Brittany

Brittany is presented as a place where royal authority faced resistance and where legal custom outlasted the reach of the central courts. It enters the narrative when the Duke of Brittany refused to surrender a fugitive accused of attacking the constable of France, drawing Charles VI’s army into a campaign that included Jean de Carrouges. The region also marks the limits of the Parlement of Paris’s authority: judicial duels continued in Brittany after that court stopped authorizing them.

A Political Refuge

In 1392, Pierre de Craon, a disgraced noble banished from the royal court the previous year, attempted to kill Olivier de Clisson, the constable of France. Craon blamed Clisson for his exile. He attacked Clisson at night in the streets of Paris with mounted men-at-arms, knocking him from his horse with a sword blow and leaving him for dead. Clisson survived and identified his assailant.

Craon then fled to the protection of the Duke of Brittany. The duke’s refusal to hand him over turned the attack into a confrontation between the king and a regional ruler: Charles VI raised an army to subdue the duke and bring Craon to justice. Brittany’s significance here is political rather than scenic. It serves as the destination of a fugitive and the seat of a protection that the king was prepared to challenge by force.

The Royal Campaign of 1392

Jean de Carrouges joined the king’s retinue as it rode toward Brittany in the summer of 1392. Newly appointed a chevalier d’honneur, Carrouges travelled with ten squires in his own entourage. His presence connects the campaign to his altered position at court: the knight who had once struggled for recognition in Count Pierre’s service now rode among the king’s household and had a substantial following of his own.

The expedition also unfolded amid a shift in royal power. Charles VI, then twenty-three, had recently cast off the tutelage of his uncles and declared himself sole ruler of France. The campaign against the Duke of Brittany therefore followed both a direct political cause—the duke’s sheltering of Craon—and the young king’s assertion of personal rule. The account describes an unexpected conclusion to the expedition. On August 8, while the army was passing through a forest near Le Mans, a man seized the king’s horse and warned him not to go farther, saying that he was betrayed. The procession continued after the attendants beat the man and he released the reins. This episode takes place on the route, not in Brittany, but it belongs to the campaign that had brought Carrouges and the royal army toward the region.

Beyond the Parlement’s Reach

Brittany appears again in the book’s account of judicial combat, this time as a region where the practice survived after the Parlement of Paris ceased to authorize it. The duel between Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris was the last judicial duel sanctioned by that court. Later appeals for trial by combat reached the Parlement, but none resulted in permission to fight. That legal change did not immediately end the custom throughout France: judicial duels continued in places beyond the Parlement’s jurisdiction, including Brittany.

The distinction is important. The Parlement’s decision marked the end of its own authorization of judicial duels, not an instantaneous prohibition across every territory where the practice remained available. Brittany is one example of that uneven transition. The book places it alongside parts of Flanders under Burgundian control, while noting later duels at Arras, Valenciennes, and Nancy. These examples show the persistence of trial by combat beyond the central court’s reach without suggesting that all such encounters followed a single regional rule.

Place in the Narrative

Across these episodes, Brittany carries two related but distinct meanings. In the 1392 campaign, it is a political refuge whose ruler’s refusal to yield Craon provokes a royal expedition. In the history of judicial combat, it is a jurisdictional margin where an older legal practice continued after the Parlement of Paris stopped approving it. The first appearance tests the king’s ability to enforce his will against a duke; the second qualifies the apparent finality of a landmark court decision.

The book does not develop Brittany as a landscape or offer a detailed account of its people, towns, or internal politics. Instead, the region is defined by what authority does there and where authority stops: a duke can shelter a fugitive, a king can raise an army, and a central court’s withdrawal of approval does not by itself extinguish a custom beyond its jurisdiction.