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Abailiff (French:bailli,pronounced[baji]ⓘ) was the king's administrative representative during theancien régime in northern France, where the bailiff was responsible for the application of justice and control of the administration and local finances in hisbailiwick (baillage).
Bailli is first noted in the 12th century and comes the same word in Old French which means to govern or administer.[1] One 17th Century author credits the Old French word as meaning at the time "guardian" or "protector."[2] This word derives from theVulgar Latin termbajulivus meaning "official in charge of a castle" (i.e., a royalcastellan[citation needed] or "porter."[1]
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In the late 12th and early 13th century,King Philip II, an able and ingenious administrator who founded the central institutions on which the French monarchy's system of power would be based, prepared the expansion of the royal demesne through his appointment of bailiffs in the king's northern lands (thedomaine royal),[3] based on medieval fiscal and tax divisions (the "baillie") which had been used by earlier sovereign princes such as theDuke of Normandy. InFlanders, the count appointed similar bailiffs (Dutch:baljuw). The equivalent agent in the king's southern lands acquired after the inheritance of theCounty of Toulouse was theseneschal.
Over time, the role of thebaillages would be greatly extended as extensions of royal power, administration and justice. With the office of Great Seneschal vacant after 1191, the bailies became stationary and established themselves as powerful officials superior to provosts. A bailie's district included about half a dozen provostships. When appeals were instituted by the Crown, appeal of provost judgments, formerly impossible, now lay with the bailie. Moreover, in the 14th century, provosts no longer were in charge of collecting domainal revenues, except in farmed provostships, having instead yielded this responsibility to royal receivers (receveurs royaux). Raising local army contingents (ban and arrière-ban) also passed to bailies. Provosts therefore retained the sole function of inferior judges over vassals with original jurisdiction concurrent with bailies over claims against nobles and actions reserved for royal courts (cas royaux). This followed a precedent established in the chief feudal courts in the 13th and 14th centuries in which summary provostship suits were distinguished from solemnbailiary sessions.
Unlike the local administration ofNorman England throughsheriffs drawn from the great local families, the bailiff was a paid official sent out by the government, who had no power network in the area to which he had been assigned, and, in the way of a truebureaucrat, owed his income andsocial status wholly to the central administration that he represented. "He was therefore fanatically loyal to the king," Norman Cantor observes, "and was concerned only with the full exercise of royal power."[4] Thecathedral schools and theUniversity of Paris provided the clerks and lawyers who served as the king's bailiff.
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