Enquête

Enquête was a formal inquiry in which evidence and testimony were gathered for a court’s consideration. In 1386, the Parlement of Paris ordered an Enquête into the case brought by Jean de Carrouges against Jacques Le Gris, making written examination of the disputed facts a necessary step before the court decided whether to authorize a judicial duel. The procedure offered a structured alternative to combat as a means of assessing a case, but its record did not settle the central question of what had occurred.

Definition and Historical Function

In medieval French law, an Enquête was a formal inquiry involving evidence and testimony. Its use reflected a long change in the place of judicial combat. In earlier periods, people of different social ranks could resort to combat to resolve criminal accusations and civil disputes; public duels were fought by commoners as well as nobles, and in some parts of Europe women could fight men. In civil cases, a party could sometimes appoint a champion. Criminal cases generally required the principals themselves to fight, because defeat usually brought death, with champions permitted only for women, elderly people, or the infirm.

Combat had also served as a form of appeal. A litigant dissatisfied with a verdict could challenge witnesses who had sworn against him, offering to establish his own claim through a fight. Over time, however, the practice contracted. By 1200 judicial duels were disappearing from French civil proceedings and becoming increasingly restricted in criminal cases to noble men. In 1258, Louis IX removed combat from French civil law and substituted the Enquête, a process grounded in evidence and testimony. The change did not eliminate combat from every criminal appeal: a nobleman seeking to challenge his lord’s verdict could still invoke it as a last resort.

From Appeal to Royal Procedure

The rules continued to shift under Philip IV. He outlawed judicial combat during wartime in 1296, partly because duels among nobles deprived the realm of men needed for military defense, and banned it in peacetime in 1303. Noble opposition led him to restore it in 1306 as a form of appeal in certain criminal cases, including rape, but only under the king’s direct jurisdiction. The decree was still in force when Jean de Carrouges went to Paris, although judicial duels had become extremely rare.

A challenge did not automatically secure a duel. The case had to concern a capital crime; the crime had to be established as having occurred; other legal remedies had to be exhausted; and the accused had to be strongly suspected. These conditions made inquiry consequential. The court needed to consider the parties’ accounts and the available evidence before deciding whether combat was warranted. In the Carrouges–Le Gris dispute, the Enquête therefore stood between Jean’s appeal of Count Pierre’s verdict and the possibility of a duel: it was not itself a judgment by combat, but a procedure for deciding whether that extraordinary remedy could go forward.

The 1386 Inquiry

After the two men presented their challenge and response, the magistrates ordered them to submit their facts and reasons in writing, in the manner of affidavits. The Parlement would receive and weigh those submissions before resolving the case. Each party was thus required to place an account before the court, rather than leaving the next step to the exchange of pledges alone. Jacques Le Gris’s lawyer, Jean Le Coq, had advised him to claim benefit of clergy to avoid the risk of a duel; Le Gris refused. He consequently remained subject to the Parlement’s jurisdiction and had to submit to the inquiry and its result.

The inquiry began by mid-July. Marguerite de Carrouges, though women could not bring criminal charges themselves, gave evidence as the chief witness. The official record says that information was received through her deposition or oath before the court, and that she was closely and repeatedly questioned about her accusation. The account also infers that she appeared before the king and the assembled Parlement to be sworn in before court officers examined her privately. At the time, she was six months pregnant; by late summer, she was at least eight months pregnant and still waiting for both the court’s decision and her pregnancy to reach its term.

Jean de Carrouges’s written account emphasized the prior closeness between the men. He represented Jacques Le Gris as a trusted friend and recalled naming him godfather to his firstborn son, including the baptism in which Le Gris held the child at the font. Jean also recounted the earlier occasion at Jean Crespin’s house when he instructed Marguerite to kiss Le Gris as a sign of peace and friendship between the two men. The inquiry thus received not only the accusation and its denial, but an account of the relationship that made the dispute a rupture between former associates.

Record and Limits of Knowledge

The participants testified in their native Norman French, but no transcript of their oral testimony survives. Instead, the Parlement’s records preserve a detailed Latin summary made by a professional scribe. The unique surviving manuscript runs to nearly ten densely written folio-sized pages. It contains Jean’s itemized charges, based on his wife’s sworn testimony, followed by Jacques Le Gris’s lengthy defense. This is substantial documentation, but it is not a verbatim record of everything said in court; the distinction matters when later readers try to reconstruct the evidence and weigh the opposing accounts.

Jean Le Coq’s diary adds a different perspective from the official summary. He recorded that Marguerite never relented in affirming that the deed had occurred. He also noted that Le Gris asked whether his lawyer doubted him after noticing him thinking. In Le Gris’s favor, Le Coq repeated the claim that numerous knights had seen him with Count Pierre throughout the day in question. He also reported that some people believed Le Gris would not confess because doing so would bring scandal upon his sons and friends, especially after Count Pierre had declared him innocent. These entries show the lawyer considering evidence and possible pressures, not establishing which account was true.

After more than two months of inquiry, and eight months after the date of the alleged crime, the Parlement summoned Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris to hear its decision on September 15, 1386. The later record of the dispute leaves the inquiry’s central evidentiary difficulty intact. Le Coq concluded that no one really knew the truth of the matter, despite his close involvement in the proceedings. Later accounts disagreed over the case and over the duel’s meaning, reinforcing the distinction between a court’s decision about what procedure should follow and a conclusive recovery of disputed events. Enquête made the claims available for formal scrutiny; it did not make uncertainty disappear.