Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/558

 5 o8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE domain. A bailli was merely a royal creature and agent; the seneschal was some local noble who became a combination of royal agent and hereditary feudal lord. When Philip Augustus won so much territory from John, he put senes- chals rather than baillis over the lands south of Normandy — William of Roches over Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and Aimeri, Viscount of Thouars, over Poitou, Saintonge, and Guienne. Moreover, the local customs, feudal and other- wise, of different parts of France were preserved either by guaranty of written charter or simply as unwritten customs without saying anything about it. Finally, while mon- archy was gradually getting the better of feudalism as a system of government, the feudal land system with its fiefs and manors, and the feudal social system with its knights and nobles, were still flourishing in France of the early fourteenth century, where it had now become the rule that there was no "land without its lord." It would be hard to draw a definite boundary line on a map for the French monarchy at the close of the reign of Territorial Philip the Fair in 1 3 14 or at the end of the direct th^French Capetians in 1328. It would also not be easy to monarchy distinguish sharply between the royal domain, fourteenth the possessions of great feudal lords who were century nevertheless loyal enough to the French king to be reckoned as within his territory, and the fiefs of those who, like the King of England, while nominally vassals of the King of France, were really to all intents and purposes independent sovereigns. But roughly we may say that Brittany, although brought in Philip Augustus's time under a younger branch of the Capetian family, and the English possessions in the southwest in Guienne and Gascony were quite outside of the French king's control, as was the city of Montpellier on the Mediterranean which owned the juris- diction of the King of Aragon. In the southeast the river Rhone was approximately the French boundary. To the northeast the Count of Champagne and the Duke of Bur- gundy were now docile vassals, and French influence had recently been pushed yet farther east in Lorraine and the