The evidence of hearsay in criminal proceedings from Late Renaissance France

This article argues that Renaissance legal culture provided a robust means of evaluating the epistemological status of rumour, informed by the Roman law of proof. In order to do so, the article explores the meaning of hearsay evidence in criminal proceedings from late Renaissance France, focusing on a major series of interrogations for homicide in the Parlement of Paris. It contributes to legal history by demonstrating how the inquisitorial procedures employed by the Parlement’s magistrates exemplified the sophisticated Roman law of witness evidence concerning hearsay. And it contributes to social and cultural history by revealing how effectively people throughout the social hierarchy understood the significance of hearsay in all its forms, so that witnesses, the accused, and the magistrates leading their interrogations knew well how to manipulate hearsay evidence to achieve their ends in the courtroom. Ultimately, this approach reinforces the growing consensus among recent histories of communication concerning the continued primacy of oral culture in the new age of print, but it does so from a new perspective that emphasises the fundamental role that oral evidence played in creating legal knowledge.

serve to reinforce the assumptions of learned commentators who left a discerning engagement with rumour to literate elites. Histories of rumour written 'against the grain' in this sense focus on second-hand reports of the word on the street rather than the direct evidence of the word on the page, and so they have not engaged with the legal theory that structured the proceedings of a trial. The approach of this article is instead to read legal records 'along the archival grain' in order to focus on the procedures and conceptual assumptions deployed by the people who produced these records. How did the magistrates, scribes, and deponents interact in the process of recording interrogations? What standards of evidence did they put to the test? And what kinds of legal knowledge do these records represent? 10 The result of this approach is to reveal how people across pre-modern Europe, and Loisel's society of late Renaissance France in particular, had a robust means of evaluating the epistemological status of rumour which was informed by the Roman law of proof as it concerned hearsay. The Roman law of proof distinguished valid witnesses -who had a direct, eyewitness view of events, and should not be biased either in favour of the accused or against them -from invalid witnesses who could not be trusted, although jurists permitted magistrates a significant degree of discretion in discerning the status of the witnesses examined during the course of an investigation. 11 Roman law primarily informed the practice of elite magistrates, yet non-elites who gave testimony as part of inquisitorial procedures also understood well its basic principles and might manipulate them to their own ends. 12 This article demonstrates that deponents' storytelling skills in court extended to a firm grasp of the value of hearsay evidence. The ways in which deponents manipulated hearsay evidence, moreover, suggests that non-elites understood the dangers of the unbridled tongue, but also that they were willing to cite gossip if it suited them at a telling moment during an interrogation. Their lawminded approach to criminal proceedings suggests that such an understanding of the epistemological status of hearsay spread far outside the courtroom too. In this sense, the gap between Loisel's world of elite magistrates and the wider society on which they sat in judgement seems smaller than either Renaissance jurists or modern historians have allowed.  The best guide to the Roman law of proof in Renaissance France was the learned jurist and experienced magistrate Jean Milles de Souvigny, whose treatise Praxis criminis persequendi was first published in Paris in 1541, then reprinted in Lyon and Venice in the 1540s and 1550s, was widely consulted across the European legal community of the ius commune. His text served to demonstrate how the principles of Roman law aligned with the correct way to proceed in French criminal justice, following the major consolidation of court practice represented by the ordonnance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539. Hearsay encompassed several types of evidence for Souvigny. It included common rumour or renown, reported direct speech, and reported indirect speech, all of which he described as hearsay, evidence overheard (ex auditu) and heard from a third party (ex audito alieno). Souvigny began his analysis of hearsay evidence by stating firmly that 'the evidence of something that has been heard from someone else has no value as proof', a point that appears in similar terms in the criminal code known as the Carolina of the Holy Roman Empire (1532) but not in any French royal ordonnance, since those texts were intended more as guides to institutional processes than substantive legal codifications. 