Dominican and Franciscan orders, for the task was the correction of the
abuses of royal government itself by its local agents. The redress of his
subjects’ grievances was part of Louis’s crusading vow, without the
fulfilment of which the enterprise could not be expected to prosper.^3
Particular care was now being taken in the choice of baillis, who
might be moved from one place to another, have temporary associates
appointed, and see the boundaries of their bailliagesadjusted to meet the
demand for more effective government. A tract on princely rule written
a hundred years later recalled how ‘the holy king Louis’ had been
accustomed, as he went round the country, ‘to bear at his girdle a pair
of tables’ on which to note the names of men he heard about who were
‘good, true and wise’ and convenient for office.^4 Royal baillisand
sénéchauxwere being appointed in the newly conquered areas in the
south, even where the king had few personal domains: the importance
of the great enquêteof 1247–8 lay in its proclamation that the people
of Carcassonne, Nîmes, and Beaucaire were equally citizens of the king-
dom of France, whom the king would protect against his own officials
if these acted unjustly.^5 As he departed for the crusade in 1249,
Alphonse count of Poitou, the king’s brother, appointed his own
inquisitors for his appanage, which a month later was swollen by his
succession to the county of Toulouse.^6
Preparation for crusading stimulated domestic government: crusading
itself was an interruption of the government, which was coming to be
regarded as the king’s main business. To this Louis returned in 1254
with a new dedication, as would his cousin Edward I of England from
his crusade twenty years later. No doubt penitence for the sins which it
was believed must have led the Seventh Crusade to its ruin in Egypt con-
tributed to Louis’s zeal for just rule. Jean de Joinville, the companion of
the king in defeat and captivity, makes the latter part of his Vie de Saint
Louis, one of the first saint’s lives in the vernacular, a description of a
new sort of royal sanctity, which combined the conscientious super-
vision of officials with a personal holiness that renounced silk robes and
feather beds. Moving up from his landfall near Marseilles in July 1254,
Louis sought, by restoring their liberties, to reconcile the cities of the
south which still smarted from the bloody crusade mounted by the
barons of northern France against the Cathar heretics. The enquêtes
148 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^3) Recueil des historiens, 24, pp. 3 ff.; F. Lot et R. Fawtier, Histoire des institutions
françaises au moyen âge, ii. Institutions royales(Paris, 1958), 157; C.-V. Langlois, ‘Doléances
recueillies par les enquêteurs de saint Louis’, Revue historique, 92 (1906), 3.
(^4) Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet, Camden
4th. ser. 18 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 203.
(^5) See Recueil des historiens,24, p. 2 for the territorial grouping of complaints.
(^6) Layettes du Trésor des chartes, ed. A. Teulet et al., 5 vols. (Paris, 1863–1909), iii, no.
3796; Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, ed. P.-F. Fournier and P. Guebin (Paris,
1959).