specific licence.^209 The barons petitioned Edward II in 1325 that the rule
should not apply to lands they acquired within honours that had
escheated to the king for rebellion, and were answered that in this
matter ‘the king should have the same estate as the lords’.^210 It was
avowedly on behalf of ‘magnates and others’ that Edward I’s Statute of
Quia Emptores sought in 1290 to prevent the loss of rights to escheats,
marriages and wardships by their vassals’ alienations; the purchaser of
a fief or part of one must in future replace the vendor in the feudal hier-
archy and assume a just proportion of his services to the chief lord. The
statute in fact took the heart out of ‘feudalism’ by preventing the
creation of new social bonds by subinfeudation, and the most significant
words of the enactment were the first: ‘that henceforth it is to be lawful
for each free man to sell or will his land or tenement’.^211 The ‘fee
simple’ became a straightforward unit of landed property, like the franc-
fief the acquisition of which by non-nobles Philip IV once again
admitted in 1291 with a specification of extra payment if there was
‘abridgement of services’.^212
A private law rooted in common rules of fief-holding developed in
similar ways in the two countries, but royal legislation changed it more
obviously in the smaller country, with its stock of procedures by
chancery writ and a tighter administration to apply them. The modes of
possession and inheritance of feudal property in France were set out in
the établissements of Saint Louis, a private compilation of the early
1270s (though taken for legislation and thus included in 1723 in the
first volume of the Ordonnances des Roys de France), and in
Beaumanoir’s Coutumes de Beauvaisis.^213 The systematic amendment of
English private law was at the heart of the ‘establishments’ promulgated
by Edward I in the parliaments held at Westminster in 1275 and 1285
‘to set to rights the state of his kingdom’. Westminster I has clauses pro-
hibiting magnates from impoverishing houses of religion by excessive
demands for entertainment, and on how they should exercise their
rights of wardship; a dozen chapters deal exclusively with civil pro-
cedure, curbing the power of defendants to delay cases, bringing
forward the dates of limitation from which plaintiffs had to prove their
right in various actions, widening the circumstances in which actions for
dower and the petty assizes could be pursued and ending with a royal
request to the bishops that assizes ‘might be taken in Advent, on
234 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^209) EHDiii. 360–1.
(^210) RPi. 430 (no. 3).
(^211) SRi. 106; tr. in EHDiii. 466; T. F. T. Plucknett, The Legislation of Edward I(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1949), 102–8.
(^212) Ordonnances des Roys de France,i. 323–4 (c. 9).
(^213) Ibid.i. 161, 200–1, 276–7 etc.; Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit français, 117;
Coutumes de Beauvaisis, chs. xiv, xlvii etc.