13 The image that accompanied Souvigny's discussion of hearsay evidence demonstrated his point, as it depicted in the top-right corner a witness who overheard what turned out to be a deadly fight at the public square below, but he did not have a clear view from behind his window and so Souvigny explained that the court could not count his evidence as valid proof (Fig. 1). 14 Yet Souvigny went on to develop a more flexible position than these general points might suggest. In a gloss he had established that common-fame evidence could be taken into account, so long as an earwitness named their source as an eyewitness who had been cross-examined. Much depended on whether the testimony made sense compared with other evidence or in the light of natural reason, Souvigny continued, for if it was inconclusive, irrational, or not pertaining to the case, then it could prove nothing at all. In the remainder of the gloss, Souvigny explained that what a witness believes they have heard or seen cannot be considered without supporting proof because they might be mistaken in their apprehension. All of these glosses depended on a dense network of references to Bartolist  Ultimately, Souvigny suggested that hearsay merited attention whatever its limits. Did practice correspond with theory? And, more specifically, what role did the evidence of hearsay play in criminal proceedings from late Renaissance France? In order to examine the evidentiary value of hearsay in practice, this article analyses a major series of homicide interrogations conducted as part of the preparatory or information-gathering stage of criminal proceedings in the high court of the Parlement of Paris, which represent some of the lengthiest and most considered evaluations of oral evidence of any criminal archive in Renaissance Europe. 16 Anybody condemned by a criminal court in France to a sentence of corporal punishment or one of equal severity had the right for their case to be heard on automatic appeal by a parlement with the cost of the appeal paid for by the subaltern court, often funded by the prosecuting party acting as plaintiff (partie civile). 17 This automatic appeal system ensured that the parlements could act as a check on the potentially over-zealous sentences given by their subordinate courts. As a court of appeal, the Parlement heard up to 800 cases concerning serious crime each year, drawn from subordinate courts as far as Lyon in the south and La Rochelle in the west. The Parlement saw its role primarily as a court of appeal, 'a sanctuary like the cities of refuge to which the children of God withdrew when they were pursued' in the terms of the avocat général Louis Servin during a hearing in the court's audience chamber in 1586. 18 The cases considered here show that the Parlement also accepted cases from litigants who made use of its justice directly when it acted as a court of the first instance or in order to confirm pardons issued by a chancery. 19 Quantitative analysis demonstrates that hearsay plays a numerically small role in the sample of cases analysed here. 20 What matters more than the frequency of appearances of these terms, however, is what significance the presiding judge gave to them. The magistrates in the Parlement of Paris generally steered their witnesses in interrogations away 16 The sample of 148 cases analysed in this article represents all those labelled 'assassination', 'homicide', and 'murder' in an inventory of the instruction series in the Parlement from the earliest case in 1570 until the end of the catalogue in 1623 (Archives nationales (hereafter AN) Inv.451 1er , covering AN X2B 1174-84). The analysis particularly focuses on fifty-six cases from that catalogue, selecting those for which it has been possible to identify the various stages of the case proceedings through record-linking with other series in the criminal archives of the Parlement, notably the registers of incarceration kept in the Archives de la Préfécture When hearsay evidence did appear during interrogations conducted in the criminal chamber of the Parlement of Paris, the court scribe typically marked it out as evidence by 'ouy dire [hearsay]', or more rarely 'bruit commun [common rumour]' and 'rumeur [rumour]', and these terms framed third party oral evidence in these witness depositions for homicide, as it did in Souvigny's conceptual discussion. 21 Allegations made by common rumour invoked knowledge that was widely established as being true and therefore worth investigating by the court, backed by an assumption that it should not be hard to find eyewitnesses to confirm the point. 22 Along these lines, most homicide investigations included a stock question as to whether the accused had a longstanding quarrel with the victim. 