Perjury

Perjury in the judicial duel was more than a false statement: it was the wrong oath the combat was supposed to expose, with consequences framed as both earthly punishment and divine judgment. In the case of Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, the procedure promised a definitive verdict, but the surviving records and later disputes show how little certainty that verdict could secure about the underlying accusation.

Meaning and Legal Function

Under French law, a nobleman appealing a case to the king could challenge his opponent to judicial combat. Unlike a duel of honor, this was a formal legal procedure intended to determine which party had sworn falsely. Its outcome was understood as the judgment of God, not simply a victory established by strength. The peril of perjury therefore belonged to the procedure’s foundation: a contested oath became the question put to combat, and the result was treated as a verdict on truth.

Judicial combat had once been available in a broad range of cases and among different social classes. Over time it was curtailed. Church authorities denounced it as tempting God, while kings opposed a practice that could limit royal control of justice. In France, Louis IX removed it from civil law in 1258, substituting a formal inquiry based on evidence and testimony. Philip IV outlawed it in wartime in 1296 and in peacetime in 1303, then restored it in 1306 as an appeal in certain criminal cases, including rape, under the king’s direct jurisdiction. Its continued use thus joined the claim of divine judgment to an increasingly centralized royal legal system.

Oaths, Judgment, and Penalties

Before combat, the men swore formal oaths in a religious setting. Priests placed a crucifix and a prayer book on an altar at the center of the field, making the proceedings visibly answerable to sacred authority. At the final oath, the combatants joined left hands, a gesture marking their bond as hostile rather than the mutual bond represented by right-handed oaths in other rituals. A priest warned that the one in the wrong faced damnation in soul and body as a consequence of the oaths and would be judged by God.

The stakes were not merely symbolic. In criminal cases, the parties generally had to fight in person, and the penalty for losing was usually death; champions could substitute only for women, the elderly, or the infirm. The account also records that Marguerite de Carrouges could be burned if she were proven to have committed perjury. These threatened penalties made an accusation and its oath hazardous for every party, while the ceremony presented the duel’s outcome as a judgment capable of resolving that danger.

Testimony and the Limits of Certainty

The inquiry into the accusation was recorded in writing. Although women could not initiate criminal charges themselves, Marguerite de Carrouges testified as the chief witness and was repeatedly questioned. The knight, the squire, and the lady gave their testimony in Norman French; no transcript of their oral evidence survives. Instead, the official record preserves a detailed Latin summary, nearly ten densely written folio-sized pages, containing Jean de Carrouges’s charges and Jacques Le Gris’s defense.

Jean de Carrouges emphasized that he had trusted Le Gris as a close friend and had named him godfather to his firstborn son. In the lawyer Jean Le Coq’s private diary, Marguerite’s persistence in affirming that the crime had occurred counted against Le Gris, while knights’ claims that they had seen the squire with the Count of Alençon throughout the day supported his defense. Le Coq also recorded that Le Gris had asked whether the lawyer doubted him. These observations preserve conflicting considerations, not a settled finding about what happened. Le Coq’s final assessment acknowledged the limits of what even a closely involved lawyer could know.

Aftermath and Historical Significance

The later accounts remained divided over whether the duel had exposed perjury or punished an innocent man. Jean Froissart reported that the king, court, and crowd rejoiced at the outcome; Le Coq noted mixed reactions. The Saint-Denis Chronicle later claimed that Marguerite had accused Le Gris mistakenly and that another felon confessed, a story repeated in altered form by Jean Juvénal des Ursins and revived by later writers. The book challenges the mistaken-identity and deliberate-fabrication theories while recognizing that the case cannot be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

The duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris was the last judicial combat authorized by the Parlement of Paris. Its controversial result has been credited with hastening the decline of the practice: later appeals came before the court, but none received authorization for a duel. Perjury thus marks the tension at the heart of the institution. The combat was presented as a way to make hidden truth manifest through divine judgment, yet its outcome could not prevent doubt, disagreement, or the growth of competing stories about guilt.