Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
The kingdom of the Franks: crown and government 521
pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots acknowledging the regular income and expenses of the domain, while
the baillis accounted for the profits of justice and other occasional finances.
They deposited their monies at the house of the Knights Templars, which, as
under Louis VII, served both as a bank to transmit funds for the crusade and
as a permanent royal treasury. Although other provisions of the ordinance of
1190 disappeared when the king returned, the innovations of the baillis dis-
pensing justice and the accounting bureau operating on a triennial schedule in
Paris remained permanent features of royal government. Unlike Suger’s earlier
experiments, Philip Augustus’s ordinance-testament effected lasting change. It
initiated a reversal in the flow of governmental operations. Although the king
continued to travel widely, the trennial visits of scores of pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots and baillis
increasingly drew representatives from the domain to Paris. To enhance the
appearance of the city Philip paved the chief squares and roads and issued the
command for encircling it with walls before his departure in 1190.Bythat year,
therefore, Paris was finally designated as the centripetal capital of the Capetians.
Included with these innovations were new royal documents. The king’s
absence had occasioned the first constitution or description of the royal gov-
ernment and the first series of periodic fiscal accounts, but upon his return
Philip added a new royal archive. In the fighting of 1194 he fell into an ambush
prepared by Richard at Fr
´
eteval where he lost baggage that contained treasure,
the royal seal and documents. While the nature and the extent of the losses
cannot be fully known, it is clear that thereafter Philip established at Paris an
archive that preserved incoming correspondence for safekeeping in a collec-
tion subsequently known as the Tr
´
esor des Chartes. The historian Rigord who
had copied the ordinance of 1190 was equally aware of the contents of this
collection. Once again, these series of written sources appeared symbiotically
as products of and testimony to new institutions. For the first time the royal
administration can be viewed from the inside as it was perceived by the king’s
entourage and not exclusively transmitted through ecclesiastical channels.
The new fiscal accounts indicate that the royal domain had begun to grow
at an accelerating rate during the first two decades of Philip’s reign as a result
of dynastic crises in the houses of Flanders and the Anglo-Norman-Angevins.
The marriage alliance between the royal cousins of Vermandois and the counts
of Flanders was reinforced by Philip’s own marriage to Isabelle of Hainault (also
related to the Flemish house) and the birth of their son Louis. When it became
apparent that Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, would die without heir, these
alliances promised significant gains to the Capetians. Through complex nego-
tiations, the king acquired Amiens, Montdidier and Roye in 1185, and after the
death of the childless Flemish count in 1191,P
´
eronne and the county of Artois
in the name of Louis. King Richard’s death without direct heir in 1199 caused
similar difficulties for the Anglo-Norman-Angevin succession. When Richard’s
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
522 john w. baldwin
brother John’s claim was disputed by a nephew Arthur, Philip Augustus was able
to exact from the former the Norman territory of Evrecin and parts of the Vexin
as the price of confirming John’s succession. The value of these acquisitions
may be calculated from the fiscal accounts. The number of pr
´
ev
ˆ
ot
´
es (circum-
scriptions headed by pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots)inthe royal domain increased from forty-one in
1179 to fifty-two in 1190 to sixty-two in 1202/3, but the increase in domanial
revenues was even more striking: 22 per cent by 1190 and 50 per cent by 1203.
On the eve of the Capetian conquest of Normandy, therefore, Philip Augus-
tus’s regular domanial income had increased by almost three-quarters. In 1196
Rigord encapsulated the significance of the growing domain when he entitled
Philip as Augustus because, like the Caesars, he augmented (auge[bat] )the
respublica by adding Vermandois.
3
The new governmental sources also reveal a notable shift in the personnel of
the royal entourage. Philip Augustus insisted that all his greatvassals accompany
him on the crusade, allowing no important personage to remain behind to cause
the mischief that had plagued his father. As he had probably calculated, the
rigours of the expedition took their toll on the magnates of his father’s genera-
tion. An unusual number died, including the counts of Flanders and Blois at the
siege of Acre in 1191. The crusade, therefore, provided the youthful king with
an opportunity to restaff his entourage afresh. Although the regent, William,
archbishop of Rheims, lingered into the next decade, no great lord achieved
prominence at the royal court. After the death of Theobald, count of Blois,
Philip revived the tactic of vacancy and neglected to refill the post of seneschal
as he had done for the chancellor in 1185.Since the two chief household offices
were thereby suppressed, the other officers were reduced to honorific status.
