The primary purpose of the inquests of 1247 was to restore those
unjustly disinherited by Louis or his predecessors in these political
troubles, so that the king could go on crusade with a clear conscience.
Many items in the register of Norman complaints begin conqueritur de
domino 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 of
two hundred or so officials (for instance, 186 are headed ‘against Philip
Coraut, castellan of Tours’, and 254 ‘against the provost of Chinon’).
In other parts of France grievances were arranged by their place of
origin, but tell the same story of a vastly extended hierarchy of royal
agents using their new-found authority for their own ends. Typical
offences of the new men were: the imposition of unaccustomed harvest
works by a farmer of royal land; the commandeering by the royal
castellan of Alès 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 to
recover the costs of buying office in the first place.^28
Two recurrent features of the complaints throughout France—that
they came from communities and charged officials with violence—are
combined in the querelaof the consuls of Alès for themselves and the
whole body of townspeople (pro se et universitate) that during his
seneschalcy Peter Faber evicted men and women from their homes,
seized cloth from workers, kept forty or more persons captive for two
weeks, and by violence took almost a thousand pounds of money of
Vienne from the town, which should by custom be free of all taxes. Alès
asked to have its money back, and the universitasto be restored to its
proper ‘state’.^29 Parishes complained through their leading men that the
king’s officers had deprived them of their pasture rights or their
markets, and deaneries that the provost of Falaise taxed clerks on their
purchases for themselves and their churches as though they were
villeins. The commonest complaints of all were that officials held to
ransom the people they arrested and maltreated on charges ranging
from homicide to brawling and abusive language or even for no cause
(nullam causam praetendentes). At Beaucaire Bernard Gondelenus
asserted that a former seneschal had taken fifty marks from him for
allegedly robbing a Jew and drawing his sword against a Christian in
the public street—this quite arbitrarily, ‘putting aside all judicial pro-
cedure and hearing by a judge’.^30
Plaints and the reform of the status regni 157(^28) Ibid. 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, ‘Doléances’, 21 ff.; Petit-Dutaillis, ‘Querimonie Normannorum’,
115.^29 Recueil des historiens, 24, pp. 386 (no. 1).
(^30) Ibid.28 (no. 222), 30 (no. 236), 53 (no. 395), 291 (no. 124), 386 (no. 1), 441 (no. 1),
483 (no. 126).