Maso and his companions pull down the judge’s breeches

Maso and his companions pull down the judge’s breeches in a calculated courtroom prank that converts a judge’s awkward appearance into a public challenge to the quality of the officials sent to Florence. By distracting Messer Niccola da San Lepidio with a fabricated dispute, Maso, Ribi, and Matteuzzo make the judicial bench itself part of the trick: while the judge leans forward to hear their complaints, Matteuzzo reaches through broken boards and pulls down his breeches. The laughter is directed not only at the exposed judge but at the authorities who appointed him.

The visiting judges and the target

Filostrato introduces the episode as a tale of Maso del Saggio and two companions, prompted by an earlier mention of Maso. The story begins with the arrival in Florence of governors from the Marches of Ancona. Its narrator characterizes these officials as mean-spirited and miserly, and says that the judges and notaries they bring seem more suited to manual trades than to legal study. That disparaging generalization establishes the satire’s target: an appointment system that, in the narrator’s view, has supplied the city with poor representatives of justice.

Among the incoming judges is Messer Niccola da San Lepidio, assigned with others to hear criminal cases. Maso sees him at court and studies his appearance. The judge wears a miniver bonnet blackened with smoke and grease, a small inkhorn at his girdle, and a gown longer than his mantle. Most striking to Maso are his breeches: because his clothes gape in front from tightness, their backside hangs halfway down his legs. The episode makes this visible wardrobe failure the comic image around which its larger criticism gathers.

A plan built around the courtroom

Maso does not act alone. He finds Ribi and Matteuzzo, whom the story presents as companions of a similarly unruly humor, and brings them to the courthouse to see the judge. From near the platform they notice two practical weaknesses: someone can pass beneath it, and the boards under the judge’s feet are broken enough to admit a hand and arm. The prank depends on those specific features of the room, not merely on the judge’s conspicuous clothing.

The three agree on what each will do and return the next morning, when the court is crowded. Matteuzzo slips beneath the bench and positions himself directly under the judge. Above him, Maso and Ribi take up positions on either side of Messer Niccola. The crowd and the bustle of a hearing provide cover, while the companions’ coordinated roles turn a fleeting visual joke into a timed operation.

The distraction and the exposure

Maso and Ribi seize the judge’s gown and present competing complaints. Maso claims that another man has stolen his saddle-bags and mentions having seen the supposed thief getting them resoled. Ribi interrupts with a counter-accusation: he says the saddle-bags belong to him and claims that Maso has instead come to complain about a pair of boots. The details are deliberately confused and petty. Their overlapping claims compel the judge to rise and lean toward them, trying to make sense of the dispute.

That movement gives Matteuzzo his opportunity. Reaching through the crack between the boards, he grabs the judge’s breeches by the seat and tugs. Messer Niccola is lean, and the garment comes down at once. The judge tries to sit and draw his skirts over himself, but Maso and Ribi keep hold of his clothes and continue demanding that he hear them. Their feigned grievance thus prolongs the exposure: the judge cannot immediately cover himself, and everyone in the courtroom sees what has happened.

Matteuzzo releases the breeches, emerges from beneath the platform, and escapes unseen. Maso and Ribi then break off the performance and leave in opposite directions. Their parting remarks continue the pretense that the hearing concerned saddle-bags and boots, even as the judge pulls up his breeches in full view of the court. The absurd gap between the ostensible legal dispute and the humiliation unfolding before the audience is the scene’s central comic mechanism.

The rebuke and its limits

Once the judge understands what occurred, he swears and asks whether it is customary in Florence to pull down judges’ breeches while they sit on the bench. The Provost makes a great stir when he hears of the incident. The judge’s question treats the prank as an affront to judicial dignity; the explanation offered to the Provost recasts it as a message about the dignity of the office itself. The Florentines, he is told, understood that the visiting governor had brought them shabby fellows in place of proper judges, and had made those appointments cheaper by treating their representatives accordingly.

The episode ends without a reported prosecution or formal punishment: the Provost’s associates advise him to hold his peace, and the matter goes no farther for the time being. That limited aftermath preserves the story’s pointedness. The prank publicly humiliates an individual judge, but its stated target is the appointment that placed him there; the authorities’ response is not to vindicate him through a recorded judgment, but to let the embarrassment subside. Within Filostrato’s comic tale, the broken bench, the judge’s ill-fitting clothes, and the companions’ sham complaint combine to expose the weakness of official authority through the very spectacle it would ordinarily control.