Messer Niccola da San Lepidio

Messer Niccola da San Lepidio is a visiting criminal judge whose appearance makes him the focus of a public prank in Florence. Three young men exploit the broken floorboards beneath his bench to pull down his breeches while he is hearing cases. The episode turns the judge’s exposed body into a comic rebuke of the provincial officials who brought him to Florence and, in the story’s telling, makes judicial dignity vulnerable to the very disorder it is supposed to govern.

Identity and Appointment

Messer Niccola arrives in Florence among the judges brought by a governor from the Marches of Ancona. The tale presents the governor and his entourage through a sharply prejudicial description: they are characterized as mean-spirited and miserly, and their judges and notaries are said to look more like laborers than men trained in law. Messer Niccola is introduced as one of the judges assigned to hear criminal causes, giving his position formal authority even as the narration casts doubt on the dignity and competence of the group that appointed him.

The story does not describe a particular case that Messer Niccola decides, nor does it explain his legal training or his conduct on the bench before the prank. His role is instead established through the contrast between office and appearance. He sits as a criminal judge, but the narrator invites the audience to see him as an incongruous figure, whose clothing and bearing make him seem less like a dignified magistrate than a spectacle.

Appearance and Discovery

Maso del Saggio first notices Messer Niccola while visiting the courthouse in search of a friend. He studies the judge from head to foot: Messer Niccola wears a miniver cap blackened with smoke and grease, carries a cheap inkpot at his belt, and has a gown longer than his mantle. The details accumulate as evidence in a comic visual inventory. The most striking feature is his pair of breeches, whose back hangs halfway down his legs while the front of his clothes stands open because they are too tight.

Maso takes this sight to his companions, Ribi and Matteuzzo, describing the judge as an extraordinary scarecrow. They return with him to the courthouse, where the breeches prompt their laughter even from a distance. On approaching the raised platform, the three discover the practical means of turning ridicule into action: a person can pass beneath the bench, and broken boards leave a gap through which a hand and arm can reach. Their plan depends not on confronting Messer Niccola openly but on the architecture of the courtroom and the judge’s position above it.

The Prank on the Bench

The three men return the next morning, when the court is crowded. Matteuzzo slips beneath the bench and positions himself directly under Messer Niccola’s feet. Above him, Maso and Ribi each seize one side of the judge’s gown and loudly stage competing complaints about stolen goods. Their invented dispute over saddle-bags and boots draws Messer Niccola into the performance: he rises and leans toward them to hear their claims more clearly.

As the judge bends forward, Matteuzzo reaches through the gap between the boards, catches the breeches at the back, and pulls. The garment comes down readily. Messer Niccola feels what has happened and tries to sit again and draw his skirts over himself, but Maso and Ribi hold him by his clothes while continuing to demand that he hear their complaints. Their loud pretence keeps the judge occupied as the people in the courtroom see his breeches pulled down. The prank succeeds through coordination: one man acts beneath the bench, while the other two create a plausible distraction and prevent Messer Niccola from covering himself at once.

Matteuzzo lets go and escapes unseen from beneath the platform. Maso and Ribi release the judge and depart in opposite directions, leaving Messer Niccola to pull up his breeches in full view of the court. Still trying to understand what happened, he asks where the men who had been arguing over the boots and saddle-bags have gone. They are nowhere to be found. His attempt to resume the ordinary business of the court arrives only after the staged quarrel and the bodily exposure have overturned its decorum.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Messer Niccola swears that he must discover whether it is customary in Florence to pull down judges’ breeches while they sit on the bench. The question makes his confusion part of the joke: he interprets the carefully arranged prank as a possible local practice rather than immediately identifying its purpose. The governor makes a great stir when he hears of the incident, but his friends advise him that the prank was meant as a warning. The Florentines, they explain, have shown that they understand the governor brought them inferior judges and did so in order to obtain them more cheaply.

The story reports no punishment of Maso, Ribi, or Matteuzzo, and no further action against Messer Niccola. Instead, the affair goes no farther for the time being. The judge remains the visible object of the humiliation, but the episode’s stated political target is the governor who selected the judicial party. Messer Niccola’s authority makes the prank legible: pulling down the clothes of a man seated to administer justice turns a private defect of dress into a public judgment on the officials’ appointments. His brief appearance therefore serves the tale’s broader comic reversal, in which the court that should hear disputes becomes the stage for a performance exposing its own compromised dignity.