Parties involved in ordinary violence in the Latin Quarter of Paris according to notarial acts: Victims and aggressors

The present paper is a research on the intersection between social history and history of law. The attention is focused on fights, quarrels, and manslaughters that took place in Paris during the first part of the 16 century. The main source for this study is notarial acts, which are preserved in the Minutier Central of the French National Archives. It has been revealed that the two parties of the conflict asked for intervention of a royal notary in order to resolve their conflict or to sign the deal that was already discussed. That would permit Parisians to avoid dealing with the complicated judicial system. As a result of the analysis of 214 notarial acts, the following patterns have been discovered: firstly, the subjects of most agreements (122) were beatings and fights; secondly, the participants in such agreements were mostly small artisans and bourgeois; thirdly, most of them lived in the Latin Quarter, i.e., in the area where the offices of notaries, whose archives formed the basis of the study, were located, as well as in the surrounding suburbs; fourthly, apprentices of various professions and typographers turned out to be the aggressors in a higher number of cases, while day laborers were more often the victims. The obtained results broaden our vision about the French judicial system in the 16th century that comprised various social institutions for conflict resolution.