In their place he continued his grandfather’s and father’s policy of relying
on lesser men. The central court recruited chamberlains, including Louis VII’s
faithful Walter, now accompanied by his two sons, Urso and Walter the Young,
knights such as Bartholomew of Roye and Henry Cl
´
ement, and clerics such
as Brother Gu
´
erin and Brother Haimard. The pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots were joined at the local
level by at least a dozen new baillis on circuit throughout the domain. To
the titles of chamberlains, knights, clerics and baillis was added the distinctive
sobriquet ‘of the king’. The salient characteristics of these men were obscurity
of origins, youth and faithfulness. Bartholomew of Roye, for example, came
from the petty knights of Vermandois, and the family of Brother Gu
´
erin has
not yet been identified. In all likelihood Philip discovered him while on the
crusade. With one exception the baillis were drawn from the same level as
the royal knights. None were promoted above their origins into the baronage;
only Brother Gu
´
erin became a magnate by election to the bishopric of Senlis.
3
Rigord, Gesta,inOeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, i,p.6.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The kingdom of the Franks: crown and government 523
All outlived their youthful master, except Henry Cl
´
ement who died of battle
wounds. Only a single bailli was dismissed in disgrace from service.
As each new set of royal records appeared, the diverse duties of these men
were revealed. Brother Gu
´
erin first emerged in the royal chancery in 1201–2
when he began annotating royal charters with the inscription ‘given by the
hand of Brother Gu
´
erin’.
4
Thereafter the fiscal accounts show him disburs-
ing monies widely throughout the domain. In the judicial rolls surviving after
the conquest of Normandy he is seen presiding over the exchequer sessions
at Falaise. The archives and subsequent collections reveal him active in judg-
ing, holding inquests, executing commands and serving on missions. He was
in attendance at virtually all recorded meetings of the royal court. As he be-
came better known to chroniclers, he was identified as ‘second only to the
king’.
5
Functioning as Gu
´
erin’s lay counterpart, Bartholomew of Roye’s activ-
ities replicated his colleague’s in diversity, intensity and ubiquity, except for
chancery service which was reserved for clerics. Like Louis VII, Philip relied
on the lesser chamberlains, knights and clerics both for routine business and
for advice in the inner council. Unlike the entourage of his father and the
Anglo-Norman-Angevins, however, his was not large and heterogeneous, mix-
ing magnates with lesser men, but was limited to a small number of intimates
composed of Gu
´
erin, Bartholomew, Henry Cl
´
ement and Walter the Young.
When the chroniclers first took notice of them, they were advising the king in
the military campaign leading up to Bouvines in 1214 and remained close by
his side at the battle itself. From governmental documentation, however, they
can be observed having worked together since 1195.Inthe words of a royal
chronicler, ‘these were the only people to whom the king was accustomed to
open his soul and reveal his secret thoughts on all occasions’.
6
Beyond the innovations in justice, finance and personnel, accompanied by
new documentation, Philip continued with the traditions of his predecessors.
Returning from the crusade a widower and debilitated by sickness, the king
was forced to recognize the fragility of his lineage, especially after his infant son
had barely escaped severe illness as well. One of his preoccupations, therefore,
was to remarry and reinforce the royal lineage with additional sons. Only this
long-range goal remains clear; the means to achieve it defy explanation. It is
difficult to comprehend his choice of the Danish princess Ingeborg, because her
political assets were minimal, but his sudden aversion to her on their wedding
night of 14/15 August 1193 can only be laid to personal neuroses. Obtaining
a separation on the grounds of consanguinity, as his father had secured from
4
‘data . . . per manum fratris Garini’. Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, ii,no.688 (first instance).
5
‘secundus a rege’. William the Breton, Gesta,inOeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, i,p.256.
