The epic duel that transfixed medieval France
Ridley Scott’s latest film is based on the true story of an extraordinary ‘trial by combat’, says historian Dan Jones
One day in the week after Christmas 1386, in the grounds of a monastery outside the walls of Paris, two French warriors met to fight to the death. Their names were Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, and the cause of their quarrel was the oldest one: a woman. That woman was Carrouges’s wife, Marguerite, who had accused Le Gris of breaking into her home, pinning her down, shoving a glove in her mouth to silence her, and raping her.
In The Last Duel, the latest film from British director Ridley Scott, starring Jodie Comer, Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Ben Affleck, out today, that horrific scene is played out again and again, from rotating perspectives. So too is the armed showdown it led to, which is generally believed to be the last official trial by combat in French history.
At the time, the case confounded the highest courts in France. Judges, including the 18-year-old King Charles VI, were unwilling to convict Le Gris, despite Marguerite’s powerful testimony. Le Gris hired a superstar lawyer, Jean Le Coq, who (like his later near-namesake Johnnie Cochran) specialised in getting rich and famous clients off the hook. It was not hard for this skilful attorney to suggest that “her word against his” was a thin basis for a prosecution.
And so, after months of legal wrangling, the courts decided that a woman’s word could not be trusted, and that the only fair way to decide the case was by an appeal to God. Carrouges and Le Gris would fight in mortal combat. The Lord would decide the winner. If it were Carrouges, Le Gris would be judged and punished at a stroke. If Le Gris won, he would be cleared of rape and Carrouges, his false accuser, would be conveniently dead. Marguerite would be burned alive for perjury. The stakes were high. All that was left to do was fight.
Scott is not the first storyteller to adapt the case for his own ends: it was first written up by the late medieval Flemish chronicler Jean Froissart. Obsessed with chivalry, Froissart saw plenty to like in l’affaire Carrouges. It had knights prepared to die and a damsel in distress. It offered melodrama, a deadly rivalry, a crime that demanded vengeance, and a violent, cathartic showdown. It was a near-perfect tale.
Froissart devoted a long section in his famous chronicle to the duel, and other writers followed him. None was very sympathetic to Marguerite. Some developed the theory that Carrouges and Le Gris were both in the right. Sure, Marguerite had been raped, they said. But she had lied about the real culprit: her attacker was not Le Gris but a third man.
That this was nonsense was neither here nor there. Victim-blaming was alive and well in the 14th century. Historians today, drawing on chronicle evidence and Le Coq’s trial notes, believe Le Gris raped Marguerite.
But did he get what he deserved on that fateful afternoon, when the two men clashed in heavy armour before the king and a crowd of hundreds? After meeting on horseback with lances, then axes, the knights descended into brutal sword fighting at close quarters ... You’ll have to see the film to find out who prevailed.
The Last Duel is broadly faithful to the outline of the real medieval case. The screenplay was adapted by Affleck, Damon and Nicole Holofcener from Eric Jager’s 2004 book of the same name. So, many of the historical facts are present and correct, even if some have been distorted, including the climactic moment of the duel itself – the battering open of a metal helmet with a sword-hilt.
Purists may complain – but that’s showbiz. And the film makes up for its partial command of historical detail in the boldness of its narrative approach. Whereas chroniclers like Froissart assumed that it was a story about male honour, The Last Duel takes a more sophisticated, less certain view. Paying homage to Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic Rashomon – about the murder of a samurai and rape of his wife – it tells in turn “Carrouges’s truth”, then “Le Gris’s truth” and finally and most powerfully “Marguerite’s truth”. Needless to say, these do not correlate.
One effect of this approach is to show the hypocrisy of medieval chivalry: a code which pretended to gallantry but which treated women like farm animals to be sold and bred, and assumed crimes against females were matters of the husband’s property and not the wife’s person.
Yet the film’s deeper achievement is to hint, without hectoring, that when it comes to men and women’s attitudes to sexual violence, and the problems with prosecuting rape, relatively little has changed in more than six centuries. Two old Hollywood bros like Damon and Affleck writing a medieval Metoo movie must have seemed like a risky concept. But in The Last Duel, they have found the perfect vehicle to bring the Middle Ages firmly up to date.