normal practice was for the inquisitors to question each juratusindi-
vidually rather than to obtain ‘verdicts’ from juries of presentment.^24
The general inquest of 1247 was the turning-point in the development
of French justice because it was instructed to listen to anyone in the
realm, ‘whoever they might be’, who had grievances against King Louis
himself, his predecessors, or his bailiffs, provosts, foresters and serjeants
and their households. The inquisitors were ‘to hear, write down and
investigate simply and summarily’ complaints (querimonie) of injuries,
exactions and improper receipt of services by the king’s officials, and
order the latter or their heirs to make restitution where, by confession
or proof, it was found to be due.^25
The 551 Querimonie Normannorumrecorded in 1247 reveal much
about the duchy’s integration into the realm. More than a hundred of
the complaints arose from the loss by Norman monasteries of English
property after the separation of the duchy from the kingdom of England
in 1204, or from the French king’s confiscation of the lands of Anglo-
Norman barons. Only now was there an opportunity to seek justice for
many of the dependants and tenants who had been deprived of their
inheritance ‘from the time of the conquest of Normandy’ because their
kinsmen or lords had chosen England. Other grievances originated from
the siege of the rebel-held castle of Bellême by royal troops in 1229:
monks complained of the besieging army’s plundering of their wood,
laymen of penalties imposed on them although they had no part in the
rebellion.^26
In the south of France complaints to the enquêteurswere often that
the king unjustly retained lands taken in the crusades against the
Albigensian heretics. Some said they had been victimized simply because
they happened to have houses in Carcassonne in 1240, at the time of its
betrayal to Raymond Trenceval, the rebellious vicomte of Béziers.
Others claimed to have been dispossessed for participation in the ‘war
of the count of Montfort’ (the leader of the crusaders from 1209 to
1218). One complainant was met with evidence that her husband’s
father had been burnt at Toulouse as a heretic (the witness claimed to
have been in the town, but had preferred not to watch), and that the
complainant herself had been implicated in ‘the war of the vicomte’.^27
156 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^24) Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, i. 150–3, 172–3 (nos. 92, 94, 113); the life of Saint
Louis by Queen Margaret’s confessor, in Recueil des historiens, 20, ed. Daunou and Naudet,
119.
(^25) Layettes du Trésor des chartes, 5, no. 490.
(^26) C. Petit-Dutaillis, ‘Querimoniae Normannorum’, in Essays in Medieval History
Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester UP,
1925), 107–10; the complaints to the inquisitors of 1247 and subsequent years are edited by
Delisle in Recueil des historiens, 24: see pp. 1–73 for the Norman plaints, and for this para-
graph, nos. 40, 46, 47, 49, 76, 78, 84, 135, 152, 274 etc.
(^27) Recueil des historiens, 24, pp. 300 (no.5), 308 (no.36), 541–4, 585 (no. 563).