Borough enfranchisement was spurred on by the formation of sworn
communes of townsmen, like that at Laon suppressed by King Louis VI
in 1114 after three terrible years during which the castellan and the
bishop were murdered, the cathedral burnt, and the city ravaged by a
neighbouring lord, Thomas de Marle. After another fourteen years, the
same king restored the commune by charter, for both the Capetian
kings of France and the Angevin kings of England in their French lands
saw the need to harness the political energies of the burgeoning towns,
especially where the two dynasties confronted each other.^62 At the end
of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, bands of
towns to the north of Paris—Senlis, Crépy-en-Valois, Soissons, and
Rheims; Beauvais, Roye, and Noyon; Amiens, Corbie, Péronne, and
Saint-Quentin; Arras and Tournai—had their communal privileges
(often acquired some time earlier) confirmed by the charters of Philip
Augustus.^63 The bourgs of the Angevin territories generally obtained
more restricted privileges, despite the energetic foundation of new
towns, but Rouen won a commune from Henry II by the defence its
inhabitants put up against Louis VII in 1174, and the Queen-Dowager
Eleanor and her son King John gave the defence of their sovereign rights
as well as the rights of the townsmen as the reason for granting com-
munal status to Poitiers, Fécamp, Harfleur, and other places at the turn
of the century. When Philip Augustus captured Normandy from King
John in 1204 and encroached upon the rest of ‘the Angevin empire’, he
was quick to confirm Rouen’s privileges, which he gave in a reduced
form to Falaise and Pont-Audemer, and to send a copy of the grant
(rescriptum communie Rothomagensis) to ‘all his faithful men sworn of
the commune of Poitiers’.^64
The new political role of the urban communities was recognized by
the concession of liberties which were in the first place judicial, though
by Beaumanoir’s time it was the fiscal arrangements that needed most
explanation. Guibert of Nogent asserts that the clergy and magnates of
Laon deceived the populace into adopting ‘that new and detestable
name of commune’ in 1111, using promises that all servile exactions
would be abolished and only the fines paid to the town authorities for
law-breaking retained; and so by legal chicanery they kept the people in
their original subjection.^65 The mark of a commune changed from the
56 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^62) Guibert de Nogent, Autobiographie, ed. E.-R. Labande (Paris, 1981), 321 ff.;
J.-F. Lemarignier, La France médiévale: Institutions et société(Paris, 1970), 184.
(^63) Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Les Communes Françaises(Paris, 1947), 38–9, 95 ff.
(^64) Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages(London, 1967); Gallia christiana,
16 vols. (Paris, 1716–1865), xiv. 177; J. Boussard, Le Gouvernement d’Henri II Plantagenet
(Paris, 1956), 181–92; Recueil des Actes de Henri II, ii. 83; Recueil des Actes de Philippe
Auguste, ii. 362–7 (no. 789), 443–6 (no. 858).
(^65) Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ii. 266–75 (ch. 50); Guibert of Nogent, Auto-
biographie, 320–1, 324–5; Petit-Dutaillis, Les Communes Françaises, 38 ff.