelief until further research addresses these questions, if we focus instead on working with the scholarship and sources as they stand, certainly northern France remains unique in its efforts to regulate marriage in the fifteenth century. These efforts focused particularly on the prevention and prosecution of bigamous marriage. Among the ecclesiastical courts of Western Christendom, Troyes stands apart above all in the repeated subjection of male bigamists to public punishment and imprisonment, a special combination of ecclesiastical punishments usually reserved for male clergy who had most seriously violated their religious obligations, notably the ban on shedding blood.
With this background in law, theology, and custom in hand, having stretched also to the limits that the surviving sources and current scholarship allow, we can now turn, for the remainder of this chapter and the chapters that follow, to a detailed study of the crisis of marriage in late medieval Troyes. As we have seen, men and women who sought confirmation of their remarriages at the papal penitentiary were not permitted to remain married to a second spouse; those who asked permission from the pope were refused. However, sometimes spouses in southern Germany found more sympathetic officials, and even in northern France and Cambrai exceptions were made for women married to long-absent spouses. Most often, people probably remarried much more quietly, without asking a judicial officer to interfere. A crisis emerged only when officials not only refused to tolerate more quiet acts of bigamy but also dissolved or suspended any suspect marriages and made spectacular examples of some of the male offenders found to be bigamous. Crises only emerged when and where the laws were upheld in their strictest sense. Such a crisis is found in fifteenth-century Troyes.
The sources that lie at the heart of this inquiry belong to the Archives Départmentales de l’Aube, in the city of Troyes, ancient capital of the Champagne region. These fifteenth-century registers are among the earliest surviving records of the bishop of Troyes’ judicial court, known as an officiality in honor of its judge, the official, who held the delegated judicial powers of the bishop. In northern France, ecclesiastical court procedure made use of a figure much less present elsewhere, the promotor, a sort of public prosecutor acting on behalf of the court.149 A promotor could bring cases before the court at the court’s own initiative, ex officio, without any outside accusation. The active use of these promotors to bring “office” cases against alleged offenders gave northern French and Burgundian officialities a distinctly different character than the relatively more litigant friendly courts of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England or Italy, and probably Spanish and German courts as well.150
The surviving records of the medieval officiality of Troyes can be divided into four main categories. First we have registers involving testaments, goods, and legal separations. Only one such register survives, covering the period of the last decade of the fourteenth century. For the fifteenth century we have two registers of sentences, warnings, and agreements called assecurationes (asseurements in French). We also have fifteen registers covering the daily business of the court, called “cause registers.” These cause registers begin in 1455 and continue with few interruptions into the sixteenth century, for which many more registers survive. We also have several registers describing fines collected by the officiality, from the early decades of the fifteenth century and again from midcentury. Most of these entries offer only the name of an individual and the sum paid, but some of the earliest registers also describe the offense individuals were accused of having committed. This book is based largely upon extensive analysis of four of the earliest surviving registers: the two registers of sentences and other matters, G4171 (1423–76) and G4172 (1426–47), and the two earliest cause registers, G4173 (1455) and G4174 (1456). I also draw upon the registers of fines, a number of additional cause registers, and various other records kept by the officiality and by the bishop of Troyes.
Reading the register of sentences, one is overwhelmed first by the scrawled handwriting, seemingly indecipherable—and perhaps intentionally so—and then by the sheer number of cases instigated by this court. Hundreds of men and women suspected of illegal relationships are ordered to quit each other’s company, to avoid causing further scandal. In some cases, they are fined for illegal cohabitation, for fornication, for adultery, or for concubinage. In the course of the century couples faced warnings, orders, fines, detention in prison, and even excommunication and terms of imprisonment if they did not separate. The officiality made a considerable effort, it seems, to summon and fine anyone in the diocese suspected of partaking in a nonmarital male-female relationship that caused scandal.
In some cases, those accused of adulterous relationships faced additional orders to return to their spouses and resume married life, on penalty of excommunication, imprisonment, and heavy fines. These orders, however, were issued rarely, in perhaps only a dozen cases over the course of the century. The implications of the difference in numbers between the few thousands of men, women, and couples ordered to abandon an illicit relationship and the very few ordered to resume married life merit further study. It seems at least possible that informal separation was tolerated in Troyes, as it seems to have been in so many other places in Christian Europe, as long as neither husband nor wife went on to engage in an extramarital relationship, which did, by contrast, seem to draw the attention and energy of the court.
In addition to policing sex and marriage, the court often served as a venue for redress of violence or for dispute resolution. We find case after case of alleged violent attack, men fighting men and women, women fighting women and men, laymen and women fighting with clergy, and clergy fighting with all manner of persons. Additionally,
