110 THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE MIDDLE AGES
outside the ordinary laws of the king, the city, and craft organizations.
The exact territorial limits covered by the Temple's franchise are not
known. It is quite certain that they went well beyond the Enclos itself.
The 1279 accord stipulates in fact the rights and franchises for those
artisans who lived and worked in the courts and the Enclos of the
Temple. The franchise privilege obviously was exercised throughout the
area where the Templars had the authority to administer high justice, a
domain that was much more extensive than the Enclos and its direct
dependencies. It is likely, however, that originally all the taxpayers of
the Temple benefited from it.^8
By virtue of this right of franchise, the entry into a craft would have
been free in the Temple censive district, whereas in the royal provost-
ship many crafts and trades had to be purchased from the king.
Generally speaking, the subjects of the Temple, at least those in its high
justice domain, were exempt from royal and municipal charges and
most taxes: those attached to the tally, conscripted labor (the corvee),
regulations concerning weights and measures, the giving of free gifts,
and so forth. After 1279, they all escaped the servitude that the bour-
geois and crafts masters found so unpleasant: the watch. In the provost-
ship, on the other hand, it was quite rare that those crafts described as
francs metiers in Etienne Boileau's book escaped this obligation. Among
those that did were the mortar makers and stonecutters, but not masons
and carpenters. In the Temple jurisdiction, all craftsmen were francs
metiers and the masons who were established there were freemasons.
The bourgeois there were known as francs bourgeois, such as a certain
Simon le Franc, who lived around 1200 and left his name on a street in
the censive district that neighbored the rue des Francs Bourgeois.
Thus privileges of asylum and franchise were not common. They
long made the Temple highly popular among craftsmen. It was the
influx of these artisans that helped populate and enrich the Parisian
establishment of the Order—so much so that it was chosen to be the
Order's headquarters when the Christians lost the Holy Land.
The Temple enclosed its population within its huge commandery,
effectively a large city that manufactured everything needed to live
there. The Parisian merchants, craftsmen, and bourgeois who lived
under Templar jurisdiction were so numerous in comparison to those