concluded by the court’s arrêts(judgments).^63 Under the developed pro-
cedure suits began with the plaintiffs’ requêtes, which Philip IV’s
parliamentary ordinance of 1291 appointed a notary and three masters
of his council (who were not to be baillis) to scrutinize. Sitting from sun-
rise to mid-day in the great hall of the king’s palace the masters of
requests might decide straightforward matters themselves, but usually
issued ‘letters of justice’ to bring cases to parliament for full hearings, or
direct them to the courts of the provost of Paris, a baillior a seneschal.
Cases appealed to parlementfrom the bailliages and (in great numbers)
from the provost of Paris sitting at the Châtelet were also first con-
sidered in the Chambre des Requêtes du Palays. All the great cases of
the kingdom were pleaded in the Grand Chambreof parlement, staffed
for the July session of 1316 by four presidents (the archbishop of
Rouen, the bishop of Saint Malo, the count of Burgundy, and the
constable of France) and thirty-one masters (fourteen clerics and seven-
teen laymen), for the most part long-time royal councillors. When
pleading reached a stage at which evidence needed to be considered,
cases were referred to the Chambre des Enquêtes to which four
councillors (a dean, an archdeacon, a castellan, and a knight) were
appointed in 1291. The findings of this chamber had to be approved
and turned into arrêtsby the Grand Chambre, which kept under its own
control inquests concerning serious crimes and issues of inheritance and
personal honour.^64
A legal system capable of embracing all France was knitted together
by parlements. The size of the country makes this achievement of its
thirteenth-century kings quite as remarkable as Henry II’s in the more
compact kingdom of England. The parlementof Paris adjudicated on
the liberties, including the judicial liberties, of the lords (both lay and
ecclesiastical) and of communities, and by 1270 it had a procedure for
getting the local customs relevant to a case certified in writing. At the
Martinmas parlementof 1258 an inquest was held into the grievances
of the Norman bishops, who petitioned the king for the rights of them-
selves and their men ‘according to the ancient general custom of
Normandy’: some articles received the response that ‘it should be done
to the bishops as they ask’, while others were answered by a demarca-
tion of the respective roles of bishop and bailli, for example in the
confiscation of the goods of deceased usurers and in the trial of disputes
166 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^63) Les Olim, i, ed. Comte Beugnot (Paris, 1839); Langlois, ‘Les Origines’, 92–3; id.,
‘Nouveaux Fragments du Liber Inquestarum’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 46 (1885).
(^64) Langlois, Textes, 156–9 (cxi); P. Guilhermoz, Enquêtes et procès: Étude sur la procédure
et le fonctionnement du Parlement au XIVesiècle(Paris, 1892); Lot and Fawtier, Institutions
royales, 335–8, 341–8, 387, 411, 413–14; J. R. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair(Princeton
UP, 1980), 208–36.