23 Quarrels depended on renown, and gossip about them spread easily, an association that Charles d'Aguerre exploited as he denied he was engaged in a feud with the deceased sieur de Bazauge, saying that 'a common rumour that was circulating' told of their quarrel but when he asked his rival 'whether or not this is true' he denied it. 24 In this way, d'Aguerre pre-empted potentially contradictory witness testimony by equating it with mere gossip. A stock question about the background to a quarrel could thereby set the scene for an interrogation but rarely served to gather affirmative evidence since it was simple to dismiss. Moments when hearsay appeared in the course of interrogations can reveal the ways in which magistrates attempted to place limits on its evidentiary value. Sometimes the magistrates in the Parlement themselves asked witnesses about matters of hearsay and so kept control over its presence in the courtroom. The conseiller Gaston de Grieu interrogated a group of royal officeholders in 1601 accused of murder, pillage, and rebellion in the village of Civry in the Loire valley. Grieu struggled to sift through the various crimes of which they had been accused. Interrogating the sergent Jean Huidoc, keen to piece conflicting reports together, Grieu asked Huidoc 'if he knows Michel Gorin, a notary at Civry, and whether he has heard it said that his house was robbed in the night?' Hidoc replied that 'he knows Gorin and has heard it said that Gorin's house was robbed and that Gorin is married to his [Huidoc's] cousin … He said that Gorin told him that he did not know who did this and that Gorin told him to investigate it'. 25 In this case, the conseiller Grieu reinforced his enquiry into hearsay by naming a particular victim of theft -the notary Michel Gorin -while Huidoc's reply not only reported what Gorin had told him but justified the report since Gorin had married his cousin. As the jurists recommended, in this case Grieu's rare but exemplary recourse to a question concerning hearsay was justified by the range of crimes he was investigating and it was circumscribed by enquiring about a particular reported conversation. Hearsay, rumour, and reputation played a particularly important role in the confrontation of witnesses. According to the 1539 ordonnance of Villers-Cotterêts (articles 153-7), after the presiding magistrate had taken a first initial deposition he then confirmed witnesses in their testimony and confronted the witnesses with the accused. He then gave the accused a chance to offer reproaches and argue that the witness' testimony should be considered invalid, and finally he asked the accused to confirm or deny the witness' testimony read to them. This procedure was especially lively in the case of Michel Josset, a former assistant to a tax official in Mortain, who was accused of killing Jehan Doissie, sieur de Tourchet. Josset denounced the witnesses that his opposing party set against him as false and suborned, as thieves, fornicators, and jealous litigants. For example, Josset told the court that the witness Jacques Champs would say what he was told for money, that 'he had taken part in a robbery from Pierre Guillard and tried to settle that case out of court with a notary', that he was a 'thief in the night' who 'boasted' of another grain theft, and that 'he had killed his first wife'. Champs replied that his wife lived at home with him and that he was a good man, and the court did not give Josset the chance to back up his claims, which he based on Champs' renown alone. 26 During witness confrontations the court served as a privileged space for slander. The witnesses could try anything as a reproach, proffering 'any injuries and villainies they like without fear of retribution', as the jurist and magistrate Ayrault lamented. 27  although not every claim had force behind it unless it could be justified by further witnesses. The accused in these confrontations had to play a difficult numbers game, knocking out enough witnesses to leave not even two eyewitnesses standing. Josset was fortunate: freed but required to spend three months available to the Parlement to be recalled in case more evidence was forthcoming that proved his guilt. 28 Inquisitorial procedures in late Renaissance France included mechanisms that might have generated significant amounts of testimony based on hearsay. In this sense it is notable that the sample of record-linked cases involves almost no references to the procedure known as the monitoire, a summons issued at Sunday mass calling for witnesses to come forward with evidence that often proved circumstantial and not directly relevant to the case at hand. 29 A rare mention of this procedure appears when the labourer Augustin Alexandre claimed he had 'not heard the summons that were published' against Pierre Caillet, who was accused of killing Jean de Beaumont nine years earlier. When Caillet led Beaumont into a wood outside Reims, they stopped and Caillet called the signal to his accomplices hiding with arquebuses. 30 Perhaps Caillet's release without charge was in part due to the weak evidence against him that depended on hearsay gathered by the monitoires and repeated in the Parlement's criminal chamber by the merchant Auger de Haulmont, 'who said that he knows nothing about the affair apart from what he has heard by the common rumour in the region, which is that he [Beaumont] was killed in August that year [1577]'. 31 Procedures such as the monitoire existed to announce publicly a call for evidence, but the association between a monitoire and hearsay appears too strong to have led the magistrates in the Parlement to focus on evidence gathered in that manner during earlier stages in proceedings.
