Archives Nationales Séries JJ 155 folio 65 number 113, Himanis p. 143
Charles etc We make known to all present and to come to us has been humbly exposed the part of Jehannot Dougne laborer with arms, aged 27 years or thereabouts, living in Oulchy la Ville. That around the Pentecost that was in the year 1399 he took by marriage Ysabel his wife and with her lived until around the 16th day of November last passed, on the which day his said wife was taken and put in the prison of Oulchy le Chastel for suspicion of having drowned in the ford of the said town a baby of hers at night without having had baptism. For the which act she was detained as prisoner since the said day until around the 15th day of May following after at which tim for the compassion, affection, and love that he had for his said wife who was a young woman of around 23 years, he left the said Oulchy la Ville equipped with a long ladder of around 12 steps the which he carried from there under the door of the said Chastel between the drawbridge and the door of it which was closed and the said bridge lowered. And by the said door ladder he mounted above the said door by the place where the door s groove of the said Chastel usually runs down to the gate of the said prison where his said wife was, the which prison is above the said door of the said Chastel and next to it and he broke the door with the guard the which he broken and damaged with a bar from a gated window that he had brought from his said home and from the said prison he took and let out his said wife, let her down by the said ladder and took her to the church of the said town of Oulchy from which she left and absented herself and he does not know where. For the which act the said exposant was taken and placed in the said prisons where he has been for a long time and still is in very great poverty and misery destined to miserably finish his days there if on this we do not impart to him our grace and mercy as he says, requesting that because in all other deeds he has been a man of good reputation and renown without having been taken nor accused of any other villainous act or reproach, except that by his simpleness he swore and affirmed in judgment that he was not at all culpable of the said act and infraction, we would like to be piteous and merciful towards him and to prefer in this party pity and mercy to the rigor of justice. Therefore we, considering these things, to the said exposant in the case, expecting the long prison that he suffered for this, have acquitted, remitted, and pardoned and by these present by special grace, full power, and royal authority, we acquit, remit, and pardon the deeds and acts abovesaid, as much of the prison break as of the perjury, and of having taken his said wife out of the prisons, with all penalty, fine, and offense, corporal, criminal, and civil, which he could have incurred for this against us and justice. And we restore and replace him to his good reputation and renown in the country and to his goods not confiscated, satisfaction made to the first party and before all wishes if it is not done. So we give and in commandment to the Bailli of Vitry and to all our other justices or to their lieutenants and to each of them make known as appertains to him that by our present grace, remission, and pardon allow and suffer the said exposant to enjoy and use peaceably without impeding him or allowing him to be impeded in his body nor in his said goods in any manner to the contrary. In imposing on this to our procurer perpetual silence and that it be a firm and stable thing forever, we have had placed on these present our seal without in other things our right and the other in everything etc. Given in Paris in the month of June the year of grace 1400 and of our reign the 20th.
By the King at the relation of counsel
Freron~
