(b) - The Seigneuries

Summary

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 (arriŕre-vassaux) and, finally, 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 community represented by a mayor and jurès. 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.