potestas.^43 As a seignorial official, he survived to later centuries as the
‘voyer’, associated by a false etymology with the policing of the roads in
his voierie, and ascribed the duty of keeping the ways open for
merchants and others travelling ‘from town to town, and one castle to
another’.^44 In the south of France, on the other hand, it is possible to
watch the viguiersturning into a petty nobility.
And everywhere the powers of the old vicariiover the peasantry, now
exercised by the ubiquitous prévôts, gave the lordship its backbone:
before it was an economic unit, the seigneuriewas the area in which the
lord judged, taxed, and requisitioned soldiers, labourers and supplies.^45
It was around 1100 that the castellan’s powers of bannum(authority to
punish offenders against the public peace) and districtus (power to
enforce judicial orders, typically by ‘distraining’ the goods of recalci-
trant offenders) were being converted most vigorously into economic
rights: to demand payment from village-communities for protection
(salvamentum) and eventually impose an arbitrary tax (tallage, taille) on
their members as his serfs; to billet on the peasantry his agents, with
their horses and hunting-dogs; to take fodder for the horses of his
men-at-arms; to exact carting and ploughing services on his ‘demesne’
or home farm; and to compel the use of his forge and wine-press, ovens,
mills, and markets.^46 At the same time, a multiplicity of land-trans-
actions was splitting into distinct layers the jurisdiction which was at
the root of all the lords’ other powers. The clerk who, some time
after 1155, made up a charter of the tenth-century King Lothar for
the monastery of Saint-Cyprian of Poitiers stipulated that land in a
certain vicariawas granted with all vigeria, both high and low (alta et
52 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^43) Guillot,Le Comté de Anjou, ii. nos. 89, 133, 145, 229, 241, 251, 311; Recueil des Actes
de Henri II, Roi d’Angleterre et Duc de Normandie concernant Les Provinces Françaises, ed.
L. Delisle et E. Berger, 4 vols. (Paris, 1909–27), i. 213. 13 ; Halphen, ‘Les Institutions judi-
ciaires’, 304–5; Lot et Fawtier, Institutions seigneuriales, 42–3, 80, 251, 328; R. Boutruche,
Seigneurie et féodalité, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959, 1970), ii. 269; Les Établissements de Saint Louis,
ed. P. Viollet, 4 vols. (Paris, 1881–6), i. 165–6.
(^44) Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ed. A. Salmon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1970–4),
i. 367 ff. (paras. 718 ff.); Niermeyer, lexicon minus, s.v. viatura; F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de
l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXeau XVesiècle(Paris, 1881–1902), s.vv.
voier, voierie; see examples in Recueil des Actes de Philippe Ier,1059–1108, ed. M. Prou
(Paris, 1908), 311. 2 , for the king’s grant of justice and voirie(viariam) in a vineyard; Recueil
des Actes de Philippe Auguste, ii, ed. H.-Fr. Delaborde, Ch. Petit-Dutaillis, et
J. Monicat (Paris, 1943), 289 (a. 1202), and iii, ed. M. J. Monicat et M.J. Boussard (Paris,
1966), 74 (a. 1207) for dealings in what is termed both viaturaand viaria.
(^45) Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, ii. 268.
(^46) G. Duby, La Société aux XIeet XIIesiècles dans la région maconnaise(Paris, 1963), 205 ff.,
584 ff.; and his Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, tr. C. Postan (London,
1968), 187–9, 224–31; Guillot, Le Comté d’Anjou, i. 400–3; Niermeyer, lexicon minus, s.vv.
salvamentum(6–8) and taleare(3); see Recueil des Actes de Philippe Ier, 150. 22 , 179. 21 ,
- 7 , 278. 12 , 400. 17 , for examples of the inclusion of justice along with the economic rights
of lordship.