Uses of the term hearsay mostly came before the court unsolicited in the responses of the witnesses. When hearsay did appear it usually came in the form of denials. The examples that accompanied the definition of the term ouy dire in the 1694 Académie française dictionary attached it to a dismissal: 'I do not know about that, I have only heard it said' or 'That is just hearsay'. 32 Claude de Salmon, who allegedly arranged for her lover to kill her husband, used hearsay emphatically to reject the accusation that her cousin La Haye and her lover La Pointe lent her forty livres to pay her host to buy tools from a cobbler that La Haye used to beat her husband to death. Salmon had 'never 28 APP AB 7, fol. 22v, 1581-04-08. 29  heard tell of this accusation and denied it as false', so false indeed that it was not even the subject of gossip. 33 After persistently denying the charge of conspiring to kill her husband she was sentenced to a short period of imprisonment. 34 The common formula that Salmon repeated -'I have not even heard tell of that' -accounts for the majority of uses of hearsay as a defence strategy, part of a vocabulary of denial that proved a safe means to negotiate interrogations in the criminal chamber of the Parlement when the magistrates so rarely had recourse to torture, and when they did they only extracted confessions in exceptional cases. 35 Indeed, by claiming that 'I have not even heard tell of that', a witness was insisting to the magistrates that the court had no grounds for torturing them to obtain further information, since there was not even a half proof based on renown that might support the allegation.
Although statistical analysis shows that the Parlement rarely extracted confessions by torture, in the cases when torture did apply it inflicted excruciating pain on the accused in ways that changed the dynamic of an interrogation. 36 In the case of torture involving François Simon hearsay appears as a frequent denial that the accused used as he pleaded for the pain to stop. Standards of evidence drop in this interrogation under torture conducted by the conseillers Jérôme Angenoust and Hardouin Fourcher, as Simon gave these magistrates the names of people associated with the death of the sieur de Marolles and who the court should plausibly be torturing instead of him. Simon's hearsay evidence perhaps seemed more acceptable in the torture chamber where such weak claims could not escalate the interrogations into further violence since the court had reached the limit of judicial violence available in its proceedings. And by suggesting names of accomplices he knew only by hearsay -such as La Grouillère, who had been arrested alongside him -Simon offered the magistrates reason to end the torture proceedings satisfied with the information he had given them. La Grouillère in his interrogation under torture denied the allegations and insisted Simon wanted to do him harm. Simon's strategy worked in part, as La Grouillère was sentenced to banishment and to pay reparations to the family of the victim, while Simon and Le Noir had their case demoted to a lesser dispute (procès ordinaire as opposed to the procès extraordinaire of a full criminal trial) where it might be settled financially. 38 Simon's hearsay evidence against La Grouillère was supported by the eyewitness testimony of his brother Gilles Simon, condemned to death for the homicide and executed a few weeks earlier. But this case came from Étampes on appeal, so the initial interrogations were sent back along with the prisoners following the judgement of the Parlement, and it is impossible to determine the strength of the evidence produced against the parties.
A final category of hearsay evidence concerns testimony in which witnesses quoted the direct speech of a third party. This sort of evidence falls firmly under the modern common law hearsay rule and raises common problems in its evaluation, but Renaissance jurists were more circumspect in limiting the term hearsay to oral evidence gathered ex auditu. 39 As so often in questions of practical jurisprudence in this period, no guidance is to be found in the French royal ordonnances, which gave clear instructions to structure the correct procedure for gathering witness evidence but rarely on how to interpret it. In order to highlight direct reported speech to the judges, criminal scribes often indicated it in their transcriptions by using a slightly larger hand, italics, or using a phrase such as 'and he said in his own words', serving to highlight how much of the rest of the oral evidence gathered is a summary report written up in the third person to suit the record-keeping of the court.
