Chapelle, a knight who was a central figure in the king’s court at this
time and pronounced the judgment for the convent, another knight, and
the baillisof Étampes, Orleans, and Caen, along with two provosts of
Paris.^52 In the following year, the king being still ‘in overseas parts’, a
case was heard by ‘master John de Aubergenville, bishop of Évreux’,
Geoffrey de la Chapelle, ‘master Stephen de Montfort of Orleans’, and
two other masters, all described as ‘masters of the court of France and
councillors of the said lord king’.^53
Of course there was continuity between the arbitration service long
provided by the king’s court and the judging of the masters at parle-
ments, and the jurisprudence of these magistrimight amount to no more
than the advice given to the king in 1254, against the pleas of the queen
and others, that justice demanded that a noblewoman convicted of
murdering her husband should be burned in public.^54 Roman law
inspiration hardly seems necessary for Louis’s famous ordinance,
variously dated to parlementsof November 1258 and February 1261,
that proof by witnesses should replace trial by battle throughout his
domains: it reads like a set of practical instructions to the officials of his
domain, extending an order of about 1254 to the prévôtof Paris, rather
than general legislation.^55 The earliest collections of French customary
law outside Normandy, Pierre des Fontaines’ Conseil a un amiand the
Livres de Jostice et de Plet, both from the 1250s, attempt (as did
‘Bracton’ at a similar date in England) to follow Roman law models, but
their value lies in their account of the actual practices of the courts of
Vermandois and the Orléannais and their indication of the ways in
which the baillisattracted appeals from lower officials and from the
seignorial courts (for instance, in cases where the widening social
differences between litigants made trial by battle manifestly unjust) and
fed the most serious cases through to the parlements.^56 Pierre des
Fontaines was a bailliof Vermandois who became a ‘linchpin’ of parle-
ments; Philippe de Beaumanoir, author of the leading French law-book
of the thirteenth century, Coutumes de Beauvaisis(c.1283), was the son
of the Count of Artois’s bailiff for the Gatinais and himself at various
times royal bailli of Vermandois and seneschal of Poitou and the
Limousin, his great work reflecting the extent of such an official’s
164 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^52) Langlois, Textes, 39–40 (xxiv), 43–5 (xxvii–xxviii), 62–3 (xxxviii, xl); id., ‘Les Origines’,
85–6; Griffiths, ‘New Men’.
(^53) Recueil des historiens, 24, p. *315(141); Langlois, ‘Les Origines’, 88–91.
(^54) Recueil des historiens, 20, p. 116C–D.
(^55) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i, 86–93; Langlois, Textes, 40–2 (xxv), 45–8 (xxx); Lot
and Fawtier, Institutions royales, 316–20, 426; Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 124–5.
(^56) Langlois, Textes,37–9 (xxiii); Lot and Fawtier, Institutions royales,310, 324, 428;
Griffiths, ‘New Men’, 218 ff., 258.