thieving. The gallows rather than the court were thus the symbol of the
ordinary landlord’s justice.^51
Seignorial justice stemmed from the castles, but in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries it was becoming attached to landed estates at all
levels. The Établissementsof St. Louis described the common situation
where a lord gave a vassal a fief in the castlery of another baron. Then,
the vassal did homage to the donor for his fief, but to the castellan for
‘his vaarieand his justice’.^52 In 1260, even the Count of Blois was com-
pelled to prove in the king’s court his jurisdiction in cases of robbery
and murder in a village where the provost of Corbeil maintained he
lacked rights of castlery (non habet castellaniam).^53 What was at issue
in the endless disputes about jurisdiction was often the profit rather
than the substance of justice—for instance, the right of the Abbess of
Saint-Pol to the chattels of one of her men, hanged at Montmorency as
a thief, which she maintained against the castellan of Montmorency in
1269, as something belonging to her ‘high and low justice’.^54 But rights
of justice were clearly becoming embedded in the hereditary property of
others than the counts and castellans. Even high justice was diffusing
wider, and the possession of it becoming the mark of the whole social
class above the village lords. Landlords who were not castellans, perhaps
those on the periphery of castleries first of all, were left to deal with the
thieving and mayhem, and even the killings and rapes, of their villeins,
who would in any case be tried by the ordeals of hot iron and cold water
rather than by battle. Many bishops and other great churchmen such as
the Abbot of Saint Denis had their own castles and with them justice
high and low.^55 The charters of kings, renewed and supplemented in
successive reigns, enormously complicated the pattern of justice and
inspired a multitude of conflicts between ecclesiastical lords on the one
hand and lay barons, royal bailiffs, and urban magistrates on the other.
The settlement of a dispute between the nuns of Fontevrault and their
neighbour William of Montsoreau, which Henry, King of England and
count of Anjou, confirmed in 1182, gave the nunnery the vigeria, but left
justice in all crimes punished by death or mutilation to William (canon
law frowned on its direct exercise by churchmen)—the nunnery would
simply get the fines incurred and the chattels forfeited by its own men.^56
54 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^51) Établissements de Saint Louis, ed. Viollet, i. 516, ii. 61, 447–8, iii. 247, 309–11;
Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 146–7, 437, 459, 461, ii. 340 (paras. 295, 853,
909, 914, 1641); Recueil des Actes de Henri II, ii. 80, 228, 263; J. Boussard, Le Comté
d’Anjou sous Henri Plantagenet et ses fils(Paris, 1938), 38–40.
(^52) Les Établissements de Saint Louis, i. 377, 518–19, ii. 206–7; Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’evo-
lution des institutions judiciaires’, 30.
(^53) Les Olim, i, ed. Comte Beugnot (Paris, 1839), 106–7 (vii), 158 (viii).
(^54) Ibid.i. 328–9 (xv).
(^55) See e.g. Cartulaire de L’Abbaye de Savigny, ed. Bernard, 233 (no. 430).
(^56) Recueil des Actes de Henri II, ii. 227–9 (no. 618); for the Montsoreau family, see