Norman law

Racine, who immortalised Chicanneau in his Plaideur, laid the scene in a town of Lower Normandy.

Even in his time this was no new trait, for the fondness for legal form and chicane can be traced in the early days of the Coutume de Normandie, while the Brunyol Saga shows us the love of lawsuits and fine points of procedure full-blown among the Northmen of primitive Iceland.

If Normandy is the pays de gain, it is also the pays de sapience.

Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist or a mystic.

There was, it is true, no sudden change.

Philip respected vested interests, both in the Church and among the barons, and preserved Norman customs, so that the duchy long retained its individuality of law, of local organization, and of character, and secured its rights from Louis X in a document of 1315, the Charte aux Normands, which has sometimes been compared in a small way to the Great Charter.

The Coutume de Normandie persisted like the customs of the other great provinces until the French Revolution, but it was a body of custom worked out under the influence of the central government and gradually absorbing the jurisprudence of the king's court.

If the Norman exchequer continued to sit at Rouen, it was presided over by commissioners sent out from Paris.

Racine, who immortalised Chicanneau in his Plaideur, laid the scene in a town of Lower Normandy.

Even in his time this was no new trait, for the fondness for legal form and chicane can be traced in the early days of the Coutume de Normandie, while the Brunyiol Saga shows us the love of lawsuits and fine points of procedure full-blown among the Northmen of primitive Iceland.

If Normandy is the pays de gain, it is also the pays de sapience.

Hard-headed and practical, the Norman is not an idealist or a mystic.

There was, it is true, no sudden change.

Philip respected vested interests, both in the Church and among the barons, and preserved Norman customs, so that the duchy long retained its individuality of law, of local organization, and of character, and secured its rights from Louis X in a document of 1315, the Charte aux Normands, which has sometimes been compared in a small way to the Great Charter.

The Coutume de Normandie persisted like the customs of the other great provinces until the French Revolution, but it was a body of custom worked out under the influence of the central government and gradually absorbing the jurisprudence of the king's court.

If the Norman Exchequer continued to sit at Rouen, it was presided over by commissioners sent out from Paris.