The most frequent examples of direct evidence of overheard speech presented to the Parlement in homicide cases came in witness reports of overheard insults that provided a vivid basis for determining whether a killing was premeditated. 40 Claude Duchêne, sieur de Crays, aged twenty-eight, sought pardon for killing his older brother François Duchêne by pleading the death was an accident. 41 Direct reported speech from their fatal encounter in the woods outside Crays formed Claude's best argument that the killing came in 38  Claude Duchêne's testimony, both in the interrogation and the remission letter it confirmed, addressed the demands of homicide law that permitted pardon in the event of an accidental killing committed in the heat of passion. 45 Comparing the two documents, both testimonies were mutually reinforcing. The remission letter gave slightly more detail about events and made a more elaborate justification of the killing, since the scribe had more time to prepare it as a neat, parchment copy compared to the draft 'minute' of the interrogation. Perhaps he copied the passage in the remission letter from the record of a previous interrogation. 46 Most significantly, the combined force of Duchêne's testimony in both the interrogation and remission letter lay in the direct reported speech that confirmed François had started the argument and threatened to kill the defendant Claude with his unbridled tongue. Accurate recording of the direct reported speech between the interrogation and the remission letter confirmed the outcome of the case, so that Duchêne was ordered to pay a fine of ten écus to his parish and another ten écus to the poor in lieu of the far heavier death penalty he otherwise might have faced. 42  3. 'we must kill the house of charlus, even the cats and the dogs' The cases discussed so far reinforce the general assertion that the magistrates of the Parlement as well as the witnesses they interrogated generally avoided evidence from hearsay and instead sought to establish facts in the courtroom through direct eyewitness evidence. By contrast, the investigations into the assassination of Jean de Lévy, conte de Charlus, demonstrate a particularly significant range of ways in which witnesses made assertive use of the term hearsay in the course of their interrogations. Indeed, to an extent the outcome of this trial depended on the use and manipulation of hearsay evidence. This case is the largest in the sample, involving twenty witnesses. 47 Charlus' widow, Diane de Daillon, instigated the case as plaintiff (partie civile), and the conseiller in the Parlement Guillaume des Landes led the investigations. The accusations focused on Balthazar de Gadagne, sieur de Champroux and his kin, who allegedly plotted to kill Charlus as well as his son and his lackey in an armed confrontation that took place on Thursday 20 October 1611. 48 The Gadagne clan claimed to be returning from a hunting trip that day when they encountered Charlus and his party, but the confrontation exploded as the culmination of years of friction between Champroux and Charlus over landholdings and local politics that dated back to the 1590s. 49 The skirmish on 20 October 1611 resulted in the deaths of both Champroux and Charlus. In its aftermath the Gadagne clan retreated to the château de Champroux, where the archers of the lieutenant criminel of Moulins put them under siege. The archers arrested the key suspects and their lackeys, but only after many others in the Champroux clan fled the scene after allegedly bribing the magistrates with wine. The investigation by the Parlement initially proceeded at Nevers, beginning on 8 December 1611, while the suspects remained imprisoned in nearby Moulins. In the next stage of the proceedings, the Parlement evoked the case on 17 February 1612 and it continued in Paris thereafter. 50 The first important instances of hearsay in the testimony gathered in the Parlement for Grossouvre's case appear when the lackeys tried to distance themselves from complicity in the crime, and argued instead that their masters alone plotted and executed the assassination. Estienne Moranbour, lackey of Grossouvre's son Louis de Grivel, sieur de Saint Aubin, said that his master 'tended not to discuss serious matters such as this before his servants and he 47 The key records for this case are AN X2B 1181, 1611-12-08-1612-03-14; AN X2A 974, 1612-07-07, 1612-07-09, 1612-07-12; AN X2B 269, 1612-07-21. 48 Others in the party of the sieur de Champroux escaped justice and were condemned to death in effigy: never heard tell of this affair on his lands'. 51 And when the confrontation happened 'he heard the gun shots' but 'because he was four or five hundred feet away … he did not know who had fired them'. 52 Michel Dumars, Champroux's sommelier, was asked 'whether he had several times heard of his master's rivalry with Charlus' during his fifteen years of service, but he denied this, as did almost all the lackeys, and claimed he stayed at home to serve the dame de Champroux rather than join the hunting party. 53 Sometimes these denials seemed implausible to the presiding magistrate des Landes. Claude Roupet, lackey of Champroux's client the sieur de Navière, claimed he had 'not even heard tell' of Charlus' death, and when des Landes demanded he tell the truth Roupet insisted that 'he only heard tell of the assassination when the archers [of the lieutenant criminel of Moulins] arrived', when 'they surrounded the château de Champroux'. 