of ordinances required that the customary law of the different parts of
France be written down and published, so that (as the cahierof the
estates general had asked in 1484) litigants would no longer have to
prove the relevant customs in particular disputes and that all the law of
the country might be known. The three estates of every bailliage and
jurisdiction were to be summoned to oversee the drawing-up of their
customs and to refer difficulties they found impossible to resolve to be
decided by the parlementof Paris, for without settled justice ‘realms,
monarchies and political communities’ could not survive.^87
Justice was held up as the cement of the realm. The king appointed
baillisand other judges in the paysto exercise ‘their estates and offices’
in the doing of justice within limits which he defined, and was
repeatedly called upon by the corporate estates to remove unjust
officials.^88 In 1484 the estates general were told that the king wished
them to live in ‘peace, polity and justice’, and there was a separate
chapter of the cahierbeginning with what became a standard formula:
justice was the highest (here the dame et princesse) of the virtues, ‘with-
out which no monarchy or commonwealth could be maintained in
felicity and prosperity’. That and the succeeding chapter on trade (La
Marchandise) were much concerned with the choice of officials and the
enforcement of ordonnancesregulating their behaviour.^89 In the act of
appointing a president and councillors for the Norman parlementin
1497, Charles VIII exalted justice as the virtue by which kings reigned,
‘realms, principalities and monarchies’ were maintained, and subjects
were ruled in peace and union, ‘each in his estate’. The parlementof
Paris was conscious of its special authority and permanence, yet King
Louis XII was careful to confirm its membership immediately on
succeeding his nephew in 1498, using the same formula about the
supreme importance of justice. Louis, a king who was hailed at his
death as ‘the Father of Justice’, moved constantly around the provinces
(the creation of a road system centred on Paris was the first essential of
administrative centralization); and he continued Charles’s project of
establishing the Great Council as a proper court which the king could
use to ‘act over the head of the parlementsin matters that were
France as l’état monarchique 289royaume”: Son Emploi au xvesiècle devant le Parlementde Paris’, Revue historique de droit
français et étranger, 4th ser. 39 (1961), 371–81, and B.-A. Pocquet du Haut-Jusse, ‘Une Idée
politique de Louis XI: la sujétion eclipse la vassalité’, Revue historique, 226 (1961), 383–98:
both tr. in The Recovery of France in the Fifteenth Century, ed. P. S. Lewis (London, 1971);
B. Chevalier, ‘The bonnes villesand the King’s Council in Fifteenth–Century France’, in The
Crown and Local Communities, ed. J. R. L. Highfield and R. Jeffs (Gloucester, 1981).
(^87) Ordonnances des Roys de France, xx, pp. v, 431–5, xxi. 6, 18, 332, 402; Ordonnances:
Règne de Francois I, ix. 350–6, 413–17.
(^88) Ordonnances: Regne de Francois I, viii. 104–12; ix. 413–17; Guenée, States and Rulers,
354–5; Ladurie, The Royal French State, 82, 89, 100, 202–6.
(^89) Masselin, Journal, 166, 186, 242–4, 680.