Competitors for jurisdiction and power
It is from France, at any rate, that we have the best evidence for the
transformation of the public offices of Carolingian justice into the
fiercely-guarded liberties of landlords and urban communities. We
know how precious judicial liberties became, from observation of the
long-running disputes and short-lived compromises about them
between churches, lay lords, communes, and royal officials recorded in
the charters and legal records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Occasionally it was possible to settle the issue by sharing jurisdiction in
a particular place two or even three ways. The abbeys of Saint-Denis
and Saint-Germain both claimed justice of voirie at Charlieu, until it
was agreed in parlementin 1270 that Saint-Germain should have justice
over ‘light injuries’ such as abusive words, Saint-Denis over atrocious
affrays stopping short of homicide, and the king over homicide.^81
Amongst lords, a few of the disputes were between knight and
knight,^82 but more of them were between one church and another and
caused by the translation of ancient immunities into positive juris-
dictions through royal grants which were oblivious of territorial bound-
aries and ecclesiastical hierarchy. The conflicts of churchmen were often
between bishops and religious communities. The abbey of Saint-Rémi
was confirmed in immunity ab omni aliena justitia et potestatein 1090,
and in 1197 the archbishop of Rheims granted that his reeves would not
arrest the men of the abbey as they passed to and from their bourg,
except in open crime and provided they answered to the abbot’s justice;
yet in 1265 it would be decided in parlementthat only the archbishop
had gallows for hanging thieves in the banleucaof Rheims, and that the
abbot and the monks should hand over to the royal custodians of the
vacant see the body of a man who had hanged himself, leaving their
claim to ‘all manner of justice’ in their lands to be tried when there was
a new archbishop.^83 In 1317 the two ecclesiastical corporations at odds
in the king’s court were the abbey of Saint Germain des Prés and the
rector of the university of masters and scholars of Paris, and the juris-
diction they disputed was justice high and low in the Clerks’ Meadow
under the abbey walls and in some houses by it, in which the scholars
had suffered violence. The king ordered that the meadow be taken into
Competitors for jurisdiction and power 61XXXI, 5) for merum et mixtum imperium; iii. 586 (Quinta Partida, IV, 9) for royal grants of
towns, castles, and justice.
(^81) Les Olim, i. 363–4 (v), and cf. ii. 594–5 (vi), in which a hospital is awarded the voyeria
of a township and parish, and the king takes all other justicia alta et bassa; Duby, La Société
dans la région maconnaise, 214 ff.: ‘La Concurrence entre les Seigneuries Banales’.
(^82) Duby, ibid.218.
(^83) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Ier, 305 (no. cxx); Les Olim, i. 622–3 (xvi).