 Liars, Bunglers, and Lawyers in Old French Literature:
Lying, Mispleading, and Legal Artifice in Imaginary Treason Trials Stephen D. White, Emory University 
Whereas modern readers of chansons de geste, romances of antiquity,
Arthurian romances, and other Old French narratives produced in France and England
during the twelfth and thirteenth century have routinely drawn attention to the
realism with which these texts represent court proceedings (or plaids), a broad
survey of many such episodes reveals that instead of using trial scenes as vehicles
for realistically representing the changing judicial practices of twelfth- and
thirteenth-century courts, the creators of these scenes always worked within the
narrow limits of a static narrative subgenre that left room for only a limited
number of variations on a single kind of plaid, which I refer to here as an
imaginary treason trial. To the extent that authors participated in any
reevaluation of judicial practice during the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, they did so through the mediation of highly formulaic episodes
constructed out of stock characters and motifs, many of which are neatly
catalogued in works such as Anita Guerreau-Jalabert's index of narratif motifs
in Arthurian verse romances.
There, under the general folklorists' headings Rewards and Punishments, Deceptions, Tests, and Society, we can easily locate many of the motifs that appear in trial scenes, including: Various kinds of treacherous murder; False accusation, Woman slandered as adulteress, Amorous intrigue observed and exposed, Rejected suitor's revenge, Woman avenges scorned love; Deception by equivocation, Trial by combat, Judicial combat/joust/ interrupted by friends; and, finally, Murder punished, Treachery punished, Burning as punishment for traitor, and Punishment: dragging to death by a horse. Since stock motifs of this kind require stock characters who can, for example, accuse falsely, be falsely accused, deceive by equivocation, or be dragged to death by horses, Guerreau-Jalabert's short register of stock characters in imaginary treason trials--which includes, for example, The Faithful wife, Clever persons, Gullible husbands--can easily be expanded so as to include not only the treacherous appellants, bungling appellants, and swindling defendants and defendant's champsions who are the main subjects of this paper, but also such stock characters as: the irate lord of the court, who angrily presses for the defendant's immediate punishment; the compliant barons, who side with their lord against the alleged traitor; the evil counsellor, who corroborates a false accusation of treason or advocates the defendant's immediate execution without trial; and the good counsellor, who, of course, gives good counsel by arguing for acquitting the defendant or, at least, for not putting him or her to death without trial. If the appellants, defendants, judges, and barons who appear in many different imaginary treason trials are stock characters, then one fruitful method of determining how these episodes represent trials, trial procedure, and the courts in which trials are held is to consider how, in these law cases, different kinds of stock characters are represented. Even though this kind of analysis necessarily obscures some of the distinctive features of individual characters in particular treason trials, it has the virtue of highlighting other features that are virtually invisible when trials are studied in isolation or compared with only a few others. In this paper, I briefly examine three such characters--the liar, the bungler, and the lawyer--in order to determine what roles they played in treason trials; how story-tellers represented lying, mistakes in pleading, and legal artifice in these law cases; and, finally, what kind of political spin story-tellers usually placed on imaginary treason trials. Copyright © Stephen D. White; all rights reserved. This introduction used here with permission. |
