distraint for a debt to himself, and fraudulently as well as forcibly
prevent the castellan’s servant from exercising the office.^92 Five years
later, the bishop went again to the king’s court and successfully claimed
jurisdiction in the case of an assault on the mayor of Beauvais by one of
the jurati, although the mayor pleaded that he was the king’s servant
and had suffered the injury on the public business of the commune.^93
The abbot of Corbie had long since fallen out with the commune of
clergy, knights, and burgesses, for which his predecessor had helped to
gain Louis VI’s approval back in the early twelfth century. Philip
Augustus confirmed his grandfather’s grant to the townsmen of Corbie
in 1180, but ten years later he was promising the monks that they
should not lose by it, and that he would sort out their differences with
the commune when he returned from Crusade. Yet in the 1260s the
mayor was successfully claiming an extension of the boundaries of the
commune’s justice to include a neighbouring village, although it was at
the expense of a territorial lord as well of the abbey, and had reportedly
been achieved with the help of a mob shouting ‘communia, communia’.
After more disputes, parlementat last decided the general issue of the
division of jurisdiction in Corbie between the commune and the abbey.
In 1300, ‘having heard the parties and seen their documents and privi-
leges’, it held that the monks had jurisdiction as lords of the town over
suits for the restitution of tenements and of goods and chattels, that they
could take security for the appearance in court of burgesses who with-
held customary dues or sold bad wine or bread or used false measures,
and that they could execute the judgments of the scabiniupon them.
The mayor and and jurats were left with a police-jurisdiction over
criminal injuries (de crimine seu delicto) accompanying property dis-
putes, and complaints of breach of contract if merchants brought them
to the municipal court.^94
The place of the king
What was the basis of royal authority in this society, where the mean-
ing of libertaswas no longer a defined immunity from interference by
the king’s or the bishop’s officers but rather the exercise of positive ‘free
customs’ by lords and communes? What jurisdiction belonged to the
king, the ‘lord paramount’, beside the settling of the tenurial disputes of
64 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^92) Les Olim, i. 325 (xi), ii. 111 (iii)
(^93) Ibid. ii. 225–6 (ix).
(^94) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i. 14–15 (no. 10), 445 (no. 362), 453 (no. 368),
iii. 480 (no. 1339); Les Olim, i. 204 (vi), 268–9 (ii), 325 (xi), 646 (ix), 672 (xvii), 820–1 (xv),
ii. 111 (iii), 225 (ix), 445–7 (vii), 480–1 (ii–iii).