La traición en la ficción literaria. Derecho, hecho y ordalías en la narrativa y la épica en francés antiguo

Abstract

Throughout the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, many chansons de geste, romances, and other Old French narratives produced in France and England included episodes in which the out6come of a treason trial is determined by means of a bilateral ordeal (i.e. trial by battle,sometimes known as a judicial duel) or, much more rarely, a unilateral ordeal (e.g. by cold water). By citing such episodes as evidence that vernacular story-tellers joined with clerics in either attacking or defending trial by ordeal during the very period when unilateral ordeals were abandoned, several medievalists have tried to incorporate vernacular literary sources into a conventional story about how, during the twelfth century, the irrational law of the early medieval Europe was transformed into the rational law of the high middle ages. Just as this conventional account of legal development minimizes the resemblances between earlier and later medieval law, so recent interpretations of selected Old French trial scenes obscure significant continuities in episodes of this kind, in which the same motifs were used and re-used for well over a century. A survey of many such trials shows that on the very rare occasions when vernacular authors mentioned the unilateral ordeal, they did not represent it unfavorably. Moreover, these authors repeatedly treated the bilateral ordeal (i.e. battle) as a fully adequate and honorable means of disproving false charges of treason. To the extent that stories represent the outcomes of certain imaginary cases as being problematic, they attribute the deficiences of outcomes reached by ordeal, not to the defects of ordeals as methods of proof, but rather to the difficulties involved in resolving the substantive issues of law, politics, and aristocratic honor that the cases were constructed for the purpose of raising. In raising such issues, early twelfth-century trial scenes show as much legal subtlety and sophistication as do late twelfth- and thirteenth-century trial scenes, which reveal as much concern with the problem of negotiating aristocratic honor as do early twelfth-century vernacular texts.