prized the extra control the feudal relationship gave him over the
nobility both ecclesiastical and lay: Henry the Lion was declared in
1180 to have forfeited his duchies of Bavaria and Saxony when he failed
to answer three successive summonses to Frederick’s court ‘according to
feudal law’,^77 and by the law of 1186 arsonists who did not submit after
excommunication were to lose what they possessed feodali iure.^78
Yet imperial politics were too distant from the judging of land-
holding disputes in the local courts for the language of grants in feodo
to the high nobility to leave their mark on the German law of property.
The clauses in Frederick I’s Landfriedeof 1152 prescribing a way of
deciding land cases speak only of beneficia(not feoda); and the Latin
version of the part of the Sachsenspiegel entitled in the vernacular
Lehenrecht, which sets out the rules of the landholding relationship
between lords and men, is headed De beneficiisand written for those
who wish to be instructed in iure beneficiali.^79
It was in France and England that fief-holding had most effect on
property law and on the distribution of political power. One of the
sixteenth-century French jurists who regarded feudal law as the
foundation of their country’s ruling aristocracy, and of its independence
from the Empire and its Roman Law, claimed to have ‘learned that the
authors of fiefs were the kings of the Franks, reigning... even before
the birth of Christ’.^80 Somewhat less imaginatively, but with a measure
of anachronism, historians have been accustomed to call a conditional
holding in France a ‘fief’ when the usual term was still ‘benefice’. In
1092, however, Philip I is found giving in fediumto the archbishop
of Rouen and his successors the abbey of Pontoise, to be held in
perpetuity from the king and his successors; the king then specifies that
‘this will be the service that the archbishop shall do to me for the afore-
said fief, each year he shall come to one of my courts, at Beauvais, or
Paris, or Senlis’.^81 On a famous occasion in 1124 Louis VI proclaimed
that he himself held the county of Vexin as feodatusof Saint Denis, and
placed the Oriflamme standard of the counts on the abbey’s altar as a
pledge to defend his lord and his realm against invasion by the Emperor
Henry V: but significantly added that his royal authority prevented him
206 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^77) Friderici I Diplomata, 1168–1180,362. 34 ; cf. 1158–1167, 451–2; 1181–1190,90–1.
(^78) Ibid.1181–1190,273. 14.
(^79) Ibid.1152–1158, 43 (cc. 8, 9); Auctor Vetus de Beneficiis, ed. K. A. Eckhardt, MGH
Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui, ns2, ii (Hanover, 1966), 20–1, 58–60.
(^80) Charles Du Moulin, quoted by D. R. Kelley, ‘De Origine Feudorum: The Beginnings of
an Historical Problem’, Speculum, 39 (1964), 224.
(^81) Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier, 322; cf. a famous letter from Count Odo of Blois to
King Robert II in 1027, complaining of the confiscation of his benefice, without hearing his
case and though he had performed his due services: L. Halphen, ‘La Lettre d’Eude II de Blois
au roi Robert’, Revue Historique, 97 (1908), 287–96; Lot and Fawtier, Institutions royales,
36.