of placing a check on the king’s fiscal demands. Entry to this privileged
estate could be gained by purchasing a royal lettre d’anoblissement, but
this was necessary only when a man’s status was not clear from his
membership of an ancient lineage and military prowess, typically if he
was a royal lawyer or bureaucrat with urban origins. Nobles were men
‘living nobly’ and ‘frequenting the wars’: if they were detected staying
at home and becoming innkeepers, they risked losing status and privi-
lege.^205
Yet the titled nobles were a permeable group within a landed aristo-
cracy of knights, esquires, and gentlemen which was itself open-ended
and needed to be replenished as lineages died out. The sumptuary laws
indicate that the real determinant of status in the upper levels of society
was the extent of the landed income which allowed ‘noble living’ and
this was subject to all sorts of pressures. The largest mass of early legis-
lation consequently protected landed rights, and was inspired first of all
by the efforts of the lords, the king at their head, to maintain the value
of feudal services. Vassals more and more bought, sold, and divided
their fiefs for family or commercial reasons. But lords were also vassals.
Efforts to stop the dismemberment of fiefs by insisting on succession
by primogeniture could not succeed against customs of provision for
younger children.^206 The Customs of Paris, the law-book of the French
heartland, accommodated the rules of feudalism as they were confirmed
by the établissementsof Saint Louis to the economic exigencies of the
city.^207 The king himself might buy up rear-fiefs to extend his demesne,
while demanding that his vassals purchase licenses to sell their fiefs or
enfranchise their serfs. (The royal spoiling of the land-market in this
way was one of the provocations of the leagues against Philip IV and
Louis X.) In 1275 the king began to allow non-nobles who had acquired
fiefs within his demesne to retain them on payment of a number of
years income from the land, thus creating a droit de franc-fiefwhich his
successors renewed, steadily racheting up the price.^208
In England Henry III had found ‘the Crown and royal dignity...
intolerably damaged’ by the alienation of lands held of the king in chief,
and in 1256 ordered sheriffs to seize lands so alienated without his
Estates of people 233(^205) Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit français, 2nd imp. (Montchrestien, 1951), 637–42;
Lewis, Later Medieval France, 97–8, 104, 174–6, 180–1, 226, 366–7; J. Rogozinski,
‘Ennoblement by the Crown and Social Stratification in France 1285–1322’, in Order and
Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. W. C. Jordan,
B. McNab, and T. F. Ruiz (Princeton UP, 1976); Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval
Europe, 180, 191.
(^206) Lewis, Later Medieval France, 177; E. Miller, ‘The State and Landed Interests in
Thirteenth Century France and England’, TRHS, 5th Ser. 2 (1952); Olivier-Martin, Histoire
du droit français, 243–4; Lot and Fawtier, Institutions royales, 171, 384.
(^207) Ordonnances des Roys de France,i. 107–294..
(^208) Ibid.ii. 556.