New Year’s Day

New Year’s Day held a place in the French royal court’s calendar almost equal to Christmas. In 1386, its festivities formed the setting for a striking collision of celebration, dynastic grief, and public justice: the court continued its holiday revels after the dauphin’s death, while the judicial duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris became the season’s chief spectacle.

A Feast Amid Mourning

On December 28, 1386, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the sickly dauphin died. His richly clothed body was carried by torchlight to the royal sepulchre at Saint-Denis, and his death was mourned by the court, the city, and the kingdom. Coming on a feast day that commemorated Herod’s slaughter of infants, the loss also seemed to some a bad omen.

The prince’s death did not cancel the holiday program. New Year’s Day remained a feast nearly equal to Christmas, and Charles VI and his court went ahead with parties, banquets, dances, and other entertainments. The contrast was stark: the royal heir had just been buried, yet the court returned to public celebration. Within that festive season, the duel was remembered as the high point of the proceedings.

The Duel in the Holiday Calendar

The combat between Carrouges and Le Gris had been delayed so Charles VI could attend after returning from Flanders. The king insisted that nothing begin before his arrival at the field. Once seated in the royal viewing stand, on a throne warmed by coals and draped in blue embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis, he presided over the ceremonies. The duel was not simply entertainment for the gathered court: the Parlement of Paris had authorized it in the king’s name, and the king was, by law, its judge.

The New Year festivities thus brought together two kinds of public occasion. The court’s feasting and entertainments marked the calendar’s turn; the duel presented a formal judgment on a criminal accusation. Its outcome was understood as a revelation of God’s will, but the proceeding was also arranged and supervised through royal and judicial authority. The holiday spectacle rested on this conjunction of sacred claim and political power.

Ritual and Judgment

Before the fight, priests placed an altar at the center of the field, furnished with a silver crucifix and a prayer book opened to an image of Christ’s Passion. The sacred display framed the combat as a judgment of God: the participants’ sworn accusations and denials would, in the institution’s logic, be tested through the result of the fight.

The oaths made the stakes explicit. Carrouges and Le Gris pledged not only their lives, fortunes, and honor but also their souls. For the final oath, they joined left hands, rather than the right hands used in customary mutual oaths, marking the bond between them as hostile. The duel’s solemn religious forms stood in sharp contrast to the court’s surrounding revelry, even as both were incorporated into the same season of public ceremony.

A Festivity’s Long Afterlife

The duel formally ended the legal quarrel, but not the dispute over what had happened or whether its outcome was just. Accounts of the court’s response differed: Jean Froissart described the king, court, and crowd as rejoicing, while Jean Le Coq’s account reported divided reactions, with some seeing Carrouges vindicated and others believing Le Gris had been unjustly killed.

A later story claimed that another man confessed to the crime after the duel. The Saint-Denis Chronicle recorded a version involving a condemned felon; in the 1430s, Jean Juvénal des Ursins retold it with a sick man on his deathbed. The confession has never been substantiated, yet chroniclers and historians repeatedly revived it. The duel, celebrated amid the New Year festivities, was the last judicial duel sanctioned by the Parlement of Paris. Its contested verdict consequently outlasted the holiday that framed it, becoming part of a centuries-long argument about judicial combat, evidence, and the limits of human certainty.