century drew to a close left conditions which the annointed kings of
France and England could exploit for the rebuilding of their states.^104
Firstly, since consuetudinesoriginated in Carolingian public power,
there remained a sense that it was for kings to confirm landlords in
possession of them. Secondly, as kings had learnt by the twelfth century,
grants of customs might be used to create, alongside the rural commu-
nities under the seignorial ban, collective lordships of merchants
supplying new kinds of material and ideological support for royal
government.^105 And, thirdly, the violence that was intrinsic to feudal
aggrandizement, when it was curbed and harnessed by politically skilful
royal overlords, would provide the energy of a new system of justice.
The crucial disputes about the holding of lands and the liberties
attached to them were not settled by abstract legal rules but by a
mixture of traditional procedures, force, and negotiation within groups
of feudatories, and the king’s political power was essential to the imple-
mentation of the compromises that were reached. Trial by battle or
ordeal might be awarded in an overlord’s court and then called off, so
that peace could be arranged by the counsel of the friends of both
parties. Monasteries in dispute with neighbouring castellans did not
seek legal victories which the courts were powerless to enforce, but
rather agreements witnessed as fair by the local community, which held
out a better promise of long-term peace.^106 Thus around 1124 Thomas
de Saint Jean made an agreement with the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel
in Normandy, whose lands he had been invading and woods destroying
in order to build the castle of Saint-Jean-le-Thomas. Thomas had come
to the abbey in a fury (furibundus), when he heard the clamour to God
for justice against him, but the counsel of his vassals and the monks’
resolution brought his submission and restoration of the abbey’s
demesne lands and consuetudines; he asked only to keep the service of
the knights related to him in blood. On another day he came back, ‘with
the bishop of Avranches and many other barons’, to work out detailed
terms with the monks, which included monetary compensation for
Thomas’s concessions. Later, the agreement was taken to Argentan, so
The place of the king 67(^104) For recent debate about the nature and dating of ‘the feudal mutation’, see: Guy Bois,
La Mutation de l’an mil(Paris, 1989): tr. Jean Birrell as The Transformation of the Year One
Thousand(Manchester UP, 1992); Chris Wickham, ‘Problems of Comparing Rural Societies
in Early Medieval Western Europe’, TRHS, 6th ser. 2 (1992), at 245–6; Dominique
Barthelemy, ‘La Mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu’, Annales ESC(1992), 767–77; T. N. Bisson,
‘The ‘Feudal Revolution’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), 6–42, and the subsequent debate in
Past and Present, 152 and 155 (1996–7).
(^105) For the place of the ban in the formation of rural communities, see L. Genicot, Rural
Communities in the Medieval West(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), ch. 3; Recueil des
Actes de Philippe Auguste, passim.
(^106) Stephen D. White, ‘ “Pactum... Legem Vincit et Amor Judicium”: The Settlement of
Disputes by Compromise in Eleventh-Century Western France’, American Journal of Legal
History, 22 (1978), 281–308.