and water.^143 The French cases bring into focus another important way
by which thirteenth-century monarchies changed territorial liberties
into individual rights: that is, by the extinction of the lordships through
which the liberties had flowed. With the removal of the intermediate
lords whose ancestors had received the charters of liberties and
bestowed franchise on their tenants, freedom ceased to be derived from
a multitude of separate land grants and was seen as the sum of the
customary rights of people subject to the king alone. King John forfeited
Normandy to the French crown. In Louis IX’s great inquiry into
administrative abuses forty-three years later, Norman after Norman
claimed customs they had lost when their lords had chosen English
allegiance and forfeited their Norman lands. Thus, the burgesses of
Verneuil complained of the imposition of hearth-money, despite King
Philip’s confirmation of all the liberties and customs which they had
possessed in Normandy when the kings of England were their lords.^144
Languedoc had meanwhile fallen to a mixture of force and the diplo-
macy which arranged the marriage of Louis IX’s brother Alphonse to
the heiress of Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. Petitioners to
Alphonse’s court asserted franchises granted by Raymond while he lived
or complained of new customs imposed by him to the prejudice of their
liberties; these people Count Alphonse often took the responsibility for
restoring to their good and approved customs and liberties—in order,
the grants said, to free Count Raymond’s soul. As the lordships within
which they had grown disappeared, customs became the possession of
the communities of tenants, almost part of the soil they tilled. This was
‘ancient custom’; ‘right and custom long approved’; ‘the use of the land
and the custom of its courts’; consuetudines patrie juste et rationabiles,
manifeste vel notorie.^145 Yet it seemed to Alphonse’s council, consider-
ing a petition of the barons of Agen that justice should be done there
according to the custom of Agen and not the jus scriptumof civil and
canon law, that customs could often be doubtful and uncertain.^146 They
needed to be written down, and in the course of the thirteenth century
they were written down, in the coutumiersof Normandy first of all and
Property and liberty 219(^143) Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, ed. Fournier and Guebin, 33, 63, 130,
137, 214, 216, 299–300, 304, 312, 325.
(^144) Enquêtes administratives du règne de Saint Louis, ed. Delisle in Recueil des historiens
des Gaules et de la France, xxiv (Paris, 1904), 1–73 (nos. 49, 76, 92, 95, 124, 157, 163, 207,
219, 239, 253, 266, 274, 275, 317, 355, 384, 395); Les Olim, i. 62 (7), 77, 213.
(^145) Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, 63 (no. 5), 70 (no. 90), 99 (nos. 29, 30),
115 (no. 58), 137 (no. 12), 139 (no. 22), 214 (no. 4), 304.
(^146) Ibid. 349 (nos. 493, 494, 497).