his heirs.^125 Another prior had his liberty seized because his hanging of
the corpse of a cattle thief who had stabbed himself on capture was
against the common law: the man had been neither convicted nor out-
lawed.^126 Infringements of liberties bulk large in the subject-matter of
the new thirteenth-century writs of trespass. The earliest in a register
of writs (of c.1272) include one summoning the mayor and bailiffs of
Newcastle to show why they exacted tolls from the prior of Tynemouth
contra libertates suas.^127 The Register of Writs as printed in the
sixteenth century contains examples alleging infringements of the abbot
of Westminster’s rights, conferred ‘by the charters of our progenitors as
kings of England and our own confirmation’, to the chattels of felons
and fugitives; of a prior’s chartered right to tolls; of a baron’s liberty of
return of writs (i.e. to receive and execute royal writs in his lands); and
of the archbishop of York’s liberty of licensing men to exercise the office
or mystery of dyer in the town of Ripon.^128
The effect of legal actions and legislation was to begin to shift the
meaning of liberties from the powers of the prelates and barons to the
rights of individual subjects, such as the freedom from tolls for the men
of the prior of Tynemouth or the merchants of a privileged town. A
grant of territorial liberty to a church or lay baron had always implied
individual freedoms for the men of the lordship, who should be seen as
the original type of privileged community. In the law-suit on Penenden
Heath, Archbishop Lanfranc was said to have ‘liberated his men from
the evil customs which Odo [of Bayeux] sought to impose on them’.^129
From Merovingian times, abbeys played a central role in trade and
obtained freedom from the payment of tolls for servants travelling on
their business, and Carolingian grants of immunity were regularly
accompanied by special protections for the beneficiaries’ lands and
goods—and their men, wherever they went.^130 Protections for
merchants, giving them ‘all and singular... free power to buy and sell
according to the laws and customs of the kingdom’ (liberam potestatem
216 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^125) Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ed. Sayles, ii, pp. lvi–lviii; RPi. 41 (no. 39);
Rotuli parliamentorum Anglie hactenus inediti, ed. H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles,
Camden Soc. 3rd ser. 51 (London, 1935), 31–44; Memoranda de Parliamento, ed. F. W. Mait-
land (London: Rolls Series, 1893), no. 388.
(^126) Curia Regis Rolls,xv, no. 1146 (pp. 276–7); cf. Select Cases of Procedure without Writ,
66–7.
(^127) S. F. C. Milsom, ‘Trespass from Henry III to Edward III’, Law Quarterly Review, 74
(1958), 417–18, 425; G. D. G. Hall, ‘Some Early Writs of “Trespass” ’, Law Quarterly
Review, 73 (1957), 72–3.
(^128) Registrum Omnium Brevium, fos. 103–103b, 107, 105b–106.
(^129) Niermeyer, lexicon minus; Latham, Word-List; Holt, Magna Carta, 94–100, 125–9;
Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier, no. 390; Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, nos. 1, 5, 10,
15, 16, 17, 19 etc.; Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 76–9; Harmer, Anglo-Saxon
Writs, 451; EHDii. 603–4; English Lawsuits, i. 12.
(^130) M. Kroell, L’Immunité franque(Paris, 1910), 127.