Charles etc Savoir faisons atous presens et avenir anous avoir este humblement expose de la partie de Jehannot dougne laboureur de bras aagie de xxvij ans ou environ demourant a ouchie la ville que environ la pentecouste qui fu lan mil ccc iiijxx xix il prise par mariage ysabel sa femme et avec ycelle demoura iusques environ le xvje jour de novembre derrnier passe lequel jour sa dite femme fu prise et menee es prisons de ouchie le chastel pour souspecon davoir noie ou gue de la dite ville un sien enfant de nuit sanz avoir eu batesme pour lequel cas elle aeste detenue prisonier depuis le dit jour Jusques environ le xve jour de may apres ensuivant auquel temps pour la compassion affeccon et amour quil avoir a sadite femme qui est jeunes femme de environ xxiij ans se parti dudit ouchie la ville garny dune longue eschelle de environ xij pas la quelle il apporta dilec soubz la porte dudit chastel entre le pont levis et le porte dicelui qui estoit close et le dit pont a batu et par laditte porte eschelle monta desseur la dite porte par le lieu ou la porte s coulisse dudit chastel soult couler jusques aluis dela prison ou estoit sa dite femme la quelle prison est desseur la porte dicelui chastel et acostiere dicelle et rompy luis par le poultire lequel il rompi et brisa dun barrian de fenestre trilliee quil avoit apportee de son dit hostel et dicelle prison tira et mist hors sa dite femme avala ycelle par la dite eschielle et la mena en leglise de la dicte ville douchie de la quelle elle sest partie et absentee et nescet en quel lieu pour lequel cas le dit exposant aeste pris et mis es dites prisons esquelles il aeste longuement et est encores en tresgrant povrete et misere en aventure dy finer miserablement ses jours se surce ne lui est impartie notre grace et misericorde sicomme il dit requerant comme en tous autres cas il ait este homme de bonne fame et renommee sanz avoir este reprins ou actaint daucun autre villain cas et reprouche excepte que par sa simplesse il jura et afferma en jugement que dudit cas et infraccion il nestoint point coulpables nous surce lui vueillons estre piteables et misericors et preferer en ceste partie pitie et misericorde a rigueur de iustice Pourquoy nous ces choses consideres audit exposant oudit cas actendue la longue prison quil apour ce soufferte avons quicte remis et pardonne et par ces presentes de grace especial pleine puissance et auctorite royal quictons remettons et pardonnons les faiz et cas dessusdiz tant de prison brisee comme de pariurement et davoir mis hors sa dicte femme dicelles prisons avec toute peine amende et offense corporele criminele et civile en quoy pource il puet estre encouruz envers nous et iustice Et le restituons et remettons asa bonne fame et renommee au pais et a ses biens non confisquez Satisfacion faite a partie premier et avant toute envie se faite nest Si donnons en mandement au bailli de victry et atous noz autres justices ou aleurs lieuxtenans et achacun deulx savoir alui appartenans que de notre presente grace remission et pardon facent et souffent le dit exposant joir et user paisiblement sanz lempescher ou souffrir estre empesche en corps ne en ses diz biens en aucune maniere au contraire En imposant surce a notre procureur silence perpetuel et que ce soit ferme et estable a tousiours nous avons fait mettre a ces presentes notre scel sauf en autres chose notre droit et Lautrui en toutes etc Donne a paris en mois de juing lan de grace mil cccc et de notre regne le xxe
Par le Roy a larelacion du conseil
Freron ~
Summary
In 1399, Jehannot Dougne, age 27, laborer with arms, married Ysabel, age 23. They were married around Pentecost, which would have been on May 19th of that year. On November 16th, his wife was taken from Oulchy la Ville to the prison of Oulchy le Chastel for suspicion of having drowned her baby in the ford before the child was baptized. Ysabel spent six months in prison until May 15th. At that point, Jehannot’s compassion, affection, and love for his wife inspired him to leave Oulchy la Ville with a 12 step long ladder to head to Oulchy le Chastel to break her out. He placed the ladder between the drawbridge and door of the Chastel to cross. Then, he mounted the ladder above the door where the door’s groove usually runs down to the prison’s gate. The prison where Ysabel was being held was above the door of the Chastel. He broke the guarded door with a bar from a gated window that he had brought from home. Jehannot let Ysabel out. She hurried down the ladder, and Jehannot took her to the town’s church where she sought sanctuary. Ysabel disappeared from the church, and Jehannot does not know where she went. For assisting Ysabel’s escape and perjuring himself by claiming that he did not, Jehannot was taken to prison where he sat in great misery to finish his days had his pardon letter not been answered with grace and mercy. Before his crime, Jehannot was a man with a good reputation despite this one action. With this in mind, the King agreed to restore his reputation and pardon his crime in June of 1400.
