Louis IX was the first king of France to abolish the judicial duel; the occasion for his
action was the trial of Enguerrand de Coucy in 1259 on charges of having killed two
young clerics. The king ordered an enquête, or investigation, to decide the matter, using
witnesses and depositions. The baron, through his counsel, argued that he should not have
to submit to such process when the accusation touched his person, his honor, and his
heritage. Determined to give severe justice for the seriousness of the crime, the king
referred to an ancient right of Merovingian kings to put to death without judgment. He
knew that he could not do that and sentenced the baron to heavy fines and three years in
the Holy Land.
As the result of this case, Louis IX issued an ordinance prohibiting trial by combat
throughout his domain in all disputes, and in place of battle he ordered the enquête, or
proof by witnesses and written instruments. His prohibition of the judicial duel displeased
much of the feudal nobility. His son Philip III permitted trial by combat to resume. His
grandson Philip IV the Fair kept the prohibition for civil cases but permitted battle in
criminal and capital cases. France would wait until the mid-14th century for trial by battle
to be finally abolished.
Louis IX also raised to a level of standard procedure the use of the appeal in legal
disputes. The ability of a litigant to question the rightness of a judgment in one court and
to remove it to a higher court for reconsideration can be found in the Roman Empire and
in Salic law. Charlemagne provided for it in a capitulary of 805 whereby one could
complain of a judgment and procure letters from the royal palace that would lead to a
judicial review of the original decision.
When the Carolingian empire disintegrated, the counts, dukes, and other great lords
did not encourage processes from their feudal courts to proceed in appeal to the king’s
court. And in the early stages of the French monarchy, the king was not strong enough to
command his great vassals to let cases proceed upward to his court. But gradually,
through the 12th century and into the 13th, the evidence for systematic appeals from
lower jurisdictions to the king’s court slowly increased until, with the appearance of the
earliest records of the Parlement de Paris in the reign of Louis IX, one can see the
practice firmly established. The multiplication of appeals was the major reason for the
rapid growth of judicial business in the Parlement de Paris in the late 13th century. The
vast new urban class as well as the greatly enlarged lower nobility embraced the
opportunity for a more certain justice. A remnant of the distant past remained in the 13th-
century appeal, when the appellant did not appeal his earlier adversary but rather the
earlier judges, or the tribunal, who in giving a bad judgment became the reason for the
appeal and the new adversary.
As cases of appeal multiplied, so did the rules governing them. An appellant could not
choose the court but was directed by regulations to the next highest tribunal. In 1298, the
Parlement de Paris addressed this problem in prohibiting cases from coming directly to it
that should first be tried in the court of the bailliage or sénéchaussée. It also sought to
reduce the number of judicial levels cre-ated by the seigneurial class, which often
exhausted the resources of the appellants before they could reach the highest court. Could
one appeal from a judgment of the Parlement de Paris? It answered this question in a
general ordinance of 1303, recognizing that it could review its own decisions in a process
of emendation.
The Encyclopedia 1009