Beaune, bailliof Vermandois, appears to have been one of a series ‘for
the correction of officials’. In 1298, for instance, protests from the
people of the Toulousain are reported to have caused Philip IV to
instruct the dean of Saint Martin’s, Tours, the archdeacon of Bruges,
and Geoffrey of Vendôme, knight, to investigate the methods used by
the senior officials sent only the previous year to raise money for the
king; and two of the provincial charters of liberties granted by Louis X
in 1315, those to the inhabitants of Normandy and of Champagne,
promised to send out inquisitors every three years.^43
The great change in legal procedure came as plaintiffs took to sub-
mitting their complaints in writing and directed them against others
beside officials. Some may have been doing this from the beginning of
the enquêtes, but for the general inquiries of 1247 it was necessary
to enlist the local clergy to collect and write down ‘each and everyone’
of the petitiones et querimonie.^44 Among the records of the king’s
court there survive, however, a number of original letters submitted to
the ‘lords inquisitors’ in which people from Carcassonne denounce
unreasonable dispossession and violent extortion by royal bailiffs
during ‘the war of the vicomte’, and appeal to ‘the king’s majesty’ that,
‘having God before his eyes and moved by piety and mercy’, he will
restore their property. The fact that the complaints made against
Geoffrey de Roncherolles, the bailli of Vermandois, in 1269 are
recorded in the plaintiffs’ French rather than the clerks’ Latin suggests
that they are based on written petitions.^45 Thus, burgesses of Compiègne
address themselves in their vernacular to the ‘Segneur enquesteueur,
especiaument envoie de par noble homme Looys, roys de France, por les
torfez amender’ and ‘a fere droit a chaucun, ausinc au povre quant au
riche’.^46
From the first Frankish charters until the middle of the thirteenth
century, justice in the king’s court was set in motion by royal acts con-
ferring property and protection and demanding explanations from any
who infringed royal grants. But only aggrieved churches and substantial
landowners were in a position to get writs from the chancery ordering
sheriffs to initiate legal procedures. The acceptance of oral plaints
passed the initiative to wider social groups, and a stream of written
plaints or ‘bills’ began to flow in the reverse direction, from the locali-
ties to the curia regis. Joinville paints a famous picture of St. Louis
sitting after mass at the foot of his bed, or in his Paris garden, or with
The bill revolution and parlement 161(^43) C.-V. Langlois, ‘Doléances recueillies par les enquêteurs’, Revue Historique, 100 (1909),
especially 68–9, 81–2; id. on the Toulousain inquiry in Revue Historique, 95 (1907); Lot and
Fawtier, Institutions royales, 158.
(^44) Recueil des historiens, 24, p. 301
(^45) Ibid.386, 698 ff.; Layettes du Trésor des chartes, iii. 19, 572–4 (no. 3627, i–vi).
(^46) Recueil des historiens,24, p. 700 (no. 110).