regiswho operated within the Capetian demesne had something in
common with the justices which Henry II began to send ‘on eyre’ in
England in 1166, but the baillialso had a role like the English sheriff’s
in bringing royal justice to the local community all the time. Kings could
not peremptorily take the adjudication of the landed disputes of under-
tenants away from the courts of the disputants’ lords. Through his
bailiffs the French king could, however, bring down to the local level the
offer of effective inquiry and arbitration. Episcopal and monastic cartu-
laries record the vindication of church property at assizes presided over
by royal bailiffs: how often assizes were used when both parties were
laymen we cannot know. At assizes property rights are reported as sold,
quitclaimed or acknowledged in the presence of a ballivus domini regis,
or two or three bailiffs, who then notify the result of the hearing by a
charter with a general address (notum facio universis tam presentibus
quam futuris).^44 Sometimes the royal bailiffs appear to be no more than
the presidents of a gathering of the lords of a region to which the results
of arbitrations are reported; it is at the request of litigants that bailiffs
add their seals to documents.^45 But bailiffs themselves may arbitrate,
and when the notification of the settlement cites evidence, it reads like a
judgment. A charter drawn up at a gathering in a church at Sées in 1212
was read out for approval before the bishop of Sées, a royal bailiff, and
a company of knights and clergy there present and holding the assizes.^46
At Laon in 1217 three ‘bailiffs of the lord king’, along with the provost
of Laon and a parish priest, received and announced ‘at the prayer of
the parties’ the result of an inquest by the oaths of forty men of the
district concerning the rights of the abbey of Saint-Médard in four
villages; after taking counsel from learned men they affirmed the finding
‘saving the right and customs of the king’.^47 Official records of the
assizes do not survive, any more than they do of proceedings in the
English shire court, but they seem to have existed. The cartulary of
Saint-Martin de Sées describes the making of a grant which ‘was written
in the rolls of the assizes of the lord king for its greater assurance (firmi-
tatem)’.^48 The whole development of royal justice depended on the
strength of its local base in the ballivi domini regisand their serjeants:
it was their actions which enabled the king’s court in France to provide
a judicial service comparable to that of the English curia regis, without
the formalism of the writ.
Under Philip Augustus royal notification of accords reached with the
Justice on complaint to the king of France 119(^44) Recueil des historiens, 24, pp. 271–293: ‘Preuves de la préface’, nos. 3, 5–7, 12, 19,
20, 26, 28–31, 34, 41, 44, 49, 52, 53, 57, 59, 61, 65, 67, 76, 84, 85 etc.
(^45) e.g. ‘Preuves de la préface’, nos. 49, 52, 57, 59, 65, 67, 84.
(^46) Ibid.no. 30 (p. 278).
(^47) Ibid.no. 44 (p. 282).
(^48) Ibid.no. 53 (p. 284*).