structure of courts in the territory, but superimposed the Parlement de Paris as a final
court of appeal.21
Cases involving foreign merchants could be adjudicated at most levels of this public
legal system. For the most serious cases, according to Alengry, ‘the count as sovereign
was directly employed in person in ensuring justice was rendered to visitors to the
fairs who had suffered injury’.22 This long-standing princely provision of justice to
visiting merchants, dating back to the twelfth century, was explicitly confirmed and
extended in 1245 when the count granted Roman, Tuscan, Lombard and Provençal
merchants frequenting the St Ayoul fair in Provins the privilege of being subject solely
to the count’s own direct jurisdiction or (in his absence) to that of the count’s
23
immediate deputy.
Less serious conflicts involving merchants at the fairs were judged by the princely
bailli or prévôt.24 At each fair a temporary wooden lodge was erected, from which the
prévôt dispensed civil and criminal justice.25 The first record of this lodge dates from
1176, when count Henri assigned to the churchwardens of St Quiriace ‘the wood from
the lodges of the prévôts at the fairs’.26 Further detail is provided by the Provins
communal charter of 1252, which alluded to the lodges of the prévôts at the fairs and
declared that ‘the merchants who come to the fairs shall be judged by us [the count]
and our people: that is, by the fair-wardens, or by the bailli, or by a person whom he
shall set in his place’.27 A subsequent Provins charter of 1268 also mentions the lodges
of the prévôts at the fairs, and confirms that ‘foreign merchants and our Jews shall
remain within our protection and in our justice’.28 A 1324 conflict between the royal
prévôt and the abbot of Lagny over the fair jurisdiction confirmed the continued
jurisdiction of the princely prévôt at the Champagne fairs into the fourteenth century.29
21 Arbois de Jubainville and Pigeotte (1859-66), III:155-70; Arbois de Jubainville (1859), 4-17;
Bourquelot (1839-40), I:210; Benton (1969), 281-3.
22 Alengry (1915), 110.
23 Bourquelot (1865), 174.
24 Arbois de Jubainville (1859), 22.
25 Alengry (1915), 113; Terrasse (2005), 61, 78.
26 Bourquelot (1865), II:20 n. 1; Arbois de Jubainville and Pigeotte (1859-66), III:235.
27 Bourquelot (1839-40), II:409; Terrasse (2005), 45, 61.
28 Bourquelot (1839-40), II:416; Terrasse (2005), 61, 78.
29 Boutaric (1867), II:551 (#7394).