queen and archbishop must inform King Philip three times a year ‘of the
state of our kingdom and affairs’ (de statu regni nostri et negotiis).^22
The crusading ordinance of 1190 shows that the means of governing
a wider kingdom were being developed well before the conquest of
Normandy and other Angevin lands which began in 1204 and the
annexation of Languedoc by Louis VIII in 1226: the acquisition of these
vast territories, different in culture and institutions from the old
Capetian domains and from each other, simply emphasized the need for
a new concept of the realm to be governed.^23 The city of Paris, though
it was never allowed the freedoms of a commune, was already becom-
ing a true capital by reason of its commerce, its use by the crown as a
source of administrative expertise as well as money, and the evolution
of its schools into a university.^24 Elsewhere Philip harnessed communal
energies on a new scale. His first expansion of the realm towards the
north-east at the expense of the count of Flanders was marked by the
creation or confirmation of communes at Amiens, Arras, Tournai, and
a dozen other places, the conquest of Normandy and Poitou by the
licensing of communes at Rouen, Caen, Falaise, and Poitiers amongst
other towns.^25 Grants to townsmen had early allowed him to intervene
in the archbishop’s Rheims and the duke of Burgundy’s Dijon.^26
Control of the communes was so important to the king that immedi-
ately after the conquest of Normandy the charters of thirty-nine of them
were copied out by a royal clerk to form ‘the only coherent section’ of
the first register of documents issued by the French royal chancery.^27 For
what King Philip called ‘my communes’ the age of fierce independence
was long past. The granting of ‘peace and a commune’ (institucionem
pacis et communie) was occasionally extended beyond well-established
towns to groups of rural communities, but the privileges of the
commune established at Chambly by its count were confirmed by Philip
explicitly without communia et banleuga, and there were frequent
grants of lesser ‘customs’ to townships.^28 The part of the towns in the
Justice on complaint to the king of France 115(^22) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste , i. 418. 13 ; Baldwin, Government of Philippe
Augustus, 137–9.
(^23) C. T. Wood, ‘Regnum Francie’, Traditio, 23 (1967); J. R. Strayer, ‘Normandy and
Languedoc’, Speculum, 44 (1969).
(^24) La France de Philippe Auguste, 21–6; Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 326.
(^25) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i, nos. 35 (Soissons), 224 (Tournai), 319 (Amiens),
473 (Arras), ii, nos. 491 (Saint-Quentin), 540 (Roye), 706 (Senlis), 790 (Falaise), 858
(Poitiers); iii, nos. 977 (Péronne), 1000 (Rouen), 1117 (Bray-sur-Somme), 1389 (Crépy-en-
Valois); Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, ed. J. W. Baldwin, Recueil des historiens de la
France: Documents financiers et administratifs, 7, i (Paris, 1992), 558–64, 600 (map);
Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 60–3.
(^26) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i, nos. 73, 101.
(^27) Registres de Philippe Auguste, i. 335–8; Petit-Dutaillis, Les Communes françaises, 20,
286–7; Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 412–13.
(^28) L. Carolus-Barré, ‘Philippe Auguste et les villes de commune’, in La France de Philippe