6
‘His etenim solis re confidenter in omni / Enucleare animum secretaque vota solebat.’ William the
Breton, Philippidos vv. 536–7,inOeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ii,p.271.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
524 john w. baldwin
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Philip found a personally congenial bride in Agnes from
the Bavarian nobility of Andechs-Meranien. When she died in 1201, she had
given the king a daughter and a second son. Philip’s shuffle of one spouse for
another might have succeeded like his father’s were it not for the accession in
1198 of a new pope, Innocent III, who was ambitious to secure ecclesiastical ju-
risdiction over all matters related to marriage. Since the claims to consanguinity
were patently specious, the king dared not hazard his matrimonial project to a
papal judgement. Willing to endure papal interdict on his lands in 1200,Philip
kept the pope at bay with legal manoeuvres, until after Agnes’s death when he
obtained papal legitimation of his children in exchange for dubious diplomatic
offers. Although still legally wed to Ingeborg, whom he stubbornly refused to
see, he had none the less obtained the dynstic objective of a second son.
The great interdict that threatened to close churches throughout the king’s
lands for nine months in 1200 severely strained the ties between Philip and
the regalian churches. Bishops and abbots were compelled to choose between
two masters, the spiritual head of the universal church or their temporal pro-
tector. The papal registers and chronicles divulge the decisions of nineteen of
some twenty-five regalian sees. A clear majority of thirteen (as well as the in-
fluential abbeys of St-Denis and St-Germain-des-Pr
´
es) sided with the king and
disobeyed the pope. This victory encouraged Philip to renew the traditional
Capetian policy of liberty and cooperation. When he acquired the bishopric
of Evreux from King John in 1200,hedeclared that the bishop would be freely
chosen ‘just as the other canons of French churches have the power to elect
bishops’.
7
Since Evreux was not vacant at the time, the proclamation sought to
contrast French liberties with former ducal oppression of the Norman church.
In addition, Philip began to enlarge ecclesiastical liberty by renouncing his
regalian rights altogether in 1203 on the eve of the military campaign against
Normandy. These privileges were granted to Langres and Arras on the king-
dom’s borders and extended to Auxerre, Nevers, Troyes and M
ˆ
acon during the
next six years. Since the king’s return from the crusade the chapters of regalian
churches continued to elect candidates who could be considered in the main
favourable to the king. The freedom of elections reformulated in the ordinance
of 1190 evidently continued to produce prelates ‘pleasing to God’ and, of equal
importance, ‘useful to the kingdom’.
Except for the Ingeborg scandal, the contemporary chroniclers were gen-
erally silent on Capetian governmental affairs; rather their attention was
absorbed with the mounting military hostilities between Philip and the
7
‘sicut et alii canonici ecclesiarum Francie liberam habent eligendi sibi episcopum potestatem’. Recueil
des actes de Philippe Auguste, ii,no.637.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The kingdom of the Franks: crown and government 525
Anglo-Norman-Angevins. Richard did not return to his lands until 1194, be-
cause of unfinished business in the Holy Land and his capture and imprison-
ment on his journey back through Germany. Needless to say, Philip lost no
opportunity to prolong the imprisonment while preying on Richard’s lands.
By 1198,however, Richard’s superior military skill had recovered his losses in
France and his celebrated generosity won him new allies, including the count
of Flanders. During the nearly continuous fighting Philip not only lost his
baggage but was also entrapped by the count of Flanders and humiliated by
Richard at Gisors. While the Anglo-Norman chroniclers recorded these defeats
in minute detail, Rigord attempted to minimize their effect. Richard’s string of
victories, however, was cut short by his unforeseen death in 1199. Against this
redoubtable adversary Philip’s only recourse had been the traditional Capetian
tactic of pitting one member of the Anglo-Norman-Angevin family against the
other. During Richard’s absence Philip conspired with John, Richard’s younger
brother, and at Richard’s death Philip supported Arthur, John’s nephew. A treaty
was finally negotiated at Le Goulet in 1200 in which John secured recognition
as successor to his brother in exchange for land (Evrecin and Vexin), a large
sum of money, and the acknowledgement of Capetian suzerainty over John’s
continental holdings. With John formally established as vassal, Philip had only
to wait for John’s caprice to provide further opportunity for action. True to
character, John soon outraged the Aquitainian house of Lusignan by abduct-
ing and marrying the heiress of the neighbouring barony of Angoul
ˆ
eme, who
had been affianced to a Lusignan. When John refused to hear the Lusignans’
complaint, the latter appealed to Philip, John’s overlord. Summoned as duke
of Aquitaine in 1202,John failed to appear before the royal court and was
summarily adjudged forfeit of his lands for neglect of service.