Essays
Medieval Attitudes Towards Womens’ Sexuality and Sexual Sin
Ysabel and Jehannot Dougne were married around Pentecost. Ysabel was arrested for suspicion of having drowned her infant baby in November of the same year. Assuming the child was not prematurely born, the child had to be conceived before Ysabel and Jehannot were married. As discussed in the essay about infanticide, having a tangible reminder of sexual sin was often a motivation for committing infanticide. It was an effort to prevent public shame. Infanticide could have also been an effort to make Ysabel’s marriage more pleasant considering “husbands had the right to limited use of force to correct all dependents, including wives.” She might have feared a child out of wedlock would be enough to establish patterns of domestic violence that would be difficult to break so early in a marriage. Though if Jehannot’s love and affection for her that he claims is what drove him to break Ysabel out of prison are authentic, this might not have been the case. While Ysabel might have had real concerns about private abuse as a result of conceiving a child out of wedlock based on cultural patterns she observed, her public reputation would likely have been able to survive an illegitimate child. In the early Middle Ages, public intervention in adultery cases increased. However, by the twelfth century, these affairs were being handled privately. The twelfth century began to value the “Christian, monogamous, indissoluble marriage” above all else, and public intervention was not the best method to retain a marriage. While this emphasis on marriage did make adultery a more serious offense, the Christian response to handle adultery was no longer public shame but “penitence on the part of the wife, pardon by the husband, and reconciliation of the couple.” While Ysabel was raised in a culture that entangled shame with the way her child was conceived, the church valued the convention of marriage above all else and might have made it out unscathed. Also, more recent research supports that openly sexually active unmarried women might not have been as stigmatized as previously thought. Emily Hutchinson asserts that there are two primary lenses to look at female sexuality throughout the time. The first was “the formal, legal, male knowledge that categorised, interrogated and judged.” This male gaze reduced women to the chaste, honest virgin and the unchaste, dishonest women who had sex outside marital norms. This lens of looking at a woman’s sexuality would have been critical of Ysabel’s pregnancy out of wedlock. However, the second way to look at a woman’s sexuality was through her “fama,” or her status within her community. Women still might have been blamed for the violence they endured, but they were not necessarily socially stigmatized by their communities. Hutchinson writes of a poor chambermaid, Colette Phelippe, who had a child out of wedlock. This child was raised by another man after its birth and her neighbors still agreed that she had a good reputation and was living a blameless life. This might not have been the case in every instance, but there is evidence that, depending on the next steps a woman takes, she could save her reputation and continue engaging with the community as an upstanding citizen even after public discovery of sexual sin. It stands true that many the plots of many medieval romance stories involved a “beautiful adulterous queen bound to the stake” only to be rescued or spared. Mercy was intrinsic to the legal system and forgiving women of sexual sins was not outside of that mercy’s domain.
Prison Break
In his book The Medieval Prison, that breaks down the ins and outs of the medieval prison, G. Geltner, asserts that there are five ways out: “in a solemn procession,” “in broad daylight,” “by the cover of night,” “with the help of a friend,” or “in the coroner’s cart.” Ysabel made her way out in broad daylight with the help of a friend. Though prisons were relatively integrated with the public, escapes were rare. However, pardon letters refer to escapes from prisons enough to suggest some complicity of the jailers. This might explain how Jehannot was able to waltz into the complex with a twelve-rung ladder without suspicion. The low number of escapes was likely due to prisoners limited options once outside prison walls “for a successful escape only begins by leaving the prison; how to survive beyond its walls is a different challenge altogether.” Spiraling debt was a major danger to any medieval prisoner with no way to earn money, though merchants were sometimes able to manage their business from prison. However, Ysabel would not have had these options since she was a woman. Prisoners that were originally from another place outside of where they were being held had a higher chance of escape. Therefore, Ysabel did have a better shot at escape considering she was not from the place where she was being held.
Prison Life for Women
Prison life for women began with the arrest. Convicted female criminals were both physically and metaphysically removed from their communities, meaning that “no further knowledge of their bodies or personhood would be produced or circulated.” They would then enter the prison walls; the walls that “gave rulers, lords, and masters the power of knowledge, knowledge of who was going where with what, and knowledge of their intent.” Ross Samson suggested the walls that rendered prisoners powerless. However, this view of medieval prisoners is a bit reductive. Unlike modern prisons, medieval prisons were in central locations, highly accessible, and had frequent interactions with the outside world. Because of this accessibility medieval prisons “never became liminal spaces and their inmates never became liminal people,” asserted G. Geltner is his research of Italian medieval prisons. The experience of women in medieval prisons was different from the experience of men for several reasons. Prisons were reluctant to establish female wards. Until 1328, in Bologna, incarcerated women were instead sent to monasteries. This reluctance was likely due to the fact that female inmates “required more resources per capita” when fully segregated from men. Society viewed prison as an inherently male place. In the spaces where the men stayed, people were loosely grouped by type of crime committed and socioeconomic standing. However, less space and resources for women meant that female inmates were “usually crammed into one, albeit separate and protected space.” While Ysabel was likely held in a separate space for the purpose of protection, the prison would have grouped her in with all other women, regardless of crime, because of beliefs that even the most dangerous woman was less of a threat than the most docile man. Geltner also asserted that women’s isolation from the rest of the prison left them less options to better their condition and made them more prone to abuse. He points to records of prison employees threatening female inmates to have sex with them. Had Ysabel been watched by guards such as this one in her six months in prison, there would have been little she could do to improve her life being confined to the women’s cell. There were also stories of sexual assault as a sick form of first night hazing in the men’s quarters as well. Though Jehannot was in prison for a much shorter time, there is a chance he could have been subjected to violation as well. Geltner’s case study of one medieval Italian prison, Le Stinche, suggested that women were relatively safe from harm. However, he makes it clear that this was not necessarily the case in all prisons. For both men and women, prison would create a sense of social disconnection as prisoners are forced to learn and navigate the social order within prison’s walls. Geltner suggests that female prisoners, as a result of prison’s societal association with masculinity, that the mental solitude experienced by women is a double punishment: “once for their specific crime, and once again for disobeying a social script.” Jehannot’s pardon letter writes of the terrors he experienced in his month in prison. Meanwhile, Ysabel spent six months in prison. Their experiences would have been different because of the nature of having separate spaces for women to stay, but just because women were kept separately with the intention of protecting imprisoned women does not mean that a separate cell was able to protect them from mental decline and abuse.
