his hands until there had been an inquiry as to the jurisdiction and the
injuries, and that it be kept decent for the enjoyment of the scholars and
other Parisians, as in the past, no cattle pasturing in it.^84
Most frequent of all conflicts over jurisdiction amongst landlords
were those which opposed churches to lay aristocrats. The concen-
tration of territorial power in the hands of castellans threatened the
ancient ecclesiastical immunities. The age-old tendency of the lay
neighbours of churches to annex the estates of the bodies they were
supposed to defend, exemplified by the Carolingian advocati, was
further encouraged by the giving of new responsibilities of guardiaor
custodiato the castellans. The rules of ‘the peace of God’ laid down by
ecclesiastical councils in the tenth and eleventh centuries show a wish
both to use the castellans’ policing power and to curb their imposition
of ‘bad customs’ (malae consuetudines), by which was meant the asser-
tion over the churches’ servants of a vicarial jurisdiction only appro-
priate to a servile peasantry. The peace of God movement, at least in the
Midi, can be seen as a defence of monastic interests against increasingly
predatory lay lords who passed to their children the ‘franchises and
voiries and all the customs and authority’ they had received from their
parents.^85
In the north of France, talk of bad customs appeared at the end of the
tenth century, at the same time as (good) customs began to take on a
positive connotation in the charters. By a grant to the church of Saint-
Maurice in 994, Count Fulk of Anjou remitted the malae consuetudines
which had been introduced since his father’s day; and on his accession
in 1040, Count Geoffrey Martel held a generale placitumconcerned
with ‘the curbing of depredations and the correcting of wicked
encroachments on the lands of the saints, and of bad customs imposed
beyond what is due’. Within the next few years Duke William of
Aquitaine granted a hamlet to the abbey of Saint-Jean d’Angély ‘free of
all bad customs and of vicaria’.^86 King Philip I gave a judgment at
Compiègne in 1066 against Aubri de Coucy, who, under guise of advo-
cacy and by evil custom (advocatoria et consuetudine iniqua), had been
62 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^84) Les Olim, ii. 670–2 (xxiii–xxiv); cf. i. 125–6 (i): a bishop against a monastery, leaving
the former with magnaand the latter with parva justicia.
(^85) Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire, 142–3; Duby, La Société dans la région maconnaise,
215, 220–1; Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier, ‘Les Mauvaises Coutumes en Auvergne, Bourgogne
Méridionale, Languedoc et Provence au xiesiècle’, in Structures féodales et féodalisme dans
l’Occident Méditerranéen (Xe–XIIIesiècles), 135–72, esp. 140, 148; cf. Cartulaire de L’Abbaye
de Savigny, 444 (no. 835): a lay lord is to have a third and monks two thirds of the profits of
cases and duels which they take to the lay court (c.1090); ibid., pp. 475, 478–82 (nos. 900,
903–5), for the oppression of the monastery by a castellan, who has taken hostages from
the abbot and encroached upon his jurisdiction (c.1117–21); and pp. 491–3 (no. 916) for
the plea of a prior against a vicarius, settled before the abbot and fifteen clerical and lay
witnesses (1127).
(^86) Guillot, Le Comté d’Anjou, i. 370–3, ii, nos. 6, 20, 26, 92, 110, 130, 241, 368.