Having assured legal authority, Philip now required the military and finan-
cial means to enforce the sentence. The fiscal accounts of 1202/3 also reveal
financial preparations for warfare. In addition to the reports of pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots and
baillis were triennial accounts of specially designated war treasurers who super-
vised groups of castles along the Norman border. From these accounts military
movements can be observed, especially of an army composed of some 2,300
troops, of which 250 were knights, amassed on the west bank of the Seine and
poised to invade Normandy. At the same time the fiscal document included a
separate accounting of a war tax, called the pris
´
ee des sergents, assessed on towns
and abbeys. Its total was sufficient to pay the annual wages of the troops at
the Norman border, thus enabling Philip to create a permanent and salaried
nucleus for his military force. Beyond this war tax the pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots and baillis were
reporting substantial surpluses of receipts over expenditures. On the eve of the
attack against Normandy in 1203, therefore, Philip’s finances were in excellent
condition to mount an attack against the Anglo-Norman-Angevins.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
526 john w. baldwin
from the conquest of normandy to the battle of
bouvines and its aftermath (1204–1223)
Normandy rapidly succumbed to two campaigns waged in the spring and
summer of 1203 and 1204. When John precipitously abandoned the duchy in
December 1203, after refusing to engage in combat, and when Richard’s great
fortress, Ch
ˆ
ateau Gaillard, fell in March 1204, the Normans found little hope
for further resistance. After the key castles of Chinon and Loches likewise
capitulated in the spring of 1205, the Loire valley was no longer defensible.
These astounding losses were due both to John’s desertion and to Philip’s
financial strength. The dismantling of Henry II’s great conglomeration in
north-western France prompted new manoeuvrings among the great barons.
During the next decade John, like Richard before him, reopened his purse to
enlist new allies, including the counts of Boulogne and Flanders, as well as his
nephew Otto of Brunswick, who aspired to the imperial crown of Germany. By
1214 John had devised a grand strategy to recover his losses by attacking Philip
from opposite sides. If the two thrusts could be coordinated, the Capetian
armies could be split and annihilated. John himself approached from the south-
west where Philip’s son Louis met him at La Roche-aux-Moines near Angers.
Although John quickly withdrew, he none the less had divided the Capetian
forces at the crucial moment. Philip Augustus was therefore left alone to face
a coalition from the north composed of Otto, the counts of Boulogne and
Flanders and others from the Low Countries. The two armies met on a Sunday,
17 July 1214,onthe fields of Bouvines near Lille. Forcing battle before the allied
lines could be fully formed, Philip gained the advantage and won the victory.
Otto barely escaped the debacle, but the counts of Boulogne and Flanders were
among the numerous captives. After this spectacular defeat, further efforts to
recover the Anglo-Norman-Angevin territories north of the Loire were futile,
and John set sail for England, never to return.
Although Philip Augustus retained the existing local administration in his
new conquests, he none the less introduced a fundamental division between
Normandy and the Loire fiefs of Anjou, Maine and Touraine. As early as 1202
the king announced his intention to separate Normandy and hold it directly
as royal domain. The local Norman officials, called vicomtes and baillis (cor-
responding to the Capetian pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots and baillis), were replaced with personnel
recruited from the royal lands, but they continued to report twice a year to a
central exchequer that supervised their financial and judicial affairs. The ex-
chequer was moved to Falaise closer to Paris and was presided over by a pair
of delegates (usually Brother Gu
´
erin and Walter the Young) from the king’s
entourage. In the Loire fiefs Philip inherited a regime based on local seneschals
under the jurisdiction of the chief seneschal of Anjou. Even before the conquest
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The kingdom of the Franks: crown and government 527
the king had accepted William of Les Roches, the former seneschal of Anjou,
for this post. It appears that the king was not yet prepared to absorb the Loire
fiefs into the royal domain because he permitted the seneschal unusual au-
thority over local administration. These new territories undoubtedly increased
Capetian revenues, but perhaps not as much as historians have previously
imagined. The discovery of a new financial account from 1221 suggests that
Normandy and the Loire fiefs raised Philip’s ordinary income by 70 per cent,
an increase within the same order of magnitude as the annexations before 1200.
