chapter sixNew High Courts and Reform
of the Regime
In themiddle years of the thirteenth century the reform of the ‘state
of the king and the kingdom’ became the matter of politics, and led to
the capping of the judicial systems of England and France by the new
high courts of parlementand parliament. These were the creations of
two long-lived kings, Louis IX (St. Louis, 1226–70) and Henry III
(1216–72), who were linked by family as well as feudal connections
(they married two sisters from Savoy), shared an ambition to distinguish
themselves as crusaders, and faced the same challenge of extending
justice to all their subjects through growing bodies of officials.
Complaints against officials
The crusade to the Holy Land on which Louis IX set sail in August 1248
was prepared more thoroughly than any other in Capetian history.^1
Concord had first to be established among the princes of Western
Europe—with England even at the cost of returning to Henry some of
the land John had been adjudged to have forfeited; and within France
itself the bailliswere mobilized to reinforce traditional forms of peace.
In 1245 they were ordered to grant those who took the cross a three-
year respite from their debts and to impose a five-year truce in all
private wars. The king’s local agents were busier than ever as arbiters,
and as enforcers of the bonds entered into by warring parties to keep
peace-agreements.^2 The actions of the royal agents themselves inevitably
came under scrutiny. Among orders to collect money, ships, and
supplies for the great venture, Louis issued in January 1247 a new sort
of commission directed neither to baillisnor to officers of the king’s
household but to ecclesiastical inquisitors drawn mostly from the
(^1) Jean Richard, Saint Louis, Crusader King of France, ed. and abridged S. Lloyd, tr.
J. Birrell (Cambridge UP, 1992), chs. 5 and 6; W. C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of
the Crusade: A Study in Rulership(Princeton UP, 1979).
(^2) Jean de Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. N. L. Corbett (Quebec, 1977), 96 (§65); Recueil
des historiens, 24, Les Enquêtes Administratives du Règne de Saint Louis, 302–303 (preuves
de la préface, nos. 115, 118, 119), 316* (no. 144).