Cour des Bourgeois

Also known as Burgess Court

The non-noble court for Frankish townsfolk, handling commerce, urban property, and most criminal cases below the threshold of the Haute Cour.

Every Frankish town of any size had a Cour des Bourgeois presided over by a viscount (vicomte) appointed by the lord of the place. The court tried the bulk of the kingdom's commercial, property, and criminal business: contracts, debt, theft, assault, and disputes over urban tenements between people who were neither knights nor crown vassals.

Procedure and personnel were carefully separated from the Haute Cour. The bourgeois jurors were drawn from the settled Frankish citizen body, and they applied a body of customary urban law — the Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois — that was distinct from, though parallel to, the high feudal law of John of Ibelin's Livre. Acre, Jerusalem, Tyre, Tripoli, Antioch, and the smaller seignorial centres each ran their own bench.

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