The inquiries of 1247 exposed to public criticism an administrative
culture which habitually overrode the customary rights of communities
and individuals and changed the force of law into a self-serving
violence. This was a culture, moreover, in which a man fleeced by a
Norman bailliof two hundred pounds Tournoison an allegation of
usury of which he was cleared at an assize could be told that it was vain
to try to get his money back once it had been accounted for at the royal
treasury;^31 and a merchant could find his mule train of a hundred
animals seized by the seneschal of Beaucaire for simply threatenening to
complain about him to the king of France.^32 Louis IX seems to have
been brought to understand that the unification of the widening king-
dom required a guarantee of justice to everyone in it against such
misuses of power by anyone in authority. The life of King Louis by
Queen Margaret’s confessor thought of ‘the state of the king’ in terms
of the just rule of his subjects, manifested by the sending out of inquisi-
tors to discipline local administrators; of the parallel investigation of the
state of his household (statum familiae domus suae); and his own wise
and plain-spoken judgments, which avoided oaths and relied on the
simple authority of his name.^33
The 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, and
was seen to be vital to ‘the state of the kingdom’. Despite the disaster in
Egypt, Louis returned from crusade the greatest king in the West, while
Henry was being dragged into political crisis by the expense of his
ambitions. When he called an assembly of the prelates and magnates to
London in April 1258, Henry was told that if he would ‘reform the
state of his realm... they would loyally use their influence with
the community of the realm so that a common aid would be granted’
for the Sicilian project; and on 2 May the king swore ‘that the state of
the realm should be put in order, corrected and reformed’ by twelve
men of his council and twelve elected by the magnates, who were to
meet together at Oxford one month after Whitsun. It is tempting to see
an imitation of King Louis’s inquisitions in the barons’ first reform, the
appointment of one of their number, Hugh Bigod, to be ‘justiciar of
England’ (previous justiciars had been ‘of the king’), and the swearing
of him to ‘show justice to all making complaint (omnibus querelantibus)
without faltering ‘in this for the lord king or the queen, or for their sons,
or for any living person or for any thing, nor from hate nor love, nor
prayer nor payment’. The Provisions made at the Oxford parliament of
158 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^31) Recueil des historiens, 15 (no. 96).
(^32) Ibid.507 (no. 231).
(^33) Ibid. 20, p. 400.