PICARDY (FRANCE): CAMBRAI, BEAUVAIS, LAON
Cambrai, the site of a former Roman city called Camaracum in Picardy (in the far north of what is now France), had been invaded by Magyars and Normans. By the tenth century it had become a small episcopal civitas with a stockaded merchants' quarter (faubourg) outside its walls.
By 1070 the suburban merchants had grown sufficiently prosperous and strong to require that their quarter be walled with stone.In 1075, shortly after Pope Gregory VII had declared the political and legal unity of the church and its independence from the empire, the population of Cambrai, led by a papalist priest and wealthy merchants, rose up against the authority of the emperor and his bishop and "swore a commune." This revolt was quickly put down. However, two years later, when a new bishop left the diocese to receive imperial investiture, a second revolt succeeded. Under the leadership, once again, of a Gregorian priest and the wealthiest merchants, the citizens swore oaths of fidelity to the commune and pledged themselves to defend it against a restoration of episcopal authority. In 1106, however, the emperor intervened to repress the commune once again. Only after the end of the Investiture Struggle ( 1122) did Cambrai receive a modern charter of liberties, the oldest extant copy of which is dated 1184. 9
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в‰Ў1-Map 3. Cities and towns of Western Europe circa 1250.
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Other episcopal towns of Picardy in the north of France followed the example of Cambrai in rising up against imperial authority in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and establishing sworn communes. As in the case of Cambrai, the bishops, whose power had originally derived from the emperor, were often (though not always) against the communes, while the papal party often supported them. 10 This was true not only in northern France but also in the Netherlands and northern Italy, where urban revolts similar to those of Cambrai took place.
Beauvais -- also in Picardy -- is of particular interest because in the twelfth century it received a charter providing for strong powers of selfgovernment and extensive privileges of citizens (bourgeois). A sworn commune had been instituted in Beauvais in the last years of the eleventh century, after four decades of sharp conflict between the bourgeois and a succession of bishops. Eventually, King Louis VI ( 1108-1137) issued a charter recognizing the authority of the commune, which was confirmed in 1144 by Louis VII and (with some additions) in 1182 by Philip Augustus. The seventeen articles of the charter included the following provisions:
all men within the walls of the city and in the suburb shall swear the commune;
each shall aid the other in the manner he thinks to be right;
if any man who has sworn the commune suffers a violation of rights, and a claim comes before the peers of the commune (in French, pairs, literally "equals," referring to leading citizens generally), they shall do justice against the person or property of the offender, unless he makes amends according to their judgment; and if the offender flees, the peers of the commune shall join in obtaining satisfaction from his property or person or from those to whom he has fled;
similarly, if a merchant comes to Beauvais to the market and someone within the city violates his rights, and a claim comes before the peers, they shall grant the merchant satisfaction;
no one who has violated the rights of a man of the commune shall be admitted to the city unless he makes amends according to the judgment of the peers; this rule may be waived, by advice of the peers, in the case of persons whom the Bishop of Beauvais has brought into the city;
no man of the commune shall extend credit to its enemies and no man shall speak with them except by permission of the peers;
the peers of the commune shall swear that they shall judge justly, and all others shall swear that they will observe and enforce the judgment of the peers.
11Other provisions dealt with regulation of mills, collection of debts (no person was to be taken as security for a debt), communal protection of food, equal measures of cloth, and restrictions on various feudal labor services still owed to the bishop.
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The charter did not specify the form of government of the commune but only provided that its peers were to render judgment and to secure the life and property of the members. Indeed, the charter added nothing to what had been established at least one or two decades before, except that its final
provision stated that "we [the king] do concede and confirm the justice and judgment which the peers shall do." In short, the charter was a recognition of a fait accompli: the uprising _ at the height o f the Papal Revolution of the bourgeois of Beauvais, the formation by them of a sworn
commune, and the restriction of the political and economic power of the bishop, who had previously been not only the chief ecclesiastic but also the chief feudal lord of the place, wholly involved in local and interfamily politic. 12 Although the charter itself was laconic in the extreme, it clearly implied that seignorial rights in the town of Beauvais were to be severely restricted.
The provision that "all men" were to swear the commune and be subject to its jurisdiction was not intended to include clergy or nobles, whether or not they lived within the walls. In fact, the new urban communities of Europe were in competition with clerical and feudal authorities. In the background, helping to regulate this competition, were the central royal and papal authorities.
Beauvais was somewhat unusual, though by no means unique, in that the episcopal authority and the feudal authority were united in the person of the bishop. The feudal court of the Bishop of Beauvais, which was attended by the entire nobility ("freemen") subordinate to his feudal lordship, maintained a substantial secular criminal and civil jurisdiction over the town.
On the whole, however, these and other feudal prerogatives of the bishop declined in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, partly because the French crown gave considerable support to the towns in their struggle against feudal control. The bishop's ecclesiastical jurisdiction was another matter: here, the efforts of the communal authorities to reduce the immunities of the clergy, from communal jurisdiction were largely unsuccessful -- partly because in that contest not only the papacy but also the crown was generally on the side of the church. An ordinance of Philip Augustus in 1210 forbade magistrates of French towns to arrest clerks unless they seized them in the commission of the offense, and even then they were to be turned over to the ecclesiastical court, which alone had power to judge them in most types of cases. Finally, to the royal authority itself the commune had to yield "high justice," that is, jurisdiction over capital offenses, as well as some appellate jurisdiction in cases of "middle" and "low" justice.Nevertheless, despite these limitations at the hands of the feudal, episcopal, and royal authorities, there remained a substantial autonomous jurisdiction of the commune over its own members and a substantial body of autonomous and distinctive communal law. 13
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Many of the new communes of both northern and southern France, as well as of many other parts of Europe, called themselves "communes for peace" (communia pro pace). Among these was Laon, located not far from Beauvais and Cambrai, where Louis VI in 1128 proclaimed an Institutio Pacis, recognizing the city as an "asylum of peace and safety for all, whether free or unfree." _1 4 Here, too, the immediate political issue was the conflict between the bishop and the citizens, which was partly a conflict within the church concerning the nature of episcopal authority and the competing royal and papal claims to episcopal allegiance, and partly a conflict between feudal and urban economic and social interests and values.
The suppression of an earlier commune had been followed by a long period of disorder. Indeed, in 1112 the bishop had been killed. The Institutio Pacis was an attempted compromise, in the spirit of the recent Concordat of Worms ( 1122) by which the Investiture Struggle as a whole had finally been compromised. The superior feudal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Laon was recognized, and he continued to appoint local judges (echevins); but the mayor and "jurors" (jurati, jures, or oath takers, equivalent to the peers of Beauvais and other communes) also had jurisdiction to enforce the customs of the city and to supply justice when the bishop's justice failed.Serfs who came to the town from outside were to be given freedom, and serfs of local lords were to be relieved of many obligations; mainmorte and formariage were abolished, and taille was reduced to a fixed payment and restricted to certain persons.
In Picardy as elsewhere in Europe, time was on the side of urban selfgovernment. Where episcopal appointees remained, as in Laon, they became municipal magistrates, and by the end of the twelfth century they were generally elected by the jurors. Everywhere a small group of men, nominated by the leading citizens and elected by the whole people, constituted the magistracy.