In fourteenth-century Burgundy, gallows were more than places of execution: they were powerful symbols of justice, territory and political authority. Lorris Chevalier explores how disputes over these structures became part of a wider struggle for power in the emerging Burgundian state.
By Lorris Chevalier
In medieval Europe, political authority was not exercised only through charters, courts and armed force. It was also made visible in the landscape. Boundary stones, signs bearing the ruler’s emblem, toll markers, roads and fortified gates all helped to define the territory over which a prince claimed authority. Among the most striking of these territorial markers were the patibulary forks, or gallows: structures used for public executions and the prolonged display of the bodies of the condemned.
In the emerging Burgundian state of the late fourteenth century, gallows acquired a significance that went far beyond the punishment of criminals. To erect a gallows was to make a claim about jurisdiction. To destroy one was to challenge that claim. To leave it standing could amount to accepting the authority it represented.
This is particularly clear in the County of Burgundy, or Franche-Comté, during the rule of Philip the Bold, the first Valois Duke of Burgundy, who became Count of Burgundy in 1384. Between 1380 and 1400, several disputes over gallows reveal a broader struggle over sovereignty, jurisdiction and political allegiance. These conflicts might aptly be described as a “war of the gallows”: a series of confrontations in which the physical presence of the gallows became a means of negotiating, asserting and resisting princely power.
Gallows as territorial markers
Enguerrand de Marigny being hanged. From the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, BL Royal MS 20 C vii fol. 51
A medieval political territory was both a physical space and a social construction. Authority had to be made visible through objects and places that people could recognise. Walls and gates defined towns; roads and bridges connected and controlled territories; boundary stones and signs marked jurisdictional limits.
Gallows belonged to this same world of political symbolism.
They were not simply functional structures for carrying out executions. They were called justices in contemporary records, a revealing term that connected the physical structure directly to the judicial authority of its owner. A gallows proclaimed that the lord who erected it possessed high justice: the right to judge serious crimes and, above all, to impose death.
Yet a gallows could only function as a political symbol if its claim was recognised. Its authority depended upon a degree of local acceptance. A structure that was pulled down, ignored or openly contested could become evidence not of power, but of the limits of power.
The disputes of late fourteenth-century Franche-Comté demonstrate precisely this tension.
Vauconcourt: when two gallows claimed the same jurisdiction
A fortified house in Vauconcourt, Haute-Saône, France. Photo by Espirat / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of the clearest examples occurred at Vauconcourt in 1387, in what began as a dispute between two noblewomen.
Marie de Rougemont, Lady of Rupt, exercised seigneurial authority on behalf of her minor son. Her rival, Jeanne, Lady of Thuillières, challenged Marie’s claim to high justice over the neighbouring communities of Vauconcourt and La Neuvelle. Rather than resolving the dispute through negotiation, Jeanne resorted to direct action. With an armed force, she travelled to Vauconcourt and pulled down and demolished Marie’s gallows.
The destruction was much more than an act of vandalism. By removing the gallows, Jeanne was physically challenging Marie’s jurisdiction. If the gallows represented high justice, destroying it was a direct attack on the territorial presence of that justice.
Marie had already placed herself under the duke’s protection, however, and appealed to Philip the Bold. The duke’s bailiff intervened swiftly, ordering the restoration of her judicial apparatus. Yet the resulting situation was remarkably revealing: there were now competing gallows at Vauconcourt.
Jeanne had erected her own. Marie had replaced the one that had been destroyed. The physical landscape therefore contained rival claims to jurisdiction.
The duke’s officer resolved the problem in a particularly significant manner. Rather than simply declaring which gallows was legitimate, he had a condemned man, Jean dit Clerc, executed at Marie’s gallows. The execution thereby transformed the structure from a contested object into an officially functioning instrument of justice.
Just as important was the manner in which the execution was recorded: it took place peacefully and without anyone objecting.
