bassa).^47 An interpolation in a royal charter of 1177 x 1182 has the
King of England likewise granting land to the monastery of Savigny
‘with all justice high and low and all right and lordship, with all liber-
ties and free customs’.^48 A hierarchy of justice was developing from the
hierarchy of land-holding. The castellan’s peace-keeping authority over
the inhabitants of his salvamentumbegan to be diffused by sub-infeu-
dation to lesser lords. When he alienated land, a castellan might keep
back justice, but he might also alienate judicial rights separately from
land, especially round the periphery of his lordship—even selling the
higher jurisdiction while retaining the lesser as a means of disciplining
the serfs on his demesne. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the
jurist Philippe de Beaumanoir defined ‘basse justice’ as that held as a fief
from a lord who possessed ‘haute justice’, but had to admit that the
jurisdictions of landlords were so intermeshed (entremellées et
enclavées) that there were endless arguments about the rights of seigno-
rial bailiffs to pass through foreign lordships in pursuit of offenders, and
about what arms they could carry.^49
The lesser justice which every landlord might aspire to seems
generally to have included the execution of thieves, which was a matter
of policing rather than of deliberation before judges. (The village courts,
in which the peasants themselves did the judging, spent their time exact-
ing fines for their lords for offences against local bye-laws, awarding
damages for ‘civil’ injuries inflicted by one householder on another, and
settling disputes concerning peasant land-tenure.) In the Maconnais, a
lord who could exact fines right up to the 60s. level as well as execute
thieves, could be reckoned to have ‘grande voirie’—not just ‘basse’ but
also ‘moyenne justice’,^50 but the actual trial of cases of theft might still
be regarded as a matter for haute justice. The staging of judicial duels
normally remained the castellan’s prerogative, but theft was the one
capital offence for which people could be condemned without trial, if
they were caught with the loot, or were simply notorious for their
Seignorial jurisdiction 53(^47) Recueil des Actes des Ducs de Normandie, ed. Fauroux, no. 1 (p. 68).
(^48) Recueil des Actes de Henri II, ii. 186.31: ‘cum omni justicia alta et bassa et omni jure et
dominio, cum omnibus libertatibus et liberis consuetudinibus et quiettanciis suis’; cf. 519. 20 ,
in which high justice is retained by the king.
(^49) Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, ii. 132; Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’évolution des institu-
tions judiciaires’, 30–1; Halphen, ‘Les Institutions judiciaires’, 304; Beaumanoir, Coutumes de
Beauvaisis, i. 459, ii. 344–5 (paras. 910, 1650, 1653).
(^50) Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 441, ii. 340–1 (paras. 865, 1642); Établisse-
ments de Saint Louis, ed. Viollet, iii. 309; Coutumiers de Normandie, ed. E.-J. Tardif, 3 vols.
(Rouen, 1881–1903), 1, i. 35 and ii. 31 (cap. xli of Le Trés Ancien Coutumier); Les Olim ou
Registres des Arrêts rendu par la Cour du Roi, ii, ed. Comte Beugnot (Paris, 1842), 445: ‘esset
discordia coram nobis, super bassa juridictione usque ad sexaginta solidos’; Duby, La Société
dans la région maconnaise, 590; Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, ii. 134; G. Dupont-Ferrier,
Les Officiers royaux des bailliages et sénéchaussées en France à la fin du moyen âge(Paris,
1902), 827–9.