Trial by Combat Had One Thing Your HOA Never Will: Finality

On a cold December morning in 1386, in the shadow of the monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, two men lowered their visors and charged. Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, armored and mounted, met in the last judicial duel ever sanctioned by the Parlement of Paris. A crowd pressed against the lists, necks craning, breath fogging. The matter at stake was mortal: Carrouges had accused Le Gris of raping his wife, Marguerite, and with no witnesses and no evidence, the court—baffled—tossed the question to God. Or to steel, which was the same thing in that hour. I watched. I watch all contested thresholds. And I can tell you: when Carrouges drove his dagger through Le Gris’s throat and the body was dragged to the gallows to hang in disgrace, the dispute ended. Instantly, irrevocably, in a spray of blood. No appeal. No committee. No sub-committee. Fast-forward six centuries. You are sitting in a beige conference room at the clubhouse of Shady Acres Village, listening to an assistant secretary read the minutes from the last meeting. The issue is that your fence—pressure-treated pine, two inches taller than the Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions allow—must come down. You have pointed out that fourteen other fences in the neighborhood violate the same rule. You have submitted photographs, surveyor’s reports, a color-coded spreadsheet. The Architectural Review Committee has tabled the matter for the third time. The board will form a working group. You may, if you wish, file a formal grievance, which will be heard at the next regular session, after the quarterly budget review. You will go home defeated not by a lance, but by a laminated copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. And you will think—I know you think it—that a swift, definitive, even violent end to this absurdity might be preferable to drowning in a swamp of procedure. The standard account of this fantasy is that it’s barbaric. That we’ve evolved past the savagery of trial by combat, and thank heavens for it. But that account misses something essential: trial by combat was, for all its brutality, a closure mechanism. It was socially accepted, ritually contained, and above all final. When Le Gris fell, the legal matter ceased to exist. No further arguments could be made, no reinterpretation of evidence, no interminable appeal. The Parlement of Paris—an institution not known for efficiency—had stumbled onto a resolution technology that modern bureaucracy completely lacks. Your HOA, by contrast, is not designed to find an answer. It is designed to distribute the blame for making a decision across so many bodies that no single person can be held responsible. The endlessness is the point. The board’s real job is not to settle disputes; it is to survive them, forever. That is why you feel powerless. Not because the rules are too strict, but because they are built to never arrive. The medieval knight stood alone before his fate; you are buried under layers of process that guarantee nothing except that you will never get the last word. The endless appeals and committee reviews are not a failure of the system—they are the system, intentionally calibrated to avoid finality and to leave you marinating in an unresolved grievance. Closure, in that world, is an enemy to be postponed. And so you find yourself, in the parking lot after the meeting, clutching your folder of evidence and imagining a different sort of hearing, one with a horse and a lance and a single, terrible clarity. I might smile at that, if I weren’t the god of travelers. For I know that the true journey is toward an ending, and a road that never arrives is a quiet kind of torture.