The acquisition of new lands also prompted new collections of governmen-
tal documents. Unlike the accounts of 1202/3 which were devised to supervise
and control the financial operations of the local pr
´
ev
ˆ
ots and baillis, the newly
discovered accounts of 1221 recapitulated general categories of income and ex-
penses and calculated balances. For the first time, therefore, the government
possessed a budget to assess its fiscal position. From the Norman exchequer
Philip further inherited the tradition of keeping plea rolls or brief records of
cases heard. The survival of such a roll (beginning in 1207)from the exchequer
at Falaise constitutes the earliest judicial collection of the Capetian monarchy.
The most important collections, however, to appear in this period were the
registers. In 1204, 1212 and 1220 three separate codices were compiled, one
from the other, by scribes in the royal chancery, most likely under the direc-
tion of Brother Gu
´
erin. Over half of their contents consisted of charters and
letters, not only the incoming materials collected in the archives, but espe-
cially the king’s outgoing charters. For the first time, therefore, the Capetian
monarchy kept at least a partial record of its own acts comparable to contempo-
rary enrollments and registers in England and at the papal court. In addition,
the registers contained heterogeneous inquests, inventories, accounts and var-
ied lists concerning the domain, forests, finances, fiefs and much more. In
short, they served as handbooks of useful information on governmental rou-
tine that could be easily transported by the chancery during the king’s habitual
displacements.
Shortly after Philip took the Norman city of Caen he had copied into his
first register of 1204 a survey of fiefs of the duchy of Normandy undertaken by
Henry II in 1172.From the beginning the Capetians had asserted their rights
as suzerains over the great magnates of the kingdom and the lesser vassals of
the royal domain. These rights included the traditional obligations of fealty,
homage, marriage, wardship and especially knight service, but they were only
vaguely defined and rarely recorded. From the Anglo-Normans, therefore,
Philip inherited the technique of inventorying the vassals of their domain. In
1207 and 1220 the Norman surveys were continued and revised in the registers
and extended to other sections of the royal domain. As an effort to record and
thereby to supervise royal rights of suzerainty, these inventories contributed
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
528 john w. baldwin
to Philip’s general programme of reducing the obligations of all his vassals to
writing. As early as 1180, for example, Henry II’s homage for his lands was
recorded in a charter, as was that of the new count of Flanders in 1196.Such
charters were carefully preserved in the registers or archives. A traditional means
for enforcing these obligations was the requirement of pledges to guarantee the
service of the vassal. Philip’s registers contain over eighty lists of such pledges.
The ultimate enforcement of suzerainty, however, was a judgement in the
royal court. Until the Capetians could summon a great vassal and execute the
sentence, their suzerainty over the great baronage was only theoretical. The
turning-point therefore came in the summons and condemnation of John as
duke of Aquitaine in 1202.Since 1194 John’s obligations as a vassal had been
meticulously recorded and preserved in the archives. When Philip Augustus
was able to execute the sentence by dispossessing John of his fiefs, his suzerainty
over the great lords was significantly reinforced.
As an aftermath of Bouvines the last decade of Philip’s reign may be charac-
terized by the expected fruits of victory: peace, prosperity and the re-expression
of ideology. The two military campaigns of the period were conducted by Louis
and removed military operations far from the France north of the Loire. An
expedition to England (1216–17) ended in failure, and crusades against the
heretics in southern France (1215, 1219)brought inconclusive results. These
campaigns apparently placed little strain on the royal finances because the
budget of 1221 shows a balance of one third the revenues remaining in the trea-
sury, a surplus that continued through the next reign. Philip’s own testament
in 1222, moreover, bequeathed an extraordinary sum equivalent to nearly four
times the annual royal income. This impression (if not the details) of the king’s
prosperity was confirmed by an eyewitness who reported hearsay from royal
officials at Philip’s funeral in 1223.
The victory at Bouvines inspired one of the participants, a chaplain of
the king named William the Breton, to bring Rigord’s prose chronicle up to
date and to transform it into verse in a second work entitled the Philippidos.
