1258 began by ordering that four knights should be chosen in each
county to attend every day in the county court, ‘hear all complaints of
any injuries and trespasses whatsoever, done to any persons whatsoever
by sheriffs, bailiffs, or any other persons’, and to remand the accused
until ‘the first visit of the chief justiciar to those parts’ to determine the
complaints hundred by hundred.^34
It became apparent in course of the preparation of the second stage
of the reform, which lasted from the summer of 1258 until the Pro-
visions of Westminster were promulgated in the autumn of 1259, that
indiscriminate distraint of knights and freeholders to attend the courts
of the magnates was as much of a grievance as the compulsion of ‘arch-
bishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, monks and women’ to
attend the sheriffs’ tourns when the business did not specifically require
them.^35 On his eyre Bigod heard the usual stories of the ransoming of
indicted men by shire officials and complaints of sheriffs who held more
tourns than were accustomed and shifted the meeting-place of the
county court of Surrey from Leatherhead to Guildford, but also
the grievances of the men of Witley, who claimed that Peter of Savoy,
the queen’s uncle, had increased the rents they paid as tenants of ancient
demesne of the king, and the charge of ‘the king’s men of Norbiton’ that
the bailiff of the chancellor of the bishop of Salisbury infringed their
common rights. The ‘whole community of the township of Southwark’
complained of the billeting of men and the seizing of flesh, fish, and
other supplies within the township by Edward, the king’s eldest son.^36
The wrong-doing of ‘aliens, courtiers, and nobles and their bailiffs’
and the failure of the king’s judges to give justice against them, for they
were nearly all ‘placed and kept in their offices by the influence of these
men’, were high among the ‘grievances by which the land of England
was oppressed, and on which the state of that kingdom needed to be
reformed’: so the barons told King Louis in January 1264 when they
sought redress from him as King Henry’s overlord.^37 Their problem
was how to bring about the reform of ‘the state of the king’ on which
they saw the ‘state of the kingdom’ to depend. King Louis had indeed
ordered the reform of his own court, but he was bound to find against
vassals who tried to force reform on a consecrated king, and likely to
listen sympathetically to a brother-in-law who understood ‘the restora-
Plaints and the reform of the status regni 159(^34) Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion 1258–1267, selected by
R. E. Treharne, ed. I. J. Sanders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 90–1, 98–9, 112–15;
Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century, 283 ff.
(^35) Documents of the Baronial Movement, 134–5, 138–41; Select Cases of Procedure with-
out Writ, 85–98.
(^36) E. F. Jacob, Studies in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1267, Oxford
Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradoff, 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925),
36–125.
(^37) Documents of the Baronial Movement, 272–3.