to successive kings for confirmation) had yielded place under Philip
Augustus, Louis VIII, and Louis IX to ‘constitutions’, ‘ordinances’, and
‘établissements’, which the king statuitfor the utility of every vassal or
all his subjects and promulgated in letters with a general address. The
investigation in 1246 of the uncertain customs of Anjou and Maine
regarding wardships and reliefs and their subsequent determination by
a royal ordinance signals the subordination of local custom to royal
control.^40
As kings took control of their countries’ ius consuetudinarium, the
duty of the jurists who served them became the integration of new legis-
lation with legal tradition in their coutumiersand Rechtsbücher. The
établissementsof French kings bulk large in Beaumanoir’s Customs of
Beauvaisis, because the baillis’ primary duty was to enforce royal edicts.
The pleading of novel disseisin, we are told, should comply with a
nouvel établissementof 1277, and sworn witnessing with Saint Louis’s
ordinance of 1260 and not ‘the ancient custom’.^41 ‘The general custom
concerning dower’ is traced by Beaumanoir to an ordinance of Philip
Augustus.^42 The intention of établissementswas not to take away any-
one’s rights but to see things done in accordance with reason, abolish-
ing bad customs and carrying forward good ones. But it was no longer
open to a baron to allow burgesses to have fiefs within his lands, as it
would have been if King Philip III had made the ordinance on the
matter only for his own domain: this was a general établissement
promulgated at an exceptionally large council meeting and for the
common profit, and should run throughout the realm.^43 The
unrestricted bloodfeud, the wreaking of vengeance on a felon’s kin, was
deemed too malign a custom, and King Philip (so Beaumanoir tells us,
though there is no record of it) made another établissementthat the
implicated kinsmen, if they were not present at the actual misdeed,
should have forty days of truce to decide whether to fight or buy
peace.^44
The biggest English law-book, ‘Bracton’ On the Laws and Customs
of England, exploits a quite new mass of material which had not been
available to Glanvill, almost five hundred cases from the plea rolls of the
king’s courts, in order to represent the new law that was being made all
the time by the devising of writs and judicial pronouncements upon
them as well as by explicit legislation like that by king and barons at
198 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^40) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 1–11, 15, 22–3, 35, 38, 44, 55, 58; Les Enquêtes
administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, 349 (nos. 493, 494, 497).
(^41) Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 39–40 (§51), 90 (§176), 103 (§205), 116–17
(§227), 367–8, 485, 497–8, ii. 104 (1165), iii. 70.
(^42) Ibid.i. 212 (§445), iii. 70.
(^43) Ibid. ii. 256–7 (§1496–§1499).
(^44) Ibid.ii. 371–2; 379 (§1722).