called into existence within the royal household. There is record of the
expenses incurred by the towns of Beaumont and Pontoise as the king
passed through them at Michaelmas 1239 ‘on the way to parlementat
Paris’ (ad pallamentum Parisius).^50 Though in 1252 an arbitration was
made ‘before the masters of the court of the king’ en parlementat
Pontoise, parlementsusually met in Paris and at terms which were
settled and known in advance—surely so that plaintiffs who could not
get satisfaction from the travelling enquêteurs(perhaps because their
grievances did not involve administrative wrong-doing) might bring
their complaints to a final court of appeal that did not move around
with the king. After 1255, when reports of cases in the Paris parliament
become available, sessions of the court can be seen to take place
normally at Candlemas, Whitsun, and the feast of All Saints—in 1262
there was ‘no parliament at Pentecost because of the marriage of the
lord Philip, the king’s son, made at Clermont’—and before the end of
St. Louis’s reign a ‘chamber for pleas’ already existed in the royal palace
on the Île de la Cité. By 1300 magistricould be said ‘to hold parliament’
there, and were soon transacting some business throughout the
year, including vacations. Repeated meetings had merged to become a
permanent institution.^51
As royal justice tightened over them in the early years of the
thirteenth century, the great lords claimed that they should be tried only
by their peers, not by royal ministers. But in parlementscomplaints
were received, inquiries conducted, and judgments on them given by the
new class of royal servants, which largely excluded the magnates and
was also distinct from the travelling enquêteurs. While the latter were
mostly friars whose horizons were nationwide, the councillors in parlia-
ment were a mixture of royal knights and secular clergy from the towns
of the old Capetian domains, experienced royal administrators (the very
people against whom complaints of administrative abuse were levelled)
brought up on a customary law which was only slowly penetrated by
the Roman law taught at Orleans. There is a list of the ‘councillors of
the lord king of France’ present in the parlementof Paris, in ‘the king’s
house’, before whom the prior of Saint-Martin des Champs appeared in
February 1253 to exhibit a charter of privileges granted by Louis VII
and obtain the return of two of the convent’s serfs, arrested for homi-
cide by the provosts of the city: they were the archbishop of Bourges,
the bishops of Paris and Évreux, five clerical magistri, Geoffrey de la
The bill revolution and parlement 163(^50) H. G. Richardson, ‘The Origins of Parliament’, in Essays in Medieval History, ed.
R. W. Southern (London, 1968), 146–7.
(^51) C.-V. Langlois, Textes relatifs à l’histoire du parlement(Paris, 1888), 36, 174, 178,
229–34; id., ‘Les Origines du parlement de Paris’, Revue Historique, 82 (1890), 95; Lot and
Fawtier, Institutions Royale, 332 ff.