Late 15th century

Late 15th century Paris is not governed by a single, unified civic order: it is a city of distinct urban territories, overlapping authorities, and sharply contrasting protections. Its churches, courts, places of refuge, and execution grounds show how legal power could be divided among ecclesiastical, municipal, academic, and royal institutions—and how exposed a person remained when those powers collided.

A City Divided into Three

Paris is described as three separate towns: the City on the island, the University on the left bank of the Seine, and the Town on the right bank. Each has its own character and customary institutions. Churches concentrate in the City, palaces in the Town, and colleges in the University. The City contains Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Town the Louvre and Hôtel de Ville, and the University the Sorbonne. Markets belong to the Town, while the City has the Hospital and the University the Pré-aux-Clercs. The divisions are not merely descriptive: each territory has its own governing authority and privileges, while depending on the other two to make the larger city function.

Authority follows this geography but does not stop at its borders. The island belongs to the bishop, the right bank to the provost of the merchants, and the left bank to the rector; over all three stands the royal Provostship of Paris. The arrangement makes the city a patchwork of jurisdictions rather than a straightforward municipal hierarchy. Even the handling of offenses can cross territorial lines: University scholars may be tried in courts on the island and punished at Montfaucon on the right bank.

Jurisdiction, Privilege, and Punishment

The University’s privileges reveal how contested that patchwork could be. Scholars were entitled to be punished on their own grounds, but the rector could intervene when the University felt strong and the king weak. The account also links many privileges to revolts and mutinies: kings, it observes, yielded when people forcibly demanded concessions. Privilege therefore appears not simply as a stable grant from above, but as something secured through pressure and political circumstance.

A condemned woman’s sentence gives this divided system a personal and public consequence. The court orders her taken to the grand portal of Notre-Dame Cathedral to make an apology, then carried to Place de Grève for execution; the sentence also names her goat and requires payment to the official. It thus moves the condemned woman from a church-associated setting to a civic punishment ground, under a formal judgment that combines public penance, execution, and financial penalty. The scene shows legal authority acting through prescribed stages, even as the woman hears the sentence in a state of distress and is taken away by attendants.

Sanctuary and Its Limits

Sanctuary offers a counterweight to the many forms of punishment. The historical account describes places of asylum across medieval cities in France, including churches, royal palaces, and princely residences. Once inside, a fugitive was considered safe; but protection depended on remaining within the boundary. A single step outside returned the person to the reach of the surrounding penal authorities. Refuge could therefore protect someone from immediate capture while also confining that person: condemned people might remain for years within a cloister, palace enclosure, abbey, or church precinct.

The protection was powerful but not absolute. A decree of Parliament could, on rare occasions, override asylum and return a condemned person to the executioner. Armed force against a sanctuary was treated as a grave violation, in part because it challenged ecclesiastical authority. The account also notes that in 1467 Louis XI made all Paris a refuge. That measure underscores the period’s shifting relationship between royal power and sanctuary: refuge could extend across the whole city, yet its practical force still depended on boundaries and on which authority was able to enforce them.

Montfaucon and the City’s Aftermath

Montfaucon stands at the opposite pole from sanctuary. The account identifies it as a major gallows outside Paris, dating from 1328 and already badly dilapidated by the late fifteenth century. Its raised masonry base measured fifteen feet high, thirty feet wide, and forty feet long; sixteen stone pillars, thirty feet high, supported beams from which chains hung. The scale made the structure visible across the surrounding countryside, while its age and decay marked it as a long-standing part of the city’s punitive landscape.

A cellar beneath the masonry received the remains of people removed from the gallows and of those executed at Paris’s other permanent sites. After the execution described in the narrative, the woman’s body is taken there according to custom. Montfaucon thus connects an individual sentence to a larger, continuing system: public judgments did not end at the scaffold, but fed into a place that gathered the consequences of punishment across generations. Set beside the city’s divided courts and conditional sanctuaries, it gives the late-fifteenth-century setting a stark institutional shape—protection bounded by jurisdiction, and punishment made part of the urban landscape.