That detail matters. The legitimacy of the gallows did not rest solely upon the duke’s intervention. It was reinforced by the absence of local resistance. Silence itself became a form of political recognition.
The episode therefore reveals an important feature of medieval government: authority required more than the capacity to issue commands. It also depended upon subjects accepting, or at least not actively resisting, the visible manifestations of that authority.
The speed of the duke’s response was also significant. Vauconcourt lay near the northern frontier of the principality, an area where jurisdictions overlapped and competing powers were particularly active. Restoring Marie’s gallows was consequently a way of securing the duke’s own expanding political sphere.
Jean Breton and the limits of princely justice
A more dangerous confrontation occurred in 1391, in the Jura, amid a major political conflict between Philip the Bold and Jean III of Chalon-Arlay, one of the most powerful noblemen in the region.
The duke’s expansion of princely authority threatened the independence traditionally enjoyed by great noble families. Jean III responded dramatically. In April 1391, his men murdered Guillemin Faguier, a ducal sergeant who was actively carrying out princely policy. The duke immediately characterised the killing as a crime against his own majesty.
One of those responsible, a receiver named Jean Breton, was captured and hanged on 9 June 1391.
The execution was itself a political statement. Breton was not simply being punished for an ordinary homicide. His death demonstrated that the duke intended to defend his officers and enforce his authority even within a region dominated by one of his most powerful rivals.
The location of the gallows was crucial. The execution took place close to Jean III’s possessions, in a politically fragmented area where ducal and seigneurial jurisdictions existed side by side. The gallows thus functioned as a deliberate assertion of princely power inside territory strongly associated with the Chalon-Arlay family.
The response came three weeks later.
During the night of 30 June, men associated with Jean III removed Breton’s body from the gallows. They transported it to Frasne, a settlement belonging to the lord of Chalon-Arlay, and buried it near the local cemetery.
The gallows themselves, however, remained standing.
This distinction was crucial. Removing the body challenged the duke’s justice, but leaving the gallows intact stopped short of destroying the physical symbol of his authority. The local population had crossed a line, but apparently had not yet crossed the most dangerous one.
The duke therefore faced a difficult choice. He could order Breton’s body to be exhumed and returned to the gallows, reaffirming the punishment in its most literal form. But doing so risked provoking a wider rebellion.
An investigation was ordered to discover what local inhabitants thought would happen if the duke attempted to restore the corpse. The resulting testimony revealed an intensely hostile political climate. In the lands of Jean of Chalon-Arlay, many inhabitants regarded the duke’s forces almost as an invading power and wished to preserve their autonomy.
One testimony even described an alliance among local communities, supposedly sworn on the Gospels, to resist the duke, attack places associated with his authority and destroy the “justice” where Jean Breton had been hanged.
The political meaning of the gallows was now unmistakable. Its destruction was imagined as an act of rebellion.
The wooden effigy
Portrait of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342-1404) – Wikimedia Commons
Philip the Bold ultimately chose compromise.
Rather than risk the consequences of exhuming Breton’s corpse and returning it to the gallows, he ordered the construction of a wooden figure in Breton’s likeness, which was then hanged in his place.
This apparently strange solution made political sense. The purpose of the execution was not merely to kill Breton. It was to demonstrate that the murder of a princely officer had been punished and that the duke possessed the authority to impose justice.
A wooden effigy could preserve that message without provoking the population into open revolt.
The episode illustrates how flexible medieval punishment could be when political considerations intervened. The duke maintained the symbolic function of the gallows while avoiding a direct confrontation with a hostile population.
The gallows remained upright. The body was absent. In a sense, the prince had achieved a partial victory.
The episode also shows that the physical possession of the gallows was not enough. The duke needed to ensure that his justice could continue to be recognised and respected. Authority was therefore negotiated at the foot of the gallows themselves.
The gallows of the Lavières: confronting Besançon
The third and perhaps most revealing case concerned the gallows of the Lavières, erected near the walls of Besançon around Christmas 1390.
