from doing homage to the abbey.^82 Hierarchies of land-holding could
reinforce hierarchies of authority, as when the duke of Aquitaine
accepted the duty—or claimed the right—to present the count of
Auvergne to royal justice, because Auvergne was held from him as he
(the duke) held it from the king. But generally land-holding ties were too
tangled for purposes of government: kings needed to stand outside
feudal hierarchies, and demand that men do them liege homage for their
lands against all others.^83
The Capetians’ exploitation of the homage of the kings of England
for their lordships in France achieved a great success in 1202–4 when
John was judged to have forfeited the fief or fiefs of Normandy, Anjou,
and Aquitaine. But equally important was Philip’s treatment of fiefs
generally as the units of military and fiscal resource of his kingdom, to
be granted uniformly in feodum et hominagium ligiumand listed in his
registers.^84 It is likely that Philip learned his feudal regime from the
duchy which he conquered in 1204, for the Feodasection of his registers
begins with the list made in 1172 of ‘services [i.e. the quotas of knights
from every bishopric, abbey, and lay barony] owed to the duke of
Normandy’; continues with the names of the knights holding of the fief
of Breteuil and the fief of Grandmesnil ‘who had come into the homage
of the lord king’ in 1204–5, and a comprehensive survey of Feoda
Normanniein 1207; and concludes with lists from the years surround-
ing the conquest of Normandy of knights-banneret over a wider area of
northern France, ‘archbishops and bishops who are under the king of
France’, ‘royal abbeys’, ‘counts and dukes of the king of the French’,
‘the king’s barons’, ‘castellans’, ‘vavassors’, ‘communes’, ‘the cities and
castles which the king has in demesne’ and finally ‘the castles held by the
king’.^85
‘Feudalism’ in France and England can be seen as the prime example
of the expression of social and political structures as a law of property.
By the later years of the thirteenth century, it wasparlement which
scrutinized feudal relationships in France in the course of deciding
property disputes—and not exclusively disputes about landed property,
since money rents could also be granted to be held perpetually in
The law of land-holding 207(^82) Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi Regis, ed. H. Waquet (Paris, 1964), 220; Recueil des actes
de Louis VI, i. 465–6, and cf. 83, 348, 439–40.
(^83) Vita Ludovici, 238–40; J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus(Berkeley:
California UP, 1986), 261–2.
(^84) S. D. White, ‘The Discourse of Inheritance in Twelfth-Century France: Alternative
Models of the Fief in Raoul de Cambrai’, in Law and Government in Medieval England and
Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, ed. George Garnett and John Hudson
(Cambridge UP, 1994); Lot and Fawtier, Institutions royales, 19–22; Recueil des Actes de
Philippe Auguste, ii. 292–3, 391, 493 etc.; Layettes du Trésor des chartes, 1, no. 412
(pp. 175–6); Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, 265 ff.
(^85) Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, ed. Baldwin, 267–342.