The latter was modelled on Walter of Ch
ˆ
atillon’s epic poem, the Alexandreis,
which was deemed appropriate for a panegyric devoted to a king who like
Alexander bore a Macedonian name. Throughout both works Philip was no
longer entitled Augustus,redolent of Roman connotations, but magnanimus,
the well-known sobriquet of the Macedonian conqueror. Although William
the Breton assumed the tasks of Suger and Rigord, he was not a monk of
St-Denis, but a royal cleric who enjoyed the direct patronage of the king and
his chief minister, Brother Gu
´
erin. His versions may therefore be considered
the first ‘official’ history of the Capetian monarchy. As William reflected
upon the battle, he discerned three underlying messages of significance for the
Capetian ideology. In the first place the capture of five counts, including the
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The kingdom of the Franks: crown and government 529
powerful count of Flanders and the rebellious count of Boulogne, guaranteed
the supremacy of royal suzerainty over the great lords. Throughout William’s
narratives all the major barons were meticulous in doing homage to the king.
When John was finally summoned before the royal court in 1202,William
has him explicitly acknowledge Philip’s ultimate jurisdiction. Bouvines, in the
second place, represented a victory of a Capetian king of the Franks over a
Roman emperor. Reminiscent of the summons of 1124, the simple silk banner
of St-Denis had once again triumphed over the terrifying eagle, the ancient
emblem of Roman ambition to dominate the world. To justify the claim that
the Franks were franci, that is free from the Roman yoke, William revived
the foundational myth of the Trojan origins that saw the Frankish kings, like
the Roman, descending in full equality from common ancestors at Troy. For
that reason also the pre-Roman Alexander and not Caesar (nor Augustus) was
the appropriate exemplar for Philip. Finally, standing directly behind the king
before battle, William heard the king’s harangue in which he reminded his
troops that Otto’s forces were under ecclesiastical excommunication, but they,
although sinners, were in communion with God and fought to protect the
clergy. Once again, William returned to the hallowed theme, reiterated at each
coronation, that it was the Capetian duty to defend the liberties of the church.
Philip’s death in 1223 presented William the Breton with one last opportunity
to return to this traditional theme. Not only was the king christianissimus for
defending the church, but he was also personally a saint. William asserted that
Philip’s death was presaged by portents, that the funeral cortege to St-Denis
was attended by miracles, and that visions were reported in which the king was
conducted directly into the divine presence by his patron saint. Despite these
efforts to demonstrate Philip’s sanctity after his death, the marital scandal and
evident shortcomings of his life were too recent to allow a viable compaign
for his canonization, but the Capetians had only to wait for two generations
before a credible saint did appear in Louis IX.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
chapter 17(b)
THE SEIGNEURIES
Michel Bur
seigneurie (lordship) was a system of government in which the seigneur or
lord (dominus in Latin) exercised for his own profit powers that were regalian in
origin, that is, powers of a public character. It was accompanied by the territorial
fragmentation of the kingdom and a more-or-less pronounced crumbling of
authority, which was none the less offset by a general and traditional sense
of belonging to the regnum Francorum (kingdom of the Franks) and also,
juridically, in a system of feudal relations that culminated in the king. Seen
from this angle, the lord was not called dominus in Latin, but senior and his
men vassi.
lordships and principalities
The formation of lordships resulted in a parcelling-out of the kingdom which
gave birth to great principalities, baronies or castellanies, those cells of local
life generated by a castle. The chapter in Philip Augustus’s registers headed
Scripta de feodis bears witness to this hierarchy: archbishops, bishops, abbots of
great monasteries, dukes and counts are ranked among the princes; then come
the barons, castellans, vavassours or sub-feudatories (arri
`
ere-vassaux) and, fi-
nally, the recently established category of the communes. These last have to
be treated as a special case. Thirty or so communes had been set up in the
north of the kingdom in the twelfth century. They had benefited from a
transfer – often very incomplete – of seigneurial powers to the urban com-
munity represented by a mayor and jur
´
es.Other towns, with no history of
conspiracy or revolt, bought liberties from their lord that were sometimes
more extensive than those of communes; and even villages, such as Beaumont-
en-Argonne, assumed full responsibility for their own administration. How-
ever, numerous settlements were satisfied with judicial and economic privileges
and left the task of governing them to their lord. At Paris the bourgeoisie very
soon realized that it was more worthwhile to feed off the avenues of power
530
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008