administrative and judicial institutions. Under Philip Augustus arose the royal baillis (see Bailiff: section Bailli), and seneschals (q.v.), who were the representatives of the king in the provinces, and superior judges. At the same time the form of the feudal courts tended to change, as they began more and more to be influenced by the Romano-canonical law. Saint Louis had striven to abolish trial by combat, and the Church had condemned other forms of ordeal, the purgatio vulgaris. In most parts of the country the feudal lords began to give place in the courts of law to the provosts (prévôts) and baillis of the lords or of the crown, who were the judges, having as their councillors the avocats (advocates) and procureurs (procurators) of the assize. The feudal courts, which were founded solely on the relations of homage and tenure, before which the vassals and tenants as such appeared, disappeared in part from the 13th century on. Of the seigniorial jurisdictions there soon remained only the hautes or basses justices (in the 14th century arose an intermediate grade, the moyenne justice), all of which were considered to be concessions of the royal power, and so delegations of the public authority. As a result of the application of Roman and canon law, there arose the appeal strictly so called, both in the class of royal and of seigniorial jurisdictions, the case in the latter instance going finally before a royal court, from which henceforth there was no appeal. In the 13th century too appeared the theory of crown cases (cas royaux), cases which the lords became incompetent to try and which were reserved for the royal court. Finally, the curia regis was gradually transformed into a regular court of justice, the Parlement (q.v.), as it was already called in the second half of the 13th century. At this time the king no longer appeared in it regularly, and before each session (for it was not yet a permanent body) a list of properly qualified men was drawn up in advance to form the parlement, only those whose names were on the list being capable of sitting in it. Its main function had come to be that of a final court of appeal. At the various sessions, which were regularly held at Paris, appeared the baillis and seneschals, who were called upon to answer for the cases they had judged and also for their administration. The accounts were received by members of the parlement at the Temple, and this was the origin of the Cour or Chambre des Comptes.
At the end of this period the nobility became an exclusive class. It became an established rule that a man had to be noble in order to be made a knight, and even in order to acquire a fief; but in this latter respect the king made exceptions in the case of roturiers, who were Nobles, commons and the Church in the 13th century. licensed to take up fiefs, subject to a payment known as the droits de franc-fief. The roturiers, or villeins who were not in a state of thraldom, were already a numerous class not only in the towns but in the country. The Church maintained her privileges; a few attempts only were made to restrain the abuse, not the extent, of her jurisdiction. This jurisdiction was, during the 12th century, to a certain extent regularized, the bishop nominating a special functionary to hold his court; this was the officialis (Fr. official), whence the name of officialité later applied in France to the ecclesiastical jurisdictions. On one point, however, her former rights were diminished. She preserved the right of freely acquiring personal and real property, but though she could still acquire feudal tenures she could not keep them; the customs decided that she must vider les mains, that is, alienate the property again within a year and a day. The reason for this new rule was that the Church, the ecclesiastical establishment, is a proprietor who does not die and in principle does not surrender her property; consequently, the lords had no longer the right of exacting the transfer duties on those tenures which she acquired. It was possible, however, to compromise and allow the Church to keep the tenure on condition of the consent not only of the lord directly concerned, but of all the higher lords up to the capitalis dominus; it goes without saying that this concession was only obtained by the payment of pecuniary compensations, the chief of which was the droit d’amortissement, paid to these different lords. In this period the form of the episcopal elections underwent a change, the electoral college coming to consist only of the canons composing the chapter of the cathedral church. But except for the official candidatures, which were abused by the kings and great lords, the elections were regular; the Pragmatic Sanction, attributed to Saint Louis, which implies the contrary, is nowadays considered apocryphal by the best critics.
Finally, it must be added that during the 13th century criminal
law was profoundly modified. Under the influence of Roman
law a system of arbitrary penalties replaced those
laid down by the customs, which had usually been
fixed and cruel. The criminal procedure of the feudal
Changes in
criminal law.
courts had been based on the right of accusation
vested only in the person wronged and his relations; for this
was substituted the inquisitorial procedure (processus per
inquisitionem), which had developed in the canon law at the very
end of the 12th century, and was to become the procédure à
l’extraordinaire of the ancien régime, which was conducted in
secret and without free defence and debate. Of this procedure
torture came to be an ordinary and regular part.
The customs, which at that time contained almost the whole of the law for a great part of France, were not fixed by being written down. In that part of France which was subject to customary law (la France coutumière) they were defined when necessary by the verdict of a jury The customs. of practitioners in what was called the enquête par turbes; some of them, however, were, in part at least, authentically recorded in seigniorial charters, chartes de ville or chartes de coutume. Their rules were also recorded by experts in private works or collections called livres coutumiers, or simply coutumiers (customaries). The most notable of these are Les Coutumes de Beauvoisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir, which Montesquieu justly quotes as throwing light on those times; also the Très ancienne coutume de Normandie and the Grand Coutumier de Normandie; the Conseil à un ami of Pierre des Fontaines, the Établissements de Saint Louis; the Livre de jostice et de plet. At the same time the clerks of important judges began to collect in registers notable decisions; it is in this way that we have preserved to us the old decisions of the exchequer of Normandy, and the Olim registers of the parlement of Paris.
The Limited Monarchy.—The 14th and 15th centuries were the age of the limited monarchy. Feudal institutions kept their political importance; but side by side with them arose others of which the object was the direct exercise of the royal authority; others also arose from the very heart of feudalism, but at the same time transformed its laws in order to adapt them to the new needs of the crown. In this period certain rules for the succession to the throne were fixed by precedents: the exclusion of women and of male descendants in the female line, and the principle that a king could not by an act of will change the succession of the crown. The old curia regis disappeared and was replaced by the parlement as to its judicial functions, while to fulfil its deliberative functions there was formed a new body, the royal council (conseil du roi), an administrative and governing council, which was in no way of a feudal character. The number of its members was at first small, but they tended to increase; soon the brevet of conseiller du roi en ses conseils was given to numerous representatives of the clergy and nobility, the great officers of the crown becoming members by right. Side by side with these officials, whose power was then at its height, there were gradually evolved more subservient ministers who could be dispensed with at will; the secrétaires des commandements du roi of the 15th century, who in the 16th century developed into the secrétaires d’état, and were themselves descended from the clercs du secret and secrétaires des finances of the 14th century. The College of the Twelve Peers of France had not its full numbers at the end of the 13th century; the six ecclesiastical peerages existed and continued to exist to the end, together with the archbishopric and bishoprics to which they were attached, not being suppressed; but several of the great fiefs to which six lay peerages had been attached had been annexed to the crown. To fill these vacancies, Philip the Fair raised the duchies of Brittany and Anjou and
