to the commune of Roye in 1196, c. 38 of which stipulated that a
burgess should not be made to answer outside the town for an
ecclesiastical offence, but only before the dean and chapter of Roye.^89
An inquest of 1210 entered in Philip’s Registers found that at Amiens a
complaint of injuries inflicted on a feast day should be addressed first of
all to the mayor rather than the bishop.^90
The most far-reaching legislation of Philip’s reign after the crusading
ordinance of 1190 was ‘a stabilimentummade at Paris between the
clergy and the barons’ about the patronage of churches, which was
probably drawn up during the winter of 1205/6 and on the model of
another stabilimentummade on 13 November 1205 between the clergy
and barons of Normandy. The Norman barons were concerned to
preserve the rights of the king and themselves as they had seen them
exercised under the Angevin kings: disputes had been, and should be,
settled by recognitions in the king’s court when they were about the
patronage of livings and whether the lands of particular clergy were
held for feudal service or ‘in free alms’. Criminal jurisdiction appeared
in the Norman stabilimentumonly in the statements that complaints of
wounding within the truce of God were also for the king, and that a
clerk degraded for theft or homicide must abjure the realm and be
punished like a layman if he returned and offended again.^91
The Paris stabilimentumclosed off ecclesiastical jurisdiction on a
wider front than its Norman model, and is indeed presented as a series
of responses to articles proposed by the king ‘against the clergy’. The
latter were accused of deciding feudal pleas in court Christian, saying
that they were issues of good faith (fiducie) or of sworn undertakings,
so that lords lost their courts: as to this the king and the barons agreed
that clerks should try cases of perjury and breach of faith, along with
the appeals of widows for their dower, and could impose penances on
those found guilty, but that they should not decide issues of tenure. The
church courts were also alleged to set free the clerical criminals handed
over to them, once they had been stripped of their orders: they were
declared not to be obliged to return them to the secular courts, but they
should not free them or put them where the king’s justices could not do
justice upon them (e.g. in a church); this applied particularly to those
charged with rape, whom clerical judges were inclined to allow to purge
themselves by oath. When someone escaped from the place where he
had been imprisoned until he redeemed himself for a less serious
offence, the clergy should not give him shelter and so deprive his lord of
Stabilimenta 127(^89) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, ii. 88.
(^90) Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, 66–7.
(^91) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, ii, nos. 899, 900; Les Registres de Philippe
Auguste, 56–9 (no. 14); Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 39–42.