feodum et homagium ligium. A good number of parlement’s judgments
were enforcements of the king’s rights to homage and jurisdiction in the
fiefs of his tenants-in-chief; or the punishment of unlicensed alienations
of royal fiefs, especially into the ‘dead hand’ of the Church (churches
never died, so their fiefs never escheated to the king).^86 In the majority
of cases, however, decisions that men be received to do homage to the
king were made at their own petition and amounted to judgments that
disputed property belonged to them. The court would order lords to
receive claimants as their men, and to pay the arrears of money-fiefs for
which they had, or ought to have, taken homage; while an heir of
the bishop of Soissons who was unwilling to take on the debt-ridden
inheritance he had been left was told that, unless he did homage to
the new bishop, the latter or the king would sell the land to satisfy
creditors.^87 A bishop justified his right as dominus feodalisto take back
a castle because its knightly tenant had sold it to a burgess, a non-
noble; and ‘by the custom of France’ an abbot and convent claimed
another castle held ‘of their fee’ when the occupant’s elder brother was
banished for treason.^88 In such matters parlementmight confirm or
overturn decisions of the bailli’s court ‘of feudal men’ (curia hominum
feodalium).^89 Over succession to fiefs ‘the customs of France and
principally of the town of Paris’ was found to be in conflict with the
Romanist ius scriptumof the south, which permitted the leaving of land
by will to someone other than the nearest heir by primogeniture.^90
The language of fiefs and homage helped to create ‘the custom of
France’ applied in the late thirteenth-century parlementin the same way
that in the twelfth century it had formed the consuetudinem Anglie, the
nascent common law of England. Perhaps the process is simply visible
earlier in England because accounting for the number of knights
enfeoffed, exemplified in 1086 by the Domesday inquest and in 1166 by
Henry II’s demand for returns from his tenants-in-chief known as the
Cartae Baronum, was essential that much sooner to the establishment
of the military and fiscal power of the Norman and then the Angevin
kings.^91 But from the earliest days of the Conquest lordship was
208 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^86) Les Olim, i. 36 (xiii), 137 (x), 167–8 , 606 (xiii), ii. 35 (iv), 69–70, 71 (x), 72 (iii), 101–2,
123 (xlix), 137 (xxi), 167 (xxxviii), 232 (xvii), 251 (xiii), 325 (v), 347 (xxxii), 365 (xxxii),
416–17 (i–iii), 505–6, 608–9, 630–1, 636–7; Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, 3, no. 4362
(p. 369) for the grant of a fief-rentein 1257, ut ratum et stabile permaneat in futurum.
(^87) Les Olim, i. 891 (xxxii), ii. 57 (xii), 83 (xxiv), 117 (xxix), 119 (xxxvii), 148 (xxviii),
201–2, 242–3, 283–4, 328 (xv: the bishop of Soissons’ claim), 341 (xix), 343 (xxiii), 353 (ix),
359–60, 420 (xi), 468–9, 484 (iv), 492–3, 500–1 (xi, xii), 504–5, 517–19, 547 (xvi).
(^88) Ibid. ii. 187–8, 606–7, 616–17.
(^89) Ibid. ii. 443–4.
(^90) Ibid. ii. 453–5, 556–8
(^91) D. C. Douglas, William the Conqueror(London, 1964), 273–83; EHDii. 903–15;
Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum[RRAN], iii, nos. 68 (p. 26), 111 (p. 40), 391 (p. 150);
A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 56.