Besançon occupied a unique political position. As an imperial city, it was an enclave within the wider Burgundian political landscape and possessed a strong tradition of autonomy. Philip the Bold nevertheless had important ambitions in relation to the city.
A treaty of protection concluded in 1386 had created new possibilities for ducal intervention. Philip promised to preserve the city’s privileges and liberties while providing military protection. At the same time, however, the agreement created a degree of judicial dependence upon the duke’s officials at nearby Châtillon-le-Duc.
The arrangement was carefully restricted: Besançon was not simply incorporated into the ordinary hierarchy of the duke’s courts. Yet it introduced a new form of legal permeability. The city, previously largely insulated from princely justice, now provided the duke with a potential route for intervention.
The Lavières were particularly suitable for exploiting this ambiguity.
The site lay in a poorly defined zone between the territory associated with Châtillon-le-Duc and the suburban territory of Besançon. For the duke’s officials, the area belonged to the duke. For the Bisontins, its status was much more contentious.
The erection of the gallows therefore amounted to a calculated political gesture. Philip was not merely installing a place of execution. He was putting the possibility of his justice on display immediately outside Besançon.
The city reacted forcefully.
In January 1391, representatives of Besançon went to the site and questioned the ducal sergeants who were constructing the gallows. The workers initially claimed that they were acting on the orders of the ducal bailiff. The Bisontins then travelled to Châtillon-le-Duc to establish whether the duke himself had authorised the construction.
Eventually, the officials admitted that he had.
The duke’s position was uncompromising: the gallows were being erected on what he considered his own territory and jurisdiction. His officers went further, asserting that his sovereignty extended right up to the walls of Besançon.
For the city, this was intolerable.
The Bisontins symbolically protested against the construction by throwing stones at the gallows. Their objection was not simply to the structure itself. They rejected the political meaning attached to it: the suggestion that they were subject to the duke’s judicial authority.
Here the contrast with Vauconcourt is striking. At Vauconcourt, the duke’s justice was ultimately validated by the absence of local opposition. At the Lavières, there was no such consensus. The gallows became an object of collective resistance.
Gallows and the struggle for power
The Gibbet of Montfaucon outside medieval Paris, depicted by Jean Fouquet in the Grandes Chroniques de France, c. 1460. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 6465, fol. 236r
These three episodes demonstrate that medieval gallows were far more than instruments of punishment.
At Vauconcourt, the gallows served to establish which noblewoman possessed high justice, while the duke’s intervention converted a contested structure into a legitimate one.
In the Jura, the gallows became an instrument through which Philip the Bold sought to penetrate the political space dominated by Jean of Chalon-Arlay. The subsequent removal of Jean Breton’s corpse revealed the limits of that authority, forcing the duke to compromise by using an effigy.
At the Lavières, the gallows represented an even broader challenge: the attempt to extend princely justice towards an autonomous imperial city. Their construction was therefore met not with passive acceptance but with determined rejection.
Across all three cases, the gallows acted simultaneously on several levels. They were judicial structures, because they enabled executions; territorial markers, because they signalled the jurisdiction of their owner; and political symbols, because they made claims about sovereignty visible to the population.
Their effectiveness depended upon recognition.
A gallows could be erected quickly, but maintaining its authority was more difficult. It had to be left standing. Its executions had to proceed without effective opposition. Its legitimacy had to be accepted by local communities. Conversely, pulling it down, removing the body of a condemned man, or contesting its location could challenge the political authority behind it.
This is why the phrase “war of the gallows” is so apt. The conflicts were not really about wooden structures. They were about who had the right to command, judge and punish within a particular piece of territory.
The making of the Burgundian state
The significance of these disputes extends beyond the history of punishment. They offer a window onto the formation of the Burgundian polity itself.
