ABSTRACT
The revenge stories of Sessanta, Parceval and Jean van Coye come of course from two very different genres of text: an entertaining novella and petitions for pardon. Both fiction and pardon tales can tell about the culture of vengeance. There was a time when historians saw feud and vengeance as forms of lawlessness that were inimical to peace and justice. The king's remedy was to institute a series of obstacles to the pursuit of vengeance: no revenge was to be taken until the would be avengers had registered their claim in writing, nor in the ten days following delivery of this letter to the house of their target; even after the ten-day period, all revenge attacks on the family and friends of the aggressor would be punished. 'The ordinary criminal law is strong enough to suppress anything we could fairly call private war'. In 1408 the bishop claimed numerous infringements of clerical privilege by the bailli.
