A01=Zoë A. Schneider
arrets
assizes
Author_Zoë A. Schneider
bailiwick
bailiwick court
bailliages
Cany
Cany Caniel
Category=NHD
Caux
civil law
common court
criminal justice
Custom of Normandy
death penalty
England
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
France
intendant
judges
justices of the peace
litigant
nobility
Parlement of Normandy
Pont Audemer
Rouen
taxation
Product details
- ISBN 9781580462921
- Weight: 666g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2008
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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An examination of kings' courts and lords' courts in Normandy that opens a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France.
Hidden deep in the countryside of France lay early modern Europe's largest bureaucracy: twenty- to thirty-thousand royal bailiwick and seigneurial courts that served more than eighty-five percent of the king's subjects. The crowncourts and lords' courts were far more than arenas of litigation, in the modern sense. They had become the nexus of local governance by the middle of the seventeenth century, a rich breeding ground for men who controlled the villages, towns, and bailiwicks of France. Yet even as the centralizing state was reaching its zenith under Louis XIV, the king's largest permanent bureaucracy became increasingly alienated and cut adrift from the crown, many decades before the French Revolution.
In The King's Bench, Zoë Schneider vividly brings to life the teeming world of the local courts, with their magistrates and jailers, townspeople and peasants. Together they contested that vital border where the private world of families and property collided with the public commonwealth. Schneider chronicles the transformation of local governance after the mid-seventeenth century, as judges and their courts became the face of public order in the countryside.
With this richly detailed local study of Normandy in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, Zoë Schneider opens a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France.
Zoë A. Schneider has taught at Georgetown University and with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
