The King's Bench

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 crown courts 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", Zoe 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, Zoe Schneider opens a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France. Zoe A. Schneider has taught at Georgetown University and with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

ISBN 1580462928   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9781580462921 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 640 Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd   Published in Rochester Imprint University of Rochester Press   Series ISSN 1542-390 Format Hardback   Series title Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe Publication date 01 Dec 2008   Height (mm) 231 Library of Congress 2008034069   Width (mm) 157 DEWEY 944.2033   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly Pages 340

1		Rex and Lex: The Problem of Legislative Sovereignty
2		Howling with the Wolves: The Normans and Their Courts
3		Officers and Gentlemen: The Local Judiciary
4		Law and Lawyers in the "Empire of Custom"
5		The Red Robe and the Black: Common Courts and the State
6		Villagers and Townspeople: Civil Litigants
7		Uncivil Acts: Crime and Punishment
8		Unruly Governors: Functions and Dysfunctions of the Common Courts
9		Appendix A: Courts of the Generalite of Rouen
10		Appendix B: Jurisdictions of the Ordinary Courts
11		Appendix C: Criminal Trial Procedure
12		Notes
13		Glossary of Legal Terms
14		Bibliography
15		Index

The King's Bench is an outstanding book. It is based on an impressive amount of research in archives that are unwieldy and difficult to use. It makes a major contribution to the debate concerning the functioning of the absolutist state. --H-FRANCE

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