towards their men ‘the points of the charters of franchises’ which they
themselves had been granted by the king, and also to respect what per-
tained ‘to the king and his franchises’.^121
Liberties were first of all privileges and powers: in the thirteenth-
century struggles of the barons with an ever more assertive monarchy,
they became the foundations of an idea of political liberty. When
Edward I demanded to know ‘by what warrant’ (quo warranto)
franchises were enjoyed, the answer was sometimes ‘by right of con-
quest’ (i.e. in 1066), and the myth arose that Earl Warenne produced
before the justices the rusty sword with which it had been done: to these
men land and freedom were inseparable.^122 At the level of kingdoms, it
is surely not a mere echo of the traditional land grant which one finds
in the agreement of Andrew Harclay, earl of Carlisle, in 1323, that
Robert Bruce and his heirs might hold the kingdom of Scotland
‘franchement, entierement, e quitement’: the franchise of the land
charters may indeed have been one of the elements out of which the
Scots forged a new concept of national freedom.^123
With the development of the king’s courts, the extent of the territorial
liberties of churches like Westminster and Battle, of the powers of
marcher lords like Richard de Clare in his ‘parliament’ of Glamorgan,
and of the detailed jurisdictions of middling lords, all fell to be decided
in the king’s courts in the thirteenth century.^124 Since disputes about
franchises originated as often as not in conflicting grants, the terms of
ancient charters could not settle them: a law of liberties based on the
general interest of crown and community was needed. The exercise of
baronial franchises was carefully scrutinized to see that royal ‘freedoms’
were not infringed. A prior who exacted tolls from the king’s officers
when they went to his market to buy eggs was told that his liberty had
not been granted to be used to the damage of the liberty of the king and
Property and liberty 215(^121) Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 132–5; see D. A.
Carpenter, ‘The Second Century of English Feudalism’, Past and Present,168 (2000), for the
continuing strength of feudal lordship in thirteenth-century England.
(^122) D. W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1963), 25–7, 82 n., 183–4; H. M. Cam, Liberties and Communities in
Medieval England(London, 1963), 176, is surely wrong to charge the chronicler with ‘mis-
representing the character of the Quo Warranto proceedings’ by this story, which effectively
brings out the territorial basis of franchise.
(^123) Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328, ed. E. L. G. Stones (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1971), 310; cf. Vita Edwardi Secundi, 132, for the report that in 1324 the Scots were demand-
ing that Scotland should be ‘immune’ from all exactions of the realm of England, and that by
right of conquest the whole territory they had marched through to the gates of York should
be ‘free’ to them.
(^124) J. B. Smith, ‘The Lordship of Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, 2 (1958), 32–3; Bracton’s
Notebook, ed. F. W. Maitland, 3 vols. (London, 1887), nos. 1050, 1107, 1154, 1250, 1598,
1676, 1716, 1720; Curia Regis Rolls, iii. 98, 131, 241; v. 12, 35; vii. 82; xi. 81–2, 90 (no.
473), 131 (no. 666), 218 (no. 1076), 325 (no. 1625), 445 (no. 2279); xv. 243 (no. 1074), 273
(no. 1137), 316–17 (no. 1277), 319–20 (no. 1285).