Neighbours before the Court: Crime, Village Communities and Seigneurial Justice in Northern Burgundy, 1750-1790

Abstract

This article uses the records of criminal cases in the seigneurial courts of northern Burgundy in the late eighteenth century to analyse the relationship between village communities and the central state. In opposition to most historians of crime, who have argued that people resented the intervention of the judge in their affairs and used courts only as a last resort, it argues that the local seigneurial court played a vital role in the everyday disputes of ordinary people. The reason that villagers turned so willingly to the local court was that their judges provided a fair resolution of disputes, with verdicts with which people agreed, and which were unlikely to escalate them. While it is true that many disputes were settled informally, even these required at least the threat of a court case, and depended for their enforcement on the same local seigneurial courts. Thus the judicial institutions of the French state belong at the centre of our understanding of everyday social relations in eighteenth‐century northern Burgundy.