Justice in the towns
A treaty in 1190 between Richard I, king of England and count of
Anjou, and Philip Augustus, king of France and patron of the cathedral
church of Saint-Martin, set down the judicial customs of the city of
Tours. The count’s viariuscame to Chateauneuf twice a year to hold
‘the justice of the castle’, hearing cases along with ‘a servant of the king
of France or of the treasurer of Saint-Martin’ from after high mass on
the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul (29 June) till after high mass on the
next feast of St. Martin (Martinus calidus: 4 July) and from All Saints
Day (1 November) to St. Brice’s Day (about 13 November). Duels
ordered at these terms should take place in the castle moat. The count’s
court should also—without delay and exacting no fines—preside over
the duels adjudged outside these terms in the treasurer’s court and the
courts of other lords in the castlery (de castro). But trials by the ordeals
of water or fire should be undergone at the church of Saint-Martin’s
burgusof Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier;^57 and the dean and chapter of Saint-
Martin possessed pleas of ‘blood, riot, robbery, murder, and all other
high justice’ over the peasantry on their tenants’ lands.^58
A third element in addition to the courts of the lay lords and the
churches made up the judicial pattern: the communal institutions of
townsmen. The justice administered by the townsmen for themselves
was again vicarial in origin—a public responsibility delegated to urban
officials by counts and castellans. In central France we last hear of viarii
and sub-viariiin the towns of the Loire, at Orleans, Tours, Saumur, and
Angers. When power to establish a bourgwas granted to a monastic
community, greater or lesser vicarial powers might be given with it.^59 In
1075, King Philip I confirmed a forty-year-old grant by which Gelduin
of Saumur had given the abbey of Pontlevoy a church, all the serfs who
worked for it, and ‘all the customs of a borough, censusand vicaria, toll
and pedagium’.^60 Some twelfth-century lords found it convenient to pass
on to their burgesses the right to settle cases of basse justicebetween
townspeople themselves.^61
Justice in the towns 55Boussard, Le Comté d’Anjou, 38–40; Les Olim, ii. 351 (xxxix), for the citing of a series of
charters from successive kings.
(^57) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i. 41–3 (no. 361, caps. 26, 33–4); Boussard, Le
Comté d’Anjou, 54–5.
(^58) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, iii. 420–1 (no. 1293).
(^59) Guillot, Le Comté d’Anjou, i. 401, ii, nos. 57a, 66, 89, 264, 350; Ordonnances des Roys
de France de la Troisième Race, i, ed. M. de Laurière (Paris, 1723), 2.
(^60) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Ier, 189–90; cf. Recueil des Actes de Philippe Auguste, i.
296–7 (no. 242).
(^61) Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’évolution des institutions judiciaires’, 34–5.