In civil disputes—though the separation of ‘civil’ from ‘criminal’
meant little when the main object was always to preserve the com-
munity’s peace—towns needed still greater freedom of action. Even the
king’s men could be arrested for debt in a town ‘ruling itself by law’
(regente se per legem).^78 Procedures for collecting debts from knights or
their servants bulk large in communal charters. At Saint-Quentin, the
mayor could order a debtor of one of the burgesses to have his lord
arrange a duel about a contested debt, and if he did not the échevins
would give a remedy; burgess creditors had to accept abandon(the
return of the goods not paid for). If a debt contracted at Rouen was not
paid, the mayor could seize the debtor’s goods and harness as soon as
he descended from his horse. The commune itself could enforce pay-
ment of an acknowledged debt, but had to rely on the king’s baillito act
if the debt of an outsider was disputed. At Péronne, the mayor and
jurats were empowered to call upon a knight to repay his debt to a
burgess, and if he would not they could ban him from the town and stop
his credit there; the creditor could be awarded the debtor’s goods, but if
a knight contested the seizure the échevins would decide the case on the
authority of king or castellan. At Rouen and Falaise even land cases
could be judged by the mayor and the échevins, if the lords of the dis-
puted tenements did not ‘claim their courts’ and ‘do right’ to claimants
within a month.^79
The jurisdictional liberties of the communes were a final product of
the draining of Carolingian public justice down to local lordships. In
England the control the Norman and Angevin kings kept over castle-
building, and in Spain the use of castles by the kings of Leon and Castile
(‘the land of castles’) in the centuries-long war against the Moors,
kept the development of seignorial and borough jurisdiction within
narrower boundaries than in France.^80
60 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
Établissements de Saint Louis, ed. Viollet, ii. 44, iii. 13, 294; Les Olim, ii. 353–4 (vi), 376
(xxiii).
(^78) Les Olim, i. 83 (xvii).
(^79) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i. 271–2 (no. 224, c. 18), ii. 19 (no. 491, cc. 35,
37), 273–4 (no. 706, cc. 6, 7, 10, 11), 366–7 (no. 789, cc. 22, 24), iii. 25 (no. 977, c. 15), 57
(no. 1000, c. 5), 354–5 (no. 1237, c. 34), 545 (no. 1389, c. 23).
(^80) For Spain, see A. Mackay, Spain in the Middle Ages(London, 1977), 51–3; Coleccion de
fueros municipales y cartas pueblas de los reinos de Castilla, Leon, Corona de Aragon y
Navarra, ed. F. Munoz Romero (Madrid, 1847); J. Rodriguez, Los Fueros del reino de Leon,
2 (Documentos) (Ediciones Leonesas, n.d.), 15–23 (no. 2, cc. 20, 24, 40–2), 67–71 (no. 19);
Jose M. Font Rius, Cartas de poblacion y franquicia de Cataluna, 1 (Textos) (Madrid, 1969);
Luis G. de Valdeavellano, Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas, 5th edn. (Madrid,
1973), 515–16, 518–24, 537–40, 551; in Las Siete Partidas, ‘vicarios’ is used in the general
sense of ‘the officials who act in place of emperors, kings and great lords in the provinces,
counties and large towns, when these cannot be there in person’: La Segunda Partida, titulo I,
ley 13, in Los Codigos españoles concordados y anotados, 12 vols. (Madrid, 1847–51), ii. 332;
ii. 402, 433–54 (Segunda Partida, titulo XIII, ley 22, and titulo XVIII, for the holding of cas-
tles for the Crown; iii. 33 [Tercera Partida], III, 5) for the casas de corte; iii. 49, 382 (IV, 18,