Philip the Bold inherited and developed a collection of territories whose political traditions, jurisdictions and forms of allegiance varied considerably. In Franche-Comté, his authority was especially complicated. He was a new ruler operating within a principality of the Empire, where powerful noble families and autonomous communities already possessed deeply established political identities.
The expansion of princely justice was therefore also an expansion of the state.
Every new jurisdiction, every ducal officer and every protected community potentially extended the reach of the prince. Every gallows erected in a contested area made that expansion visible.
But the process was not linear. Authority advanced, encountered resistance and sometimes retreated. Philip could assert his claims forcefully at one moment and compromise at another. The gallows of the Lavières may have represented a bold assertion of jurisdiction, but the resistance of Besançon demonstrated that political authority could not simply be imposed through physical occupation.
The landscape itself became a record of this negotiation.
The history of the gallows in late fourteenth-century Franche-Comté reveals a fundamental truth about medieval power: sovereignty had to be seen to be believed.
The gallows stood at the intersection of law, territory and political authority. Their physical presence proclaimed who possessed high justice; their destruction challenged that claim; their survival could signify acceptance; and their contested location exposed the uncertain boundaries of political power.
For Philip the Bold, they were particularly useful instruments in the gradual construction of a Burgundian state. Yet the cases of Vauconcourt, Jean Breton and the Lavières show that princely authority depended upon more than military strength or legal claims. It also required negotiation with nobles, communities and urban governments.
At Vauconcourt, silence helped legitimise the duke’s intervention. In the lands of Chalon-Arlay, resistance forced him to moderate his punishment. At Besançon, the erection of a gallows provoked an outright rejection of the political claim it embodied.
The gallows were therefore not merely places where justice ended. They were places where politics began: physical monuments through which rulers and subjects continually tested the limits of authority, jurisdiction and obedience. In the emerging Burgundian state, to keep the gallows standing was, quite literally, to keep a claim to power standing with them.
Dr Lorris Chevalier, who has a Ph.D. in medieval literature, is a historical advisor for movies, including The Last Duel and Napoleon. Click here to view his website.
In fourteenth-century Burgundy, gallows were more than places of execution: they were powerful symbols of justice, territory and political authority. Lorris Chevalier explores how disputes over these structures became part of a wider struggle for power in the emerging Burgundian state.
By Lorris Chevalier
In medieval Europe, political authority was not exercised only through charters, courts and armed force. It was also made visible in the landscape. Boundary stones, signs bearing the ruler’s emblem, toll markers, roads and fortified gates all helped to define the territory over which a prince claimed authority. Among the most striking of these territorial markers were the patibulary forks, or gallows: structures used for public executions and the prolonged display of the bodies of the condemned.
In the emerging Burgundian state of the late fourteenth century, gallows acquired a significance that went far beyond the punishment of criminals. To erect a gallows was to make a claim about jurisdiction. To destroy one was to challenge that claim. To leave it standing could amount to accepting the authority it represented.
This is particularly clear in the County of Burgundy, or Franche-Comté, during the rule of Philip the Bold, the first Valois Duke of Burgundy, who became Count of Burgundy in 1384. Between 1380 and 1400, several disputes over gallows reveal a broader struggle over sovereignty, jurisdiction and political allegiance. These conflicts might aptly be described as a “war of the gallows”: a series of confrontations in which the physical presence of the gallows became a means of negotiating, asserting and resisting princely power.
Gallows as territorial markers
A medieval political territory was both a physical space and a social construction. Authority had to be made visible through objects and places that people could recognise. Walls and gates defined towns; roads and bridges connected and controlled territories; boundary stones and signs marked jurisdictional limits.
Gallows belonged to this same world of political symbolism.
They were not simply functional structures for carrying out executions. They were called justices in contemporary records, a revealing term that connected the physical structure directly to the judicial authority of its owner. A gallows proclaimed that the lord who erected it possessed high justice: the right to judge serious crimes and, above all, to impose death.
