Of the many components of the so-called ‘legal revolution of the twelfth century’, one of the most important was the development of new legal procedures centred around the concept and practice of inquiry (Latin: inquisitio). The rapid and widespread dissemination of these practices, both in canon and civil law, led to the emergence of a new genre of documentary record known as the inquest, or enquête. This essay maintains that records of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century ecclesiastical enquêtes offer substantial value to the study of subjects other than law and administration, and in particular to the analysis of politics and power. Rather than assessing the enquêtes existentially as elements in a history of legal thought, or of administrative procedure, or of proto-modern rationality, that is, as examples of abstracted principles divorced from the exigencies of medieval life, this study embraces the enquêtes as documents of practice, as records – imperfect as they may be – of how medieval men and women interacted with each other. When read for what they say, and not for what legal historians want to see them as representing, it becomes apparent that the enquêtes represent an under-utilized source base for the analysis of a wide variety of topics of interest to scholars of the central Middle Ages. Enquêtes prove to be ripe for studies of orality, memory, the urban patriciate, urban–ecclesiastical relations, gender norms, moneylending, and much more.

Using two enquêtes conducted in north-western France between 1190 and 1240, the current study analyses what sources of this type reveal about power and the practice of lordship. It argues several interrelated points. First, the enquêtes underscore the point that the compulsory transfer of goods from the weak to the powerful remained, in the thirteenth century, a central element in the practical exercise of power, lordship and government. Such transfers, often represented as the seizure of goods described variously as costuma, taille, nanna and preda, were understood by the powerful to reflect a core, even defining, right of lordship; they were, in a word, central components of the exercise of power, components whose basic legitimacy remained unquestioned. The customary seizure of goods (and sometimes of persons) by the powerful was, moreover, a right practised by all lords, ecclesiastical and secular, royal and seigneurial, grand and petty.