54 This was when the archers arrested all the lackeys as suspects and brought them to the prison of Moulins. The prisoners claimed to learn about the details of the case only once they had been locked up. Jean Tiger, lackey of Champroux's cousin Gaspard de Gadagne, sieur de Verdun, protested that, although he may have followed the party away from Grossouvre and towards the confrontation with Charlus, he did not know the names of the noblemen who surrounded him, and 'only heard them named later from other lackeys in the prisons later'. 55 Jacques de Briont said he had only heard tell of the rivalry between Champroux and Charlus 'on the low roads to Moulins', although he had allegedly carried letters for Champroux over the previous months. 56 Hearsay came easily to the lips of these lackeys and clients as they tried to distance themselves from the crimes of their masters. In this instance, inferior social status and a place outside informal gossip networks served as a useful way for the lackeys to distance themselves from suspicion. Inquisitorial judges knew, as the jurist and Angers magistrate Pierre Ayrault put it, that in these troubled times 'the dexterity and industry that has always been required of a magistrate to successfully examine and investigate a crime' needed to be supplemented with 'guile and finesse if he wants to wheedle something out of a suspected criminal'. 57  making hearsay part of questioning strategy and his way of reading the existing interrogations. Des Landes repeatedly asked the witnesses whether they recognised a memorable piece of reported speech whose source he concealed, apparently gathered from direct eyewitnesses in a previous interrogation. He asked Champroux's brother-in-law Grossouvre whether he had heard Champroux's brother Beauregard say that 'we must kill the house of Charlus, even the cats and dogs', to which Grossouvre replied 'he had never heard tell of this or opened his mouth to say those words'. 58 When des Landes asked the lackey Jean Tiger if he had heard such a phrase, Beauregard's exhortation to kill the house of Charlus down to 'the cats and the dogs' became Grossouvre's order to kill 'the rooster and the rest', revealing how earwitness evidence was particularly liable to distortion as it passed further along a chain of hearsay. 59 Yet des Landes persisted in asking witnesses whether they had heard a variant of this phrase because he suspected that the magistrates who first interrogated the witnesses in the prison at Moulins had deliberately omitted it when making a neat copy of their initial interrogation. 'This copy does not correspond to another signed copy', des Landes reproached the scribe to the vicesénéchaussée of Bourbonnais, as he alleged that 'the archers' deposition has gone missing because it did not correspond with what the others had heard said'. Such a disappearance would have exculpated the Champroux clan who bribed those magistrates with cheese and wine to let them go free during the siege of the château de Champroux. 60 Indeed, Beauregard and many of his clan did escape and avoided prosecution, leaving their lackeys to face the magistrates.
Beauregard's cousin, Marc Grivel, sieur de Groussouvre, was not so fortunate and was eventually banished from the kingdom along with two of the family's lackeys. In Grossouvre's final interrogation before the criminal chamber of the Parlement, the case's rapporteur in Paris, the conseiller in the Parlement Prosper Bauyn, sought to confirm the key details of the affair and asked Grossouvre himself whether he said his clan should kill the house of Charlus, including 'the chickens and roosters' -yet another iteration -but once again Grossouvre 'said he never spoke of this'. 61 The various forms taken by Beauregard's, or Grossouvre's, exhortation to kill the house of Charlus 'down to the dogs and the cats', 'the roosters and the rest', 'the chickens and the roosters' shows that the malleability of hearsay made it a particularly 58  useful way to track different interpretations of the same piece of evidence, so that des Landes' sharp reading of the case files allowed him not only to determine the guilt of Beauregard and Grossouvre but also whether the authorities in Moulins were complicit in letting Beauregard get away. What is perhaps the turning point of the whole series of interrogations concerning Charlus' assassination revolved around hearsay. The key suspect interrogated in Nevers and Paris, the sieur de Grossouvre, tried to distance himself from the allegations just as the lackeys had done. But his task proved harder since des Landes confirmed that Grossouvre had hosted the conspirators in his château for dinner before the hunting trip, although Grossouvre corrected des Landes that they 'left the Thursday morning' rather than staying for two nights. 62 That dinner preceded, and to an extent concealed, the assassination, since it allowed the party to ride out armed to the hilt with 'pistols, and arquebuses, and large horses', or what Grossouvre dismissed as 'a few pistols'. 63 However, Grossouvre denied the hunting party's connection to the assassination. Like the lackeys, he claimed he had 'only heard tell' about the previous 'slight differences' between Champroux and Charlus, and that these differences that had been reconciled after 'the duc de Nevers made them embrace' in order to settle their peace. 64 Crucially, Grossouvre claimed he had no involvement in the assassination and 'had only heard of it from the rumour that spread' and 'in his house and elsewhere he never heard tell that there was a plan to assassinate the conte de Charlus'. 