Yet a gallows could only function as a political symbol if its claim was recognised. Its authority depended upon a degree of local acceptance. A structure that was pulled down, ignored or openly contested could become evidence not of power, but of the limits of power.
The disputes of late fourteenth-century Franche-Comté demonstrate precisely this tension.
Vauconcourt: when two gallows claimed the same jurisdiction
One of the clearest examples occurred at Vauconcourt in 1387, in what began as a dispute between two noblewomen.
Marie de Rougemont, Lady of Rupt, exercised seigneurial authority on behalf of her minor son. Her rival, Jeanne, Lady of Thuillières, challenged Marie’s claim to high justice over the neighbouring communities of Vauconcourt and La Neuvelle. Rather than resolving the dispute through negotiation, Jeanne resorted to direct action. With an armed force, she travelled to Vauconcourt and pulled down and demolished Marie’s gallows.
The destruction was much more than an act of vandalism. By removing the gallows, Jeanne was physically challenging Marie’s jurisdiction. If the gallows represented high justice, destroying it was a direct attack on the territorial presence of that justice.
Marie had already placed herself under the duke’s protection, however, and appealed to Philip the Bold. The duke’s bailiff intervened swiftly, ordering the restoration of her judicial apparatus. Yet the resulting situation was remarkably revealing: there were now competing gallows at Vauconcourt.
Jeanne had erected her own. Marie had replaced the one that had been destroyed. The physical landscape therefore contained rival claims to jurisdiction.
The duke’s officer resolved the problem in a particularly significant manner. Rather than simply declaring which gallows was legitimate, he had a condemned man, Jean dit Clerc, executed at Marie’s gallows. The execution thereby transformed the structure from a contested object into an officially functioning instrument of justice.
Just as important was the manner in which the execution was recorded: it took place peacefully and without anyone objecting.
That detail matters. The legitimacy of the gallows did not rest solely upon the duke’s intervention. It was reinforced by the absence of local resistance. Silence itself became a form of political recognition.
The episode therefore reveals an important feature of medieval government: authority required more than the capacity to issue commands. It also depended upon subjects accepting, or at least not actively resisting, the visible manifestations of that authority.
The speed of the duke’s response was also significant. Vauconcourt lay near the northern frontier of the principality, an area where jurisdictions overlapped and competing powers were particularly active. Restoring Marie’s gallows was consequently a way of securing the duke’s own expanding political sphere.
Jean Breton and the limits of princely justice
A more dangerous confrontation occurred in 1391, in the Jura, amid a major political conflict between Philip the Bold and Jean III of Chalon-Arlay, one of the most powerful noblemen in the region.
The duke’s expansion of princely authority threatened the independence traditionally enjoyed by great noble families. Jean III responded dramatically. In April 1391, his men murdered Guillemin Faguier, a ducal sergeant who was actively carrying out princely policy. The duke immediately characterised the killing as a crime against his own majesty.
One of those responsible, a receiver named Jean Breton, was captured and hanged on 9 June 1391.
The execution was itself a political statement. Breton was not simply being punished for an ordinary homicide. His death demonstrated that the duke intended to defend his officers and enforce his authority even within a region dominated by one of his most powerful rivals.
The location of the gallows was crucial. The execution took place close to Jean III’s possessions, in a politically fragmented area where ducal and seigneurial jurisdictions existed side by side. The gallows thus functioned as a deliberate assertion of princely power inside territory strongly associated with the Chalon-Arlay family.
The response came three weeks later.
During the night of 30 June, men associated with Jean III removed Breton’s body from the gallows. They transported it to Frasne, a settlement belonging to the lord of Chalon-Arlay, and buried it near the local cemetery.
The gallows themselves, however, remained standing.
This distinction was crucial. Removing the body challenged the duke’s justice, but leaving the gallows intact stopped short of destroying the physical symbol of his authority. The local population had crossed a line, but apparently had not yet crossed the most dangerous one.
