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Le champ des pratiques et des usages sociaux de l’écrit, à la suite des travaux fondateurs de Michael Clanchy, a fait l’objet d’un important renouvellement historiographique, touchant à la fois au gouvernement de l’Église, aux pouvoirs royaux et princiers et au monde seigneurial. Mais alors que Michael Clanchy faisait remarquer que dès le xiiie siècle, certains paysans faisaient montre d’une familiarité scripturale certaine, le degré de pénétration de cette culture de l’écrit dans le monde paysan est largement resté un angle mort de la recherche, malgré les traces que l’on peut relever çà et là. Une sentence rendue en 1406 par le Parlement du comté de Bourgogne, à l’encontre des paysans du Val du Saugeais, sujets du monastère augustinien de Montbenoît, montre pourtant que la communauté paysanne, convaincue d’avoir forgé une fausse charte de franchise, est parfaitement au fait d’une culture de l’écrit qui, à la fin du Moyen Âge, tend à s’imposer jusque dans des campagnes en apparence reculées.

Due to the pioneer researches of Micheal Clanchy, practices and social uses of writing have become a fruitful field for historians and arouse an important historiographical renewal in France, concerning Church, princely or royal government and landlords administration. But despite the observations of Michael Clanchy, noting that the writing revolution of the xiith and xiiith centuries even concern the peasantry, only few researches deal with this question. However, examples from Italy to Russia show that some peasants are able to use writing texts to defend their rights or prove their possessions in their everyday life, tending towards an unexpected literacy. According to a definitive sentence of the court of the burgundy’s Parliament in 1406, condemning the rural community of the subjects of the Montbenoît abbey, located on the eastern border in the upper part of the county of Burgundy, we can approach this peasant literacy. Peasants are collectively sentenced for having forge a false charter to defend their rights and their positions against their lord and abbot and particularly to attempt to get an end to eavy labour charges. The text’s details of the sentence reveal how the peasants work to established their false charter and try to obtain the recognition of its whole validity. They show by their failed attempt a high sensibility to the role and the importance of scripts, which is obviously not only an educated and social elite, but also a peasant, common culture, despite different literacy levels in control and knowledge in writing texts.