Caen is significant in the Carrouges–Le Gris affair less as a described city than as an administrative and documentary point of connection. Its bailiff, Guillaume de Mauvinet, appears in competing accounts of an earlier summons involving Dame Nicole, and later sent a courier from Caen to Paris with sealed letters for the Parlement of Paris. Through these records, Caen stands at the junction between local inquiries in Normandy and a case that was becoming a national controversy.

Caen and the Local Inquiry

The surviving evidence links Caen to the proceedings through Guillaume de Mauvinet, its bailiff. In the case records, Jean de Carrouges said that Nicole had been summoned to Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives by the Viscount of Falaise, Regnaut Bigaut. Jacques Le Gris gave a different, though not necessarily incompatible, account: Nicole appeared there before Mauvinet at the request of Robert Fevrel. These accounts place a Caen official within the local sequence of events on the day of the alleged attack, while preserving a distinction between what each party said about who summoned Nicole and who received her appearance.

That distinction matters because the inquiry depended on reports and testimony assembled across different authorities. The surviving material does not establish that Mauvinet personally witnessed the alleged crime. It does identify him as an official connected to the appearance at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, and later as the person who ordered information about the case sent to the Parlement. Caen’s role is therefore institutional: it is represented by an officer whose actions helped carry a local dispute into a higher court.

The Courier to Paris

At the end of July 1386, while the Parlement’s enquête continued through July and into August, Guillaume Berengier arrived in Paris carrying sealed letters “touching on the Lady Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris.” Mauvinet had sent him from Caen and instructed him to report additional secret matters orally, rather than commit them to writing. The letters themselves have disappeared, as has the substance of the oral report. The surviving trace is unusually slight: expense receipts for the courier remain on narrow strips of parchment.

A receipt records the expense of the courier who galloped from Caen to Paris in July with information about Le Gris and Marguerite de Carrouges. The journey gives the case a concrete documentary route: information was dispatched from a Norman administrative center to the royal court’s highest judicial body. Yet the missing contents prevent certainty about what Mauvinet conveyed. The records preserve the fact of urgent transmission, not the allegations or evidence carried in the message.

A Contested Flow of Information

The letters arrived in a politically charged context. Count Pierre of Alençon had already sent letters to Paris in an effort to stop Carrouges’s appeal. The new letters and Mauvinet’s oral report appear to have been another attempt to weaken Carrouges’s case by discrediting Marguerite’s testimony. That apparent purpose must be distinguished from what can be recovered directly: the letters are lost, and the surviving account describes their significance without reproducing their contents.

Caen thus enters the narrative not as a neutral backdrop but through the circulation of information among officials and courts. The bailiff’s involvement connected an earlier local appearance at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives with a later communication to Paris, while Count Pierre’s intervention shows that the appeal was already being contested through correspondence. What reached the Parlement was shaped by competing parties and by messages whose contents are only partly known. The surviving evidence allows the route and apparent stakes of communication to be traced, but not the complete case made in Mauvinet’s letters.

From Regional Case to National Affair

The courier’s journey belongs to a larger change in scale. What had begun as a dispute handled at a seigneurial court in Normandy was moving into the Parlement’s inquiry and attracting attention among nobles at the royal court. Caen’s documentary role makes that expansion visible: local officials and reports fed into proceedings in Paris, where the outcome could overturn Count Pierre’s judgment and determine whether Carrouges and Le Gris would face trial by combat.

The record does not offer a portrait of Caen’s streets, buildings, or daily life, and its surviving references should not be made to bear that weight. Instead, the city is legible through office, travel, and archives: a bailiff associated with a local summons, a courier sent urgently to Paris, and receipts that survived after the more consequential letters vanished. That imbalance between a traceable journey and lost testimony captures Caen’s particular significance in the case. It was a point of transmission whose importance is clear even though much of what passed through it is no longer recoverable.