Beaumanoir makes actionable all injuries to persons or property by
force, threat of force, or fraud. Prosecution by appeal and trial by battle
are possible in the case of fraud, but this was a hazardous process which
victims would have used against the graver crimes only: denunciation to
the commissioners of royal inquests was the mechanism by which most
of the vast area of injuries to other people’s property or persons was
brought within the province of the law. The bullying, tricherie, and
extortion of their own officials were a prime target of kings concerned
for the ‘peace and tranquillity’ of their subjects.^243 The monopoly of
‘legitimate force’ which has been seen as the essential attribute of the
modern state needed assertion in the thirteenth century against the insti-
tutionalized violence of officialdom itself. Before royal enquêteurs
people alleged that they had been injured ‘by the king’s violence’ (per
vim regis): for instance by the quarrying of a complainant’s land of
stone for fortifications, or by an official’s compulsion, ‘by violence
because he was a bailiff’ (per violenciam quia ballivus erat), of the pay-
ment of a debt unjustly claimed by a Jew.^244 Alfonse of Poitiers departed
on crusade in 1249 giving his executors power to do justice on his
wrongs (forefacta) and those of his bailiffs; and two years later
Alfonse’s subjects are found complaining of the many injuries inflicted
on them by the violence of the count’s servants or ‘of the bailiffry’, such
as the seizure and holding to ransom of bread baked in communal
ovens. In 1270 the parlementat Toulouse was hearing complaints of
injurias et violentias. But marauding in arms (cum armis), the ‘violent
asportation’ (carrying off) of crops and goods of all sorts, false
imprisonment and beating (verberatura) of persons, threatening
behaviour (minacitas), and defamation such as pointing out Jews and
others as ‘public usurers’ were of course wrongs not confined to
officials, and, whoever committed them, they now called for redress as
offences against the king’s peace rather than as incidents of private
war.^245
The existence of plea-rolls and registers of writs sheds extra light on
the same development of a comprehensive law of tort (wrongdoing) in
England. At the time that plea-rolls began to be kept in the late twelfth
century, the appeals of the victims or their kinsmen were the only means
to obtain redress for specific crimes: it was notorious criminals that the
presenting juries initiated by Henry II were devised to catch. Fighting
242 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^243) Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 363 (§711), 428–84 (caps. xxx–xxxi), 500–5 (cap. xxxiii), ii.
340–1 (§1642), iii. 140–2.
(^244) Recueil des historiens, vol. 24, ed. Delisle, pp. 296 (Preuves de la préface, no. 91),
307 (no. 124: minatus ad mortem), 323–324 (no. 106), 328–329 (no. 240: in novis
desaisinis, violentiis seu fortiis... vi et cum armis); ibid. 6, 15–16, 73–4, 301, 303, 440, 486.
(^245) Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, ed. Fournier and Guebin, 14, 20–1, 302
(no. 122); Artonne, Le Mouvement de 1315, 171–5.