Alan Harding Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (2001)

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.2724Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, i.150 3, 172 3 (nos.92, 94, 113); the life of SaintLouis by Queen Margaret s confessor, in Recueil des historiens, 20, ed.Daunou and Naudet,119.25Layettes du Tr�sor des chartes, 5, no.490.26C.Petit-Dutaillis, Querimoniae Normannorum , in Essays in Medieval HistoryPresented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed.A.G.Little and F.M.Powicke (Manchester UP,1925), 107 10; the complaints to the inquisitors of 1247 and subsequent years are edited byDelisle in Recueil des historiens, 24: see pp.1 73 for the Norman plaints, and for this para-graph, nos.40, 46, 47, 49, 76, 78, 84, 135, 152, 274 etc.27Recueil des historiens, 24, pp.300 (no.5), 308 (no.36), 541 4, 585 (no.563).Plaints and the reform of the status regni 157The primary purpose of the inquests of 1247 was to restore thoseunjustly disinherited by Louis or his predecessors in these politicaltroubles, so that the king could go on crusade with a clear conscience.Many items in the register of Norman complaints begin conqueritur dedomino rege, but the real targets were of course the king s local agents.In Touraine, Poitou, and Saintes, the great majority of the 1938 com-plaints made in 1247 8 are grouped in the register against the names oftwo hundred or so officials (for instance, 186 are headed against PhilipCoraut, castellan of Tours , and 254 against the provost of Chinon ).In other parts of France grievances were arranged by their place oforigin, but tell the same story of a vastly extended hierarchy of royalagents using their new-found authority for their own ends.Typicaloffences of the new men were: the imposition of unaccustomed harvestworks by a farmer of royal land; the commandeering by the royalcastellan of Al�s of a mule which was worked so hard that it died with-in eight days of its repatriation ; and the assisting of criminals, debtors,and litigants by officials generally, in return for money needed torecover the costs of buying office in the first place.28Two recurrent features of the complaints throughout France thatthey came from communities and charged officials with violence arecombined in the querela of the consuls of Al�s for themselves and thewhole body of townspeople (pro se et universitate) that during hisseneschalcy Peter Faber evicted men and women from their homes,seized cloth from workers, kept forty or more persons captive for twoweeks, and by violence took almost a thousand pounds of money ofVienne from the town, which should by custom be free of all taxes.Al�sasked to have its money back, and the universitas to be restored to itsproper state.29 Parishes complained through their leading men that theking s officers had deprived them of their pasture rights or theirmarkets, and deaneries that the provost of Falaise taxed clerks on theirpurchases for themselves and their churches as though they werevilleins.The commonest complaints of all were that officials held toransom the people they arrested and maltreated on charges rangingfrom homicide to brawling and abusive language or even for no cause(nullam causam praetendentes).At Beaucaire Bernard Gondelenusasserted that a former seneschal had taken fifty marks from him forallegedly robbing a Jew and drawing his sword against a Christian inthe public street this quite arbitrarily, putting aside all judicial pro-cedure and hearing by a judge.3028Ibid.24, pp.3 (no.11), 6 (no.31), 15, 32 (no.253), 36 (no.275), 48, 116 33, 195 211,243, 388 (no.9); Langlois, Dol�ances , 21 ff.; Petit-Dutaillis, Querimonie Normannorum ,29115.Recueil des historiens, 24, pp.386 (no.1).30Ibid.28 (no.222), 30 (no.236), 53 (no.395), 291 (no.124), 386 (no.1), 441 (no.1),483 (no.126).158 New High Courts and Reform of the RegimeThe inquiries of 1247 exposed to public criticism an administrativeculture which habitually overrode the customary rights of communitiesand individuals and changed the force of law into a self-servingviolence.This was a culture, moreover, in which a man fleeced by aNorman bailli of two hundred pounds Tournois on an allegation ofusury of which he was cleared at an assize could be told that it was vainto try to get his money back once it had been accounted for at the royaltreasury;31 and a merchant could find his mule train of a hundredanimals seized by the seneschal of Beaucaire for simply threatenening tocomplain about him to the king of France.32 Louis IX seems to havebeen brought to understand that the unification of the widening king-dom required a guarantee of justice to everyone in it against suchmisuses of power by anyone in authority.The life of King Louis byQueen Margaret s confessor thought of the state of the king in termsof the just rule of his subjects, manifested by the sending out of inquisi-tors to discipline local administrators; of the parallel investigation of thestate of his household (statum familiae domus suae); and his own wiseand plain-spoken judgments, which avoided oaths and relied on thesimple authority of his name.33The confessor was writing at the very end of the thirteenth century,but documents from the crisis of 1258 65 in England show that the state of a king was already understood as the quality of his rule, andwas seen to be vital to the state of the kingdom.Despite the disaster inEgypt, Louis returned from crusade the greatest king in the West, whileHenry was being dragged into political crisis by the expense of hisambitions.When he called an assembly of the prelates and magnates toLondon in April 1258, Henry was told that if he would reform thestate of his realm.they would loyally use their influence withthe community of the realm so that a common aid would be grantedfor the Sicilian project; and on 2 May the king swore that the state ofthe realm should be put in order, corrected and reformed by twelvemen of his council and twelve elected by the magnates, who were tomeet together at Oxford one month after Whitsun [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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