tenants-in-chief of the Crown, which was no more than the tenants-in-
chief themselves did for their tenants in their ‘honour-courts’?^95
At the Norman Conquest, many of the consuetudines of France
crossed to England; there too landlords were given rights of public
justice by the Norman and Angevin kings, though these normally
stopped at hundredal jurisdiction and the hanging of thieves caught on
one’s land. But the grants or ‘acts’ of both the Capetian kings of France
and the Norman dukes who became kings of England show that talk of
‘the state of the kingdom’ had not entirely disappeared. Confirming,
with the authority of the Pope and in a solemn assembly, the gift of the
church of Saint-Symphorien of Autun to the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur
Loire, Philip I of France could still claim in 1077 that it was for the
king’s majesty to amend ‘the state of the realm’ in morals and laws, and
the king’s business to care for the clergy so that they would pray con-
tinually for the status regni.^96 Philip’s contemporary, William, duke of
Normandy, could talk of confirming ‘the state of his principality’ by his
ratification of the gifts of lands, customs, and legal fines made by his
vassals to found a monastery.^97 In the first quarter of the twelfth
century, William’s youngest son, Henry, as king of England, gave a
church to the priory founded by his uncle at Montacute in Somerset, for
the salvation of the souls of his father and mother and other ancestors
‘and for the health and preservation of myself and for the state of the
kingdom’; and in 1133, as Duke of Normandy, he gave a mill to the
hospital of St. John at Falaise in perpetual alms, pro remissione pecca-
torum meorum, pro statu quoque et incolumitate regni mei.^98 But there
is no mention of ‘the state of the realm’ where it might have been
expected, in Henry I’s coronation charter setting out the rights of his
vassals generally. Stephen granted his demesne manor of Ripton in
The place of the king 65(^95) Formulae, 39.15 for privilegium libertatis; for the development of ‘liberty’, see Recueil
des Actes de Philippe Ier, 141. 26 , 305. 20 , 430. 3 ; Recueil des Actes de Henri II, i. 70. 4 (cum
omnibus libertatibus et liberis consuetudinibus), 151 (xlix), 161 (lix), 223 (cxvii), 269. 3 , ii. 93,
- 19 (cum omnibus aliis regiis libertatibus et consuetudinibus ad me pertinentibus);
Harding, ‘Political Liberty in the Middle Ages’, esp. p. 428; for honour-courts, see
F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166, 2nd edn. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1961), 42, 44–51, 54–5.
(^96) Recueil des Actes de Philippe Ier, p. 225 (lxxxvi), and cf. p. 235 (xci): ‘Statutum est
autem hoc a nostra majestate, sperantes quia, cum devote providemus utilitati ecclesie,
summus opifex invigilabit in regni nostri tuitione, famulorum Dei qui ibidem congregati
fuerint opitulante oratione.’
(^97) Actes des Ducs de Normandie, ed. Fauroux, 317–18; it is interesting that the Anglo-
Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis has two English earls who rebelled against William in 1075
wishing that ‘the state of the kingdom of Albion should be restored [status regni Albionis
redintegretur] in all respects as it was in the time of the virtuous King Edward’: English
Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R. C. van Caenegem, Selden Soc. 106, 107 (London,
1990–1), i. 17.
(^98) Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, ii.Regesta Henrici Primi 1100–1135, ed.
C. Johnson and H. A. Cronne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 348 (clx), 378 (cclxx).