In January 1387 a man called Jan de Rode was convicted of manslaughter in the city of Utrecht. While the sources tell us little about the details of the killing, we know all the more about its legal consequences. As part of the penal procedure, the Council of Utrecht ordered Jan to come from the city prison in the Red Tower, where he was being kept, to the bell tower of the Buurkerk (see Map 1). He would do so, the court explicated, dressed only in a simple shirt and pants. Furthermore, after arriving at the indicated spot, Jan was expected to publicly beg the Council for forgiveness and pay the city a fine of 50,000 ‘stones’. The previous chapter has argued how instances like these, when read from the perspective of the development and use of urban space, show courts’ intricate connection with the socio-cultural practices and discourses beyond a strictly legal setting. In using their physical context, courts like the Paris Parlement, York's Consistory Court and the Council of Utrecht engaged with broader ideas about what these spaces – and consequently the activities they hosted – meant. Yet this intertwinement between activities in and out of a legal setting stretches beyond the sites used for their performance. The sequence of actions Jan de Rode was supposed to go through, involving specific movements, clothing and spoken words, was loaded with references to practices, values and power relations beyond the legal occasion proper.