The duke therefore faced a difficult choice. He could order Breton’s body to be exhumed and returned to the gallows, reaffirming the punishment in its most literal form. But doing so risked provoking a wider rebellion.
An investigation was ordered to discover what local inhabitants thought would happen if the duke attempted to restore the corpse. The resulting testimony revealed an intensely hostile political climate. In the lands of Jean of Chalon-Arlay, many inhabitants regarded the duke’s forces almost as an invading power and wished to preserve their autonomy.
One testimony even described an alliance among local communities, supposedly sworn on the Gospels, to resist the duke, attack places associated with his authority and destroy the “justice” where Jean Breton had been hanged.
The political meaning of the gallows was now unmistakable. Its destruction was imagined as an act of rebellion.
The wooden effigy
Philip the Bold ultimately chose compromise.
Rather than risk the consequences of exhuming Breton’s corpse and returning it to the gallows, he ordered the construction of a wooden figure in Breton’s likeness, which was then hanged in his place.
This apparently strange solution made political sense. The purpose of the execution was not merely to kill Breton. It was to demonstrate that the murder of a princely officer had been punished and that the duke possessed the authority to impose justice.
A wooden effigy could preserve that message without provoking the population into open revolt.
The episode illustrates how flexible medieval punishment could be when political considerations intervened. The duke maintained the symbolic function of the gallows while avoiding a direct confrontation with a hostile population.
The gallows remained upright. The body was absent. In a sense, the prince had achieved a partial victory.
The episode also shows that the physical possession of the gallows was not enough. The duke needed to ensure that his justice could continue to be recognised and respected. Authority was therefore negotiated at the foot of the gallows themselves.
The gallows of the Lavières: confronting Besançon
The third and perhaps most revealing case concerned the gallows of the Lavières, erected near the walls of Besançon around Christmas 1390.
Besançon occupied a unique political position. As an imperial city, it was an enclave within the wider Burgundian political landscape and possessed a strong tradition of autonomy. Philip the Bold nevertheless had important ambitions in relation to the city.
A treaty of protection concluded in 1386 had created new possibilities for ducal intervention. Philip promised to preserve the city’s privileges and liberties while providing military protection. At the same time, however, the agreement created a degree of judicial dependence upon the duke’s officials at nearby Châtillon-le-Duc.
The arrangement was carefully restricted: Besançon was not simply incorporated into the ordinary hierarchy of the duke’s courts. Yet it introduced a new form of legal permeability. The city, previously largely insulated from princely justice, now provided the duke with a potential route for intervention.
The Lavières were particularly suitable for exploiting this ambiguity.
The site lay in a poorly defined zone between the territory associated with Châtillon-le-Duc and the suburban territory of Besançon. For the duke’s officials, the area belonged to the duke. For the Bisontins, its status was much more contentious.
The erection of the gallows therefore amounted to a calculated political gesture. Philip was not merely installing a place of execution. He was putting the possibility of his justice on display immediately outside Besançon.
The city reacted forcefully.
In January 1391, representatives of Besançon went to the site and questioned the ducal sergeants who were constructing the gallows. The workers initially claimed that they were acting on the orders of the ducal bailiff. The Bisontins then travelled to Châtillon-le-Duc to establish whether the duke himself had authorised the construction.
Eventually, the officials admitted that he had.
The duke’s position was uncompromising: the gallows were being erected on what he considered his own territory and jurisdiction. His officers went further, asserting that his sovereignty extended right up to the walls of Besançon.
For the city, this was intolerable.
The Bisontins symbolically protested against the construction by throwing stones at the gallows. Their objection was not simply to the structure itself. They rejected the political meaning attached to it: the suggestion that they were subject to the duke’s judicial authority.
Here the contrast with Vauconcourt is striking. At Vauconcourt, the duke’s justice was ultimately validated by the absence of local opposition. At the Lavières, there was no such consensus. The gallows became an object of collective resistance.
