emendi et vendendi secundum leges et consuetudines regni), remained
the most familiar of grants throughout the Middle Ages.^131 By substi-
tuting free burgage tenure for the villein services and merchet of the
rural manor, English lords created trading boroughs.^132 Villagers all
over twelfth-century France clubbed together to obtain costly charters
of freedom. The much-copied Carta Franchesieof Lorris near Orleans,
granted by its lord (who happened also to be King Louis VII) in 1155,
began by setting fixed rents for the holdings of the inhabitants of the
parish of Lorris and exempting them from tolls and tallages and
corvées. The ‘liberties and free customs’ of an increasingly active sort
granted to boroughs were obtained as communal privileges, but could
mostly be enjoyed only as individual rights, like the right not to be
sued in any but the municipal court, and freedom from ‘tolls, passage-
dues, and other customs’, which might have to be invoked by lone
burgesses far from the borough itself. Economic forces multiplied grants
of liberties of this sort, and the king’s courts safeguarded them.^133
The freemen of privileged towns were among the first free citizens,
but other types of community received grants of liberties in England in
the years leading up to Magna Carta. Significant for individual liberty
was the type of grant the men of the county of Devon obtained in 1204,
empowering the shire court ‘to give bail for men arrested by the sheriff,
so that none should remain in prison because of his malice’. In 1207–9
Peter Bruce granted a charter of liberties to the knights and free tenants
of Cleveland regarding the conduct of pleas in a wapentake he had just
purchased.^134 Liberties were granted by the king to the barons in 1215
and 1258–9 on the understanding that they would be passed on to their
men.^135 The ‘whole commons of the Franchise of Tyndale’ as well as the
community of the borough of Reading sued for freedom from tolls and
from being taken to court outside their liberties.^136 Restrictions on the
Property and liberty 217(^131) Recueil des actes de Charles le Chauve, iii. 227; RRANi, appx. 42, 66, 81; Recueil des
actes de Henri II, i. 26–7; A. Harding, ‘The Medieval Brieves of Protection’, Juridical Review
(1966), 116, 117, 138 (the last example is from 1535); Registrum Brevium, fos. 24b–25;
Formulary E, ed. Duncan, nos. 54, 61.
(^132) British Borough Charters, 1042–1216, ed. A. Ballard (Cambridge UP, 1913), pp. xl,
40–1.
(^133) Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, i. 4–5, 30–2 etc.; M. Prou, Les Coutumes de
Lorris et leur propagation aux XIIeet XIIIesiècles(Paris, 1884), 445–57; G. Duby, Rural
Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, tr. C. Postan (London, 1968), 242–3;
English Lawsuits, 662–3, 698, for the liberties the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds extracted
from the abbey.
(^134) Holt, Magna Carta, 60–72.
(^135) Ibid.469 (c. 60); Documents of the Baronial Movement, 133; cf. A. Artonne, Le mouve-
ment de 1314 et les chartes provinciales de 1315(Paris, 1912), 166–8; A. J. Otway-Ruthven,
‘The Constitutional Position of the Great Lordships of South Wales’, TRHS, 5th ser. 8 (1958),
15; R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), 88, 94, 102, and ch. 10.
(^136) C. M. Fraser, Ancient Petitions relating to Northumberland, Surtees Soc. 176 (Durham,