65 The marginal annotations to this comment in the manuscript of the interrogations mark out and explicitly comment on the hearsay evidence. Perhaps these annotations came from the procureur du roi who drew up his conclusions and advised the magistrates on how to judge the case, perhaps they were added by des Landes who was managing instructing the case in Nevers or Bauyn its rapporteur in Paris, or perhaps a later reader still who had access to the archive of the Parlement's criminal chamber. The annotation reads 'asked and has only heard tell of the death of Charlus', emphasising how, to at least one reader of the evidence, the way in which hearsay evidence was central to Grossouvre's defence strategy was sufficiently distinctive as to be worth highlighting. 66 Overall, because of the complexity of the case of the assassination of the conte de Charlus, with its multiple layers of aristocratic intrigue, and large number of lackeys interrogated, hearsay played a significant role in witnesses' denial strategies. This was a notorious case -who had not heard tell of it? -but its very renown gave the witnesses space to deny culpability despite their strong ties to the culprits, many of whom were since deceased, like Champroux, or escaped, like his brothers. Without these culprits, the sheer number of lackeys serving as witnesses only indirectly involved with the case made evidence from hearsay significant. But what impact did hearsay evidence have on the judgement? In the absence of the conclusions of the procureur du roi it is impossible to determine this point for certain. The majority of annotations to the interrogations draw attention to established facts about who was involved and where, suggesting that hearsay was not of interest to the annotator apart from the one instance where he drew attention to Grossouvre's denial. Yet considering that des Landes interrogated twenty witnesses in the prisons of Nevers, and that only three of the accused received a final judgement in person, it seems plausible to suggest that most of the lackeys were successful in using hearsay to distance themselves from the assassination at the centre of the allegations, reinforced by their inferior status that placed them at one step removed from their masters' feud, and one table away from the great feast that preceded the hunt. 67 Beyond the question of 'the chickens and roosters', hearsay did not come up at all during the final series of interrogations of Grossouvre and two lackeys in the Parlement's criminal chamber, led by des Landes' colleague Prosper Bauyn on 7, 9, and 12 July 1612. 68 Following the preparatory interrogations, the magistrates had isolated Grossouvre as the guilty party on 21 July and he was punished by the confiscation of his property and banishment from the kingdom, along with two of his lackeys. 69 4. 'everie trueth is not to be told' The analysis of the evidence of hearsay presented in this article demonstrates how magistrates in the Parlement of Paris evaluated the ambiguous value of hearsay in complex ways that reflect the sophisticated, discretionary jurisprudence exemplified in Renaissance treatises of Roman law. The cases discussed in this article also reveal that witnesses and the accused knew how to engage with hearsay critically, how hold their tongue and dismiss gossip when it helped their cause by insisting 'that's just hearsay'. As another proverb collected by Randle Cotgrave put it, 'Tout vray n'est pas bon à dire', or 'Everie trueth is not to be told'. 70 The challenge faced by magistrates in discerning the truth about crime, and evaluating the often weak, fragmented, or fictional evidence presented during interrogations, explains why they gave such critical attention to matters of hearsay evidence, even if in itself it could never stand 67 The arrêt names twenty accused, of whom seventeen were condemned in their absence. 68 AN X2A 974, 1612-07-07, 1612-07-09, 1612-07-12. 69 AN X2B 269, 1612-07-21. 70 Cotgrave, Dictionarie, 'Dire'. as a source of proof. Material and written evidence presented in criminal investigations could be easy to dismiss in an age before modern forensics, and so oral evidence constituted the principal source of knowledge available to inquisitorial judges, just as it did for witnesses and the accused under interrogation.
Ultimately, this analysis of the Roman law of proof applied in the inquisitorial courtrooms of late Renaissance France reinforces the growing consensus among recent histories of communication concerning the continued primacy of oral culture in the new age of print, but it does so from a new position rooted in legal culture. In a fallen world of abundant information, where truth could be so difficult to discern and rumour ran riot, it still seemed plausible for magistrates to discover the truth about crime based on the word of two valid eyewitnesses. Nevertheless, the deponents who cited the evidence of hearsay in court did not only do so out of common ignorance. It was also possible for witnesses and the accused to conceal the truth through strategic uses of hearsay, a law-mindedness that suggests a familiarity with the epistemological status of rumour that they might have brought to the marketplace and village square too. They made magistrates work hard in order to interpret the evidence of hearsay presented in courtroom testimonies. In these ways, hearsay represented an important object of legal knowledge precisely because witnesses, the accused, and the magistrates proved so adept at manipulating its evidence in the course of criminal proceedings.