A king whose predecessors had granted the liberties of the clergy
would naturally claim to determine their extent and even represent them
as exercised on his behalf. Philip granted the abbot of Nant the right to
exercise justice ‘by our authority’ in his lands, in order to ‘purge them
of wicked men’.^80 He confirmed an agreement between the bishop and
chapter of le Mans and the lord of Outille, reached after an inquest
summoned by the seneschal of Anjou, which restricted the lay lord’s
right to exercise criminal justice within the chapter’s lands; and another
made after an inquest of knights and servants assembled by the parties
before the bailli of Tours, which excluded the lord of Loches from try-
ing murder, rape, or arson, or exercising any justice great or small, in
the lands of Saint-Martin at Ligueil.^81
The over-arching justice of the king appeared more or less clearly in
all these settlements. In 1190 Philip stood firmly behind the chapter of
Tours in the establishment of its rights over against the count of Anjou
to exercise justice on its lands, and pledged his authority that the agree-
ment which was reached should never be used to undermine the ‘due
state’ of the church of Saint-Martin according to the privileges granted
by his predecessors.^82 Three decades later, inquests recorded in the royal
registers affirmed the king’s right to exercise high justice in the lands of
the bishops of Paris and Arras; at Paris a number of jurors testified indi-
vidually to seeing cases of murder and rape punished there by the king’s
officers.^83 Another inquest of knights and burgesses, held in 1221 ‘lest
the rights of the king should in any way perish’, asserted his right to
judge cases brought to him because of default of justice in the feudal
court of the bishop of Laon, and assigned decisions that there had been
default of justice in secular matters (i.e. not usury or marriage or other
spiritual pleas) to juries of laymen assembled by royal bailiffs.^84 In the
same year the jurors who determined the rights of the king in the
prévôtéof Orleans said that the bishop could not arrest Jews under
the king’s protection, and that they had never seen people stopped
from selling food to prévôtswho had been excommunicated by the
Church; they listed cases they had seen of clergy degraded by the bishop
for murder and theft and handed over for punishment at the king’s
will (for theft, by having their eyes put out); and they described
examples from the time of bishop Manasse when a man condemned in
the church court for denying the faith (pro incredulitate), and a woman
condemned for carrying a milking-pail marked with the cross of the
Stabilimenta 125(^80) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i, no. 415.
(^81) Ibid.iii. 1286, 1300, 1415.
(^82) Ibid.i, no. 361 (p. 444).
(^83) Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, 161–3 (no. 100), 167–8 (no. 106).
(^84) Ibid.154–5 (no. 95).