Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/175

 1920 BARONY AND THANAOE 167 with just the same sense of ' man ' as opposed to ' woman ', a use that survived in our own law-books down to the seventeenth century in the phrase ' baro et feme '. Soon its meaning was narrowed, first to ' vassal ' and then to ' king's vassal ', ' tenant- in-chief ' ; and at last, by the middle of the eleventh century, baro, without losing its other meanings, became the technical and juridical name of the possessor of certain rights of public justice which the thirteenth-century lawyers called ' la haute justice '} At this point there emerged a difference between Normandy and the rest of France. In France these rights were attached to the possession of a castellary (castellaria), that is, of a castle with the surrounding district whence it drew its supplies of food, labour, and men, which thus became the fundamental unit of political organization from all points of view, judicial, military, administrative, fiscal, and commercial.^ In Normandy, however, where the dukes kept firm control over castle-building, there were many fiefs in which the lord had the rights usually attached to a castellary but no castle. In the duchy, therefore, baro became a technical name to distinguish the possessor of those rights, whether he had a castle or not, from the vavasor, or simple knight, who had no such rights, baronia being used in opposition to vavasoria to designate both the fief to which those rights were attached and the tenure by which it was held.=^ What those rights of public justice were, we know partly from charters, partly from the statements of Norman custom known as the ' Consuetudines et lusticie ',* compiled at the end of the eleventh century, and the ' Tres Ancien Coutumier ',^ compiled about a century later. From these it appears that all barons, in addition to the purely feudal rights of civil justice that every lord exercised in his manor as of right, had as barons rights of justice by virtue of which the duel could be held and the penalty of death or mutilation could be inflicted, though the one was limited to civil causes and the other to the baron's own thieves taken in the act or with the stolen goods on them.^ Both were '^ Guilhiermoz, pp. 143, 158 ; cf. Powicke, The Loss oj Norithandy, pp. 38-9, 55-6, 265 ff. Normandie). iudicio, nisi in tali actu vel f orisfacto inventus est pro quo membrum perdere debuisset et ibidem perdidisset, et nisi per indicium curie domini Normannie de hoc quod ad eum pertinet vel iudicio curie baronum de hoc quod ad barones.' Tres Ancien Coutu- mier, c. xli : ' Tuit chevalier e tuit sergent {vavassores in the Latin version) ont en leur terres leur justice de battaille en cause citeine {in civili causa) e quant li champions sera vaincuz, il avront Ix s. e j denier de la recreandise. E la justice de leur larrons
 * Guilhiermoz, op. cit. pp. 156 ff. ; cf. Haskins, op. cit. p. 28.
 * Guilhiermoz, p. 154. * Printed by Guilhiermoz, pp. 281 ff.
 * Edited by E. J. Tardif in Coulumiers de Normayidie (Societe de I'Histoire de
 * Const, et lust. c. 8 : ' Nulli licuit . . . de membris suis hominem dampnare sine