Gallows and the struggle for power
These three episodes demonstrate that medieval gallows were far more than instruments of punishment.
At Vauconcourt, the gallows served to establish which noblewoman possessed high justice, while the duke’s intervention converted a contested structure into a legitimate one.
In the Jura, the gallows became an instrument through which Philip the Bold sought to penetrate the political space dominated by Jean of Chalon-Arlay. The subsequent removal of Jean Breton’s corpse revealed the limits of that authority, forcing the duke to compromise by using an effigy.
At the Lavières, the gallows represented an even broader challenge: the attempt to extend princely justice towards an autonomous imperial city. Their construction was therefore met not with passive acceptance but with determined rejection.
Across all three cases, the gallows acted simultaneously on several levels. They were judicial structures, because they enabled executions; territorial markers, because they signalled the jurisdiction of their owner; and political symbols, because they made claims about sovereignty visible to the population.
Their effectiveness depended upon recognition.
A gallows could be erected quickly, but maintaining its authority was more difficult. It had to be left standing. Its executions had to proceed without effective opposition. Its legitimacy had to be accepted by local communities. Conversely, pulling it down, removing the body of a condemned man, or contesting its location could challenge the political authority behind it.
This is why the phrase “war of the gallows” is so apt. The conflicts were not really about wooden structures. They were about who had the right to command, judge and punish within a particular piece of territory.
The making of the Burgundian state
The significance of these disputes extends beyond the history of punishment. They offer a window onto the formation of the Burgundian polity itself.
Philip the Bold inherited and developed a collection of territories whose political traditions, jurisdictions and forms of allegiance varied considerably. In Franche-Comté, his authority was especially complicated. He was a new ruler operating within a principality of the Empire, where powerful noble families and autonomous communities already possessed deeply established political identities.
The expansion of princely justice was therefore also an expansion of the state.
Every new jurisdiction, every ducal officer and every protected community potentially extended the reach of the prince. Every gallows erected in a contested area made that expansion visible.
But the process was not linear. Authority advanced, encountered resistance and sometimes retreated. Philip could assert his claims forcefully at one moment and compromise at another. The gallows of the Lavières may have represented a bold assertion of jurisdiction, but the resistance of Besançon demonstrated that political authority could not simply be imposed through physical occupation.
The landscape itself became a record of this negotiation.
The history of the gallows in late fourteenth-century Franche-Comté reveals a fundamental truth about medieval power: sovereignty had to be seen to be believed.
The gallows stood at the intersection of law, territory and political authority. Their physical presence proclaimed who possessed high justice; their destruction challenged that claim; their survival could signify acceptance; and their contested location exposed the uncertain boundaries of political power.
For Philip the Bold, they were particularly useful instruments in the gradual construction of a Burgundian state. Yet the cases of Vauconcourt, Jean Breton and the Lavières show that princely authority depended upon more than military strength or legal claims. It also required negotiation with nobles, communities and urban governments.
At Vauconcourt, silence helped legitimise the duke’s intervention. In the lands of Chalon-Arlay, resistance forced him to moderate his punishment. At Besançon, the erection of a gallows provoked an outright rejection of the political claim it embodied.
The gallows were therefore not merely places where justice ended. They were places where politics began: physical monuments through which rulers and subjects continually tested the limits of authority, jurisdiction and obedience. In the emerging Burgundian state, to keep the gallows standing was, quite literally, to keep a claim to power standing with them.
Dr Lorris Chevalier, who has a Ph.D. in medieval literature, is a historical advisor for movies, including The Last Duel and Napoleon. Click here to view his website.
Click here to read more from Lorris Chevalier
Further Readings:
Michelle Bubenicek, “‘Et encourt sont les dictes forches en la dicte place toutes droictes…’: La guerre des gibets dans l’État bourguignon naissant (Franche-Comté, 1380-1400),” Criminocorpus (2015)
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