15 September 1386

15 September 1386 was the day the Parlement of Paris authorized a trial by combat between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris. After months of inquiry into Marguerite de Carrouges’s accusation, the ruling reopened a case that Count Pierre of Alençon had decided in Le Gris’s favor and transferred its unresolved stakes to a duel. It was an exceptional decision by a court that had repeatedly refused appeals for judicial combat.

The case before the ruling

The decision came more than two months after the Parlement’s inquiry began, and eight months after the alleged crime. By then, the dispute had grown from a conflict heard at a seigneurial court in Normandy into a national controversy. The knight, the squire, their families, and their supporters were known in the royal court, where nobles had taken opposing sides. Each principal was required to provide six noble pledges to guarantee his appearance, drawing a wider circle of powerful men into the proceedings.

The court’s record preserved a detailed summary rather than a transcript of the testimony. Jean de Carrouges, Jacques Le Gris, and Marguerite testified in Norman French; a professional scribe rendered the case into Latin. The surviving manuscript runs to nearly ten densely written folio-sized pages, setting out the knight’s charges, based on his wife’s sworn testimony, and Le Gris’s lengthy defense. Marguerite had been closely and repeatedly questioned. By mid-July she was six months pregnant, and by the September decision she was near the term of her pregnancy; she may not have been present at the hearing.

The decision in court

The Parlement convened on a Saturday in the Grand’ Chambre. With King Charles VI and his uncles away in Flanders, the court was presided over by its first president, Arnold de Corbie. Jean de Carrouges and Le Gris appeared before the assembled judges with their lawyers, supporters, and pledges. After deliberating, the judges had written their decision in French and sealed it with the other case documents in a cloth sack. The rapporteur opened the sack and read the ruling aloud: the court ordered a trial by combat between the two parties.

The ruling did not itself establish that Le Gris was guilty, nor did it reinstate Count Pierre’s verdict as the final word. Instead, it allowed Jean de Carrouges to pursue his appeal through combat. If the appeal had been rejected, the count’s judgment would have stood and Le Gris would have remained acquitted; authorization of the duel put the dispute on a different course, with Le Gris required to defend his innocence in battle.

Why the authorization mattered

The decision was unusual. The Parlement had not authorized a duel in a case of alleged rape since 1354, and it had refused appeals for judicial combat on several occasions in the intervening decades. The court’s choice was especially consequential because the case depended on testimony that lacked corroboration. It left the final judgment to a form of proof whose outcome would be understood as an appeal to God, even as the Parlement itself had to decide whether that procedure should be allowed.

The court may also have been responding to the political difficulty of choosing between two men known to the king and backed by influential supporters. The controversy had divided people in Paris, and the pledges made visible how far the quarrel had spread through noble networks. With the king and his uncles absent and occupied with plans for an invasion of England, authorizing the duel may have seemed a way to avoid a direct ruling on the disputed accusation and leave the matter to combat.

An unresolved judgment

The decision opened the way to the celebrated duel at Saint-Martin’s dueling ground, but its outcome did not end disagreement about the case. Jean Le Coq, Le Gris’s lawyer, recorded arguments for and against his client and ultimately recognized the limits of what could be known. Later accounts diverged: Jean Froissart described broad rejoicing at the duel’s outcome, while Le Coq reported mixed reactions, and the Saint-Denis Chronicle later advanced a story that Marguerite had accused Le Gris mistakenly. That account helped sustain a legend of wrongful accusation and belated confession.

The book’s assessment is more cautious about that legend than many later retellings. Marguerite’s sworn account named both Le Gris and Adam Louvel, a detail that complicates the theory that she deliberately fabricated the charge; the surviving evidence, however, cannot conclusively establish what happened. The ruling of 15 September 1386 resolved the procedural question of whether the appeal could proceed by combat. It did not resolve the underlying historical uncertainty.