eleventh century the positive exercise of criminal justice emerged clearly
amongst the consuetudines, the customary rights of lords, alongside the
exaction of castle-guard duty from their free vassals and manorial pay-
ments from their ‘customary’ (or servile) tenants. This was the time
when the mallus finally ceased to operate, when a new race of
‘viscounts’ was appearing with their private strongholds, and when the
castle-seignory replaced the pagus as the basic unit of political and
economic life. (In Flemish charters, pagus faded before territorium,
meaning the area controlled by a castle, between 1020 and 1040.)^33 In
1008, the monks of Saint Denis got from King Robert the Pious a new
charter which recognized, instead of a negative immunity from royal
officialdom, their positive jurisdiction over cases of wounding and
homicide and other offences inside and outside their castellum, their use
of trial by battle (lex duelli), and all judicial powers within the abbey
precinct.^34 To obtain this grant, the monks apparently exhibited the
immunity they had received from Charles the Bald in the ninth century,
in which they had inserted an extra clause giving them ‘other legal
customs’ (consuetudines legum).^35
From the disintegrating public authority of the Carolingian king and
his official counts the castellans inherited the comprehensive jurisdiction
enjoyed by the Frankish vicariiover the peasantry, which their castles
allowed them to enforce with a brutal effectiveness. Although capitu-
laries had forbidden vicars and hundredmen to hear disputes concern-
ing property and free status or serious criminal cases, the counts seem
to have left their subordinates to exercise complete powers over the
humbler classes, in vicarial assemblies which corresponded in function
to the hundred courts of England.^36 These assemblies had disappeared
by the early eleventh century, and in some regions vicariaehad come to
50 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
districtio, districtum, districtus; and examples in Diplomata Ludowici Germanici [etc.], 94. 20 :
vel freda aut bannos exigendo, 159. 10 , 211. 45 ; Actes de Charles III le Simple, 99. 25 , 257. 17 ;
Actes de Lothaire et de Louis V, 12. 13 , 35.11:protection for an immune monastery ‘cum
omnibus fredis et bannis sive concessis’, 83. 9 , 133. 5 : ‘neque bannum nec freda nec ullas
districtiones faciendas’; 151. 12 : grant to Rheims, 974: ‘omnis lex, justicia atque judicium
manu regularis abbatis contineatur vel ejus arbitrio’; 159. 25 : grant ‘cum omni districtu et
integritate totius libertatis’).
(^33) Lemarignier, ‘La Dislocation du “Pagus” ’, 402.
(^34) Ibid.404: ‘hoc est bannum hominis vulnerati vel interfecti ac infracturam intra vel extra
castellum... et legem duelli... ac totam procinctam.’
(^35) L. Levillain, ‘Études sur l’abbaye de Saint-Denis’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 87
(1926), 89, 95: ‘Itaque hanc totam procinctam Deo sanctoque ejus Dionysio donamus cum
omni videlicet judiciaria potestate, hoc est bannum omnemque infracturam, et, si que sunt alie
consuetudines legum ubicumque infra totam predictam procinctam... concedimus.’
(^36) G. Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’évolution des institutions judiciaires pendant le xeet le xie
siècle dans le Sud de la Bourgogne’, Le Moyen Âge, 52 and 53 (1946–7): repr. in his Hommes
et structures du moyen âge, 7–60; Niermeyer, lexicon minus, sub v. vicaria, 2; F.Lot et
R. Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen âge, i. Institutions seigneuriales
(Paris, 1957), 11, 42.