Gibbet of Montfaucon

The Gibbet of Montfaucon was a major place of public punishment north of Paris, where the bodies of executed criminals and men killed in judicial combat were displayed. After Jacques Le Gris was killed in his duel with Jean de Carrouges, his corpse was taken there; the gallows thus marked the passage from the duel’s verdict to its posthumous penalty.

Structure and Setting

In the 1380s, Montfaucon stood more than half a mile beyond Paris. Its low hill was crowned by a stone gallows nearly forty feet high, with heavy crossbars capable of holding sixty or eighty bodies at a time. The scale made it not merely a means of execution but a conspicuous landmark for the city’s condemned dead.

A locked iron gate and high stone wall restricted access. The bodies were meant to remain on the gallows until scavengers and exposure reduced them to bones. Because space was continually needed, however, some were removed earlier and put in a charnel house below. Relatives and friends could not retrieve them, and the dead were denied Christian burial.

Use and the Duel’s Aftermath

The gallows received people executed in Paris, including those hanged there and the remains of people put to death by other methods. The bodies of men slain in judicial combat were also taken beyond the city walls and displayed, treating the duel’s outcome as proof of guilt under the custom described in the account.

After Le Gris was killed, his armor was removed and his body carried from the field to the executioner of Paris. It was then dragged on a horse-drawn sled along the customary route, past the Porte Saint-Denis and beyond the walls to Montfaucon. This was the prescribed fate of the defeated man in the duel, in stark contrast to Jean de Carrouges and Marguerite leaving the field to give thanks at Notre-Dame.

Public Meaning

Montfaucon’s gallows gave the duel’s judgment a visible and lasting consequence. Le Gris’s death on the field did not end the punishment: the journey to the gallows and the display of his body placed him among those publicly condemned by the city’s justice. The site’s crowded capacity and restricted access also made that punishment a form of exclusion, separating the condemned dead from ordinary burial and from the people who might have claimed them.