realm’. Acts of vengeance against any persons were forbidden, so long
as the king’s enemies were within the realm, and lords who failed to
restrain their people would be summoned to answer in parlement,
notwithstanding their privileges and customs.^240
Of course crimes had to be avenged and malefactors chastised, but
where it was legitimate, vengeance was to be taken judicially in the
name of the king’s peace, which reached beyond the feuding nobles to
subjects at all levels. The definitions of the various sorts of crime which
Beaumanoir sets out, the ways of prosecuting them, and the ‘vengeance’
appropriate to them had been worked out largely by custom and
practice in local courts, and rather than legislate on the content of the
criminal law, king and parlementgave new vigour and discipline to its
enforcement. Crimes on the most serious of the three levels that Beau-
manoir describes (murder, treason, homicide, rape, larceny by night,
obdurate heresy, sodomy, and making false money) were prosecuted
either by ‘appeals’ (private accusations which the appellants offered to
prove by defeating the accused in combat), or by denunciations of
crimes to a justice as notorious and his public duty à vengier; and the
vengeance for them was death in various guises (for making false money
it was ‘boiling’ before hanging). These capital crimes, along with the
breaking of truces and of mutual pledges of peace, were within the juris-
diction of the possessors of haute justiceonly.^241
But Beaumanoir knows a number of less menacing forms of theft
which were not capital (and therefore lay within lower jurisdictions),
and a whole second level of offences punished by imprisonment and
fines, and follows it with a third level avenged by fines alone, both the
terms of imprisonment and the size of the fines varying according to
the gravity of the misdeeds and the ‘estates’ of the malefactors and the
injured parties. In the second category Beaumanoir puts maiming, no
longer subject, he says, to the law of talion, which ‘in the old law’ had
demanded a hand for a hand and a foot for a foot; a serf’s insulting of
an aristocrat; and the conspiracies of the people which were especially
to be feared. In the third category were misdemeanours like abusive
behaviour and assault and battery which carried fines of 5d. if by
peasants and 10s. if by gentlemen; unless, that is, it was done in court
before a baillior prévôt, or addressed to a serjeant, or the assault broke
the skin of the victim (bloody noses were ignored), or disrupted a
market, when a peasant payed 60s. and a gentleman 60l.^242
Law of injuries and public peace 241(^240) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 328, 357, 390, 538, ii. 507–8 (cc. 13–15), 531, 569,
iii. 138–9 (c. 34), 525, 647 (c. 8).
(^241) Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 104–5, (§§207–8), 428–75 (chapter xxx), ii. 163 (§1286),
343 (§1647–8), 348–9 (§§1656–8), 375–7 (§§1709–14), iii. 124–42; cf. Ordonnances des
Roys de France, i. 108, iii. 144 (c. 55).
(^242) Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 428–9 (§823), 433–49 (§841–86).