Albigensian heretics, were surrendered to the king to suffer ‘secular
justice by fire’.^85
The king’s establishment of an exclusive jurisdiction over serious
crime was accompanied by edicts distinguishing between cases appro-
priate to royal courts and those belonging to courts Christian across a
wider spectrum. In this France was following England, where the Assize
of Clarendon of 1166 which provided for the indictment of serious
criminals had been preceded two years earlier by the Constitutions of
Clarendon proclaiming the supremacy of the king’s court in all matters
of feudal landholding, including disputes about landlords’ presentations
of clergy to their livings, along with the ultimate power of the king to
punish criminous clerks once they had been degraded. A clear separa-
tion of the two jurisdictions in both England and France was impeded
less by the resistance of bishops like Thomas Becket than by the
complex inter-reliance of secular and ecclesiastical administration. The
king’s ministers sometimes called in aid the church’s power of excom-
munication against peace-breakers (though they resented its being
turned against themselves), while churchmen looked to the king for the
force to make an obdurate excommunicate submit to ecclesiastical
discipline. Moreover, the seasoned administrators who framed the royal
judgments which gradually replaced agreements and arbitration awards
were often churchmen; and it is not surprising that the abbot of Bèze
opted for the king’s court when forced to choose between appeal to the
pope or to the king in his dispute with the bishop of Langres.^86
Here above all there was a need and an opportunity for the king to
bring order to the whole administration of justice. The seneschal of
Anjou and prévôtsand bailiffs generally were ordered to ensure swift
justice to the clergy but not to hear complaints which belonged to the
church courts.^87 All mayors and officers of communes were forbidden to
arrest anyone who was manifestly a clerk—unless it was for the serious
crimes of murder, homicide, adultery, rape, or the shedding of blood
by means of a club, stone, or sharp instrument, or for being found
‘out of hours’ in a house he had been prohibited from entering; some-
one arrested for one of these offences should be surrendered to the
ecclesiastical judge to be sentenced ‘according to the quantity and
quality of his offence’, and if the arrest was by night he should be held
apart from thieves ‘in decent custody’ until he could be handed over.^88
The sense here that the king supervised a single system of justice which
included the church courts was already suggested by the charter granted
126 Judicial Systems of France and England
(^85) Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, 158–60 (no. 98).
(^86) Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 41–2, 115–18, 315–28; Recueil des Actes de
Philippe Auguste, iii, no. 1256.
(^87) Ibid.iii. 1092, 1219, 1635, 1765
(^88) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 43.