Further reading: Geltner, The Medieval Prison and Geltner, A Cell of One’s Own
Reputation
As Peter Arnada and Walter Prevenier say in their book Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble, “honor secures self-worth and guarantees social place.” In a sense, honor was measurable. Someone’s good legal name was a form of social capital. For men, reputation was built through success in “economic, social, and familial dealings.” It was considered the responsibility of the men in the family to protect the family’s reputation. Jehannot would have been expected to restore his family’s honor upon his wife’s imprisonment, so staging the prison break might have been part of a greater plan to reclaim his family’s honor. His own honor was also a compelling factor in his pardon considering the language emphasized that “in all other deeds he has been a man of good reputation and renown.” Language like this was common in pardon letters, making one seem to have a good reputation outside of the one infraction that they need pardoning for. Wives’ reputations were viewed as an extension of their husbands, but their behavior could still have negative impact on the family’s reputation. Violence was often the natural defense to ones honor being threatened in one way or another. Maintaining one’s honor was both a reason to kill and a reason to die. While there were several facets of reputation for men, for women, “their good repute was almost solely based on their sexual purity.” The discovery of Ysabel’s baby would have been evidence of sexual impurity. The one aspect of honor that she was expected to uphold would be threatened. Violence was her solution to this when she resorted to drowning her baby in a nearby stream upon its birth. Outside of the legal repercussions, which were actually more likely to be pardoned than not, women deemed sexually impure might have more to fear from their natal kin. Adulterous women were sometimes killed by their own families as an “honor” killing as punishment for impacting the family reputation. Negatively impacting her family’s honor was enough that, even if she’s managed to be legally pardoned and had a gentle husband, she might not have had family who would be so understanding.
Runaway Wives
In the 12th century, writings of Hugh of Saint Victor defined marriage as a holy sacrament, and the church had the power to define, sanction, and occasionally annul all marriages. Considering this importance conferred on marriage, wives that left their husbands were left with few options. The situation that thrust Ysabel into filling the role of “runaway wife” was not standard, but we can learn about her realm of possibilities from other cases where wives left their husbands in medieval France. Since the church placed so much value on keeping marriages together, there were spiritual implications to a wife leaving her husband. The church sometimes threatened runaway wives with excommunication. Beyond the spiritual concerns, there were not many ways for a woman to support herself financially. The term “singlewoman” was almost synonymous with “prostitute” in this period because there were not many ways for a woman to earn money outside of sex work. There is a real chance that, upon escaping conviction, Ysabel would have resorted to sex work to stay alive, assuming she made it to a place where she would not have been imprisoned again. Unless a runaway wife was reunited with her husband, there is little documentation of what might have happened to her, but we have some sense of the options that would have been out there for Ysabel. Some runaway wives were able to make it to new places and even remarry. Women who did not find ways to financially rely on men in any capacity might have resorted to crime. Financially, it would have made the most sense for Ysabel to find a way to return home, but the fear of being imprisoned again or sentenced to a worse fate likely would have kept her from returning after Jehannot’s pardon letter was written. Outside of the church, there were repercussions for runaway wives and those who assisted runaway wives in common law court. These often involved paying husbands for goods the left with and those who assisted the wives might have been charged with ravishment. However, for many wives, “the greatest risk was a forced return to an unhappy husband.” While in his letter, Jehannot talks of the great affection he has for his wife that pushed him to break her out of prison, the fact that Ysabel was so fearful of his reaction to her illegitimate child that she committed infanticide suggests that he might not have expressed this love he boasts of in practice. Had Ysabel been able to return to a marriage with Jehannot without fear of being imprisoned again, she might have felt pressure to be a perfect wife from then on and Jehannot would be the final judge of whether or not she had fulfilled her promises.