then those of Vermandois, Orléannais, Touraine, Anjou, and the
Beauvaisis.^147 In the latter half of the century, the nobility appeared in
the new role of champions before the king of these provincial customs.
In 1315, leagues of nobles in the various provinces of France extracted
charters from Louis X confirming their own privileges in respect of
jurisdiction (including the right to have prisons) and personal justice
(they were not to be imprisoned on mere suspicion or condemned on
confessions made under torture). But in Normandy, Amiens, and
Vermandois, in particular, ‘all the common people’ were included in the
grants, and the king’s ‘loyal subjects’ generally were confirmed in the
‘good usages’ and ‘ancient customs’ or ‘general custom’ of their pays,
such as they had been governed by in the time of ‘Monseigneur Saint
Loys’.^148
In England, too, liberty and custom were being detached from, even
opposed to lordship. The Hundred Rolls inquest of 1274–5 investigated
‘liberties which obstruct common justice’.^149 The potential was recog-
nized for a noble franchise to conflict with ‘the custom of England’.
Lords were bound to do justice according to the customs of their
manors, and the men of a town or a private hundred might complain to
the king or parliament against the imposition of new customs. Once
again, the extinction of lordships was the strongest impulse to the
recognition of franchises as customary rights inhering in the communi-
ties of tenants. The wars which began with Edward I’s invasion of
Scotland in 1296 forced some lords to choose between their English and
Scottish lands, just as others had been forced early in the century to
choose between English and Norman lands. The Scottish kings’ liberty
of Tynedale and the Balliol family possessions in England were
confiscated. Tynedale saw six different lords come and go in the next
forty years, and in such circumstances it was ‘the commons of the
Franchise of Tynedale... on the point of being destroyed for lack of
right’ who had to take thought for the execution of jurisdiction in the
lordship.^150
For a time, the lordship of the king of Scots was in abeyance in his
own land, and Edward I adjudicated on the liberties and customs of the
Scots. At his spring parliament of 1305, 136 petitions from Scotland
were submitted. In reply, great abbeys like Melrose and Sweetheart
were told to show the charters of feoffment and liberty they wanted
220 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^147) J. H. Shennan, The Parlement of Paris(London, 1968), 51.
(^148) Artonne, Le Mouvement de 1314 et les chartes provinciales de 1315, 165, 167, 169,
173–6, 179, 181, 182, 184 (articles 1 and 18 of Berri).
(^149) EHDiii. 393 (c. 10).
(^150) Curia Regis Rolls, xv. 52–3 (no. 235), 194 (no. 908), 251 (no. 1098); RPi. 4 (no. 14);
Ancient Petitions relating to Northumberland, 109, 127–8; J. A. Tuck, ‘Northumbrian Society
in the Fourteenth Century’, Northern History, 3 (1968).