ABSTRACT
In France the evolution of royal justice lagged a good century behind that of England and followed a totally different course. The French royal tribunals started their piece-meal erosion of seigneurial jurisdictions in the thirteenth century, annexing here a cause from one, evoking there appeals from another, all as occasion arose. There were no great legislative acts to set beside the Plantagenet Assizes, and little attempt was made to view the scheme of justice as a whole; but neither were there any prohibited boundaries. In theory law-suits between lords and tenants had at no time been exempt from royal intervention. Given the opportunity, royal officials were always ready to hear them. Naturally they based their judgments on local custom, and in the process helped to establish it; in consequence their decisions were often disadvantageous to the peasants, whose burdens they perpetuated or, where abuse had hardened into precedent, even increased; but the principle of heritability was always upheld. With this juridical support, inheritance of tenures had become so firmly rooted by the sixteenth century that it could not be contested. Once the Code of Justinian had become part of the legal curriculum, the lawyers were faced with a difficult semantic problem. They saw the land burdened with a whole hierarchy of superimposed property rights arising from the seigneurial system and its feudal superstructure; founded on custom or contract, all these rights were perfectly legitimate in their proper spheres, yet none poss('ssed the absolute, overriding character of ownership as defined in the Civil Law. For centuries past all suits relating to mastership of the soil or its revenues had in practice turned on seisin (possession protected and sanctioned by tradition), and never on ownership. But the Roman categories demanded a definite answer to questions never before raised: who was the owner of a fief, the lord or the vassal? who was the owner of a tenure, the lord or the villein? The lawyers urgently needed to know. We shall not here concern ourselves with fiefs, nor with all the various mixed systems elaborated over the years (those
for example which drew a distinction between two 'dominions', direct dominion and useful dominion.) Academic teaching long remained undecided in its identification of the true proprietor. But from the thirteenth century there were practising lawyers who were prepared to regard the tenant in this light, and from the sixteenth century this was the view disseminated by a number of legal writings, including those of the illustrious Dumoulin. By the eighteenth century it had become received opinion.22 In the terriers or registers which were kept by seigneurial officials to facilitate the collection of rents, it is not uncommon to find the names of land-holders subject to such charges listed under the prophetic heading 'proprietaires'. The word was indeed fraught with meaning; it confirmed and reinforced the idea of perpetuity which was already implicit in the right of real property traditionally exercised by the tenant over his house and fields. By a curious historical paradox the slow-moving advance of French royal justice had proved more beneficial to the peasantry than the daring innovations carried through by the Norman and Angevin kings of England.
