over property which was not clearly ‘free alms’ or ‘lay fee’.^65 Parlement
sent councillors to sit in the exchequer at Rouen, which was brought to
accept, after due consideration, its judgments concerning Normandy;
and also, after the heiress of Champagne married Philip IV, to exercise
sovereign jurisdiction in Grands Jours at Troyes. Parlementalso acted
as the court of appeal from the Grands Joursof the apanages, the great
lordships given to the younger sons of the royal line.^66 For his inheri-
tance in Poitou and Languedoc, Louis’s brother Alphonse had his own
parlementto settle the disputes of his barons, judge demands for resti-
tution by officials previously handled by enquêteurs, and hear appeals
from the seneschals’ courts. The jurisdiction of this parlement, which
sometimes met at the count’s Paris headquarters but came to be known
as ‘of Toulouse’, was preserved in reduced form by delegation from the
parlementof Paris after Alphonse’s death and the full absorption of the
Toulousain into the kingdom.^67 At the end of the middle ages parle-
mentsfor Bordeaux, Burgundy, Brittany, the Dauphiné, Provence, and
Normandy (in this case, under the old name of the Exchequer of
Normandy) took their place beside the parlementof Toulouse. These
provincial parlementsincurred the jealousy of the parlementof Paris,
though it had a considerable part in setting them up, but they were the
only means by which the king could fulfil his responsibility for justice in
a large realm which was expanding further.^68
Parlementshowed how a high court could be the key institution in
state-formation. It is true that at times of national turmoil such as the
sixteenth-century wars of religion and the seventeenth-century frondes
the provincial parlementstoo easily became representatives of regional
particularism, and politically the Parlementof Paris might seem most
notable for its rivalry with the Grand Conseiland the rather negative
resistance to royal policies which helped to destroy it after five centuries.
Yet at the beginning, its judicial procedures were simultaneously the
administrative channels without which the king’s government could
have done nothing. The rise of parlement and of the bailliswas a
single process.^69 By the end of the thirteenth century bailliagesand
The bill revolution and parlement 167(^65) Les Olim, i. 59–63, 77 ff.; Langlois, Textes, 79 (lviii), and cf. 101–2 (lxxiv); Strayer,
Reign of Philip the Fair, 196–7, 206–7.
(^66) Recueil des historiens, 24, ‘preuves’, pp. 343, 356; Lot and Fawtier, Institutions
royales, 336, 440.
(^67) Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, xlviii–xlix; Langlois, Textes,155–6 (cx),
159 (cxii).
(^68) Lot and Fawtier, Institutions royales, 469–505.
(^69) B. Guenée, ‘La géographie administrative de la France à la fin du moyen âge: élections et
bailliages’, Le Moyen Âge(1961), 293–323; J. Rogozinski, ‘The Counsellors of the Seneschal
of Beaucaire and Nîmes, 1250–1350’, Speculum, 44 (1969); H. Takayama, ‘The Local
Administrative System of France under Philip IV (1285–1314)—Baillis and Seneschals’,
Journal of Medieval History, 21 (1995), 167–93; Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i, cap.
1: ‘De L’Office as Baillis’.