344 Ecclesiastics excluded from parlia PHILIP THE FAIR. Limitations to the law of The first act of the grandson of St. Louis these concessions were interested. The Jew was to exclude priests from the administration was the king's thing, his property; the heretic of justice, and to prohibit their sitting in any his subject, his taxable, would not have remaincourt, not only in the king's parliament and in ed for him to plunder, had he been resigned to his domains, but in those of the barons, (A. D. the extortions of the Inquisition. But let us 1287.) "It is ordered by the council of our not search too narrowly into the motive. The lord the king, that dukes, counts, barons, arch- ordinance seems honorable to him who signed bishops and bishops, abbots, chapters, colleges, it; and we discern in it with pleasure the first gentlemen, (milites,) and, in general, all who light of tolerance and of religious equity. have temporal jurisdiction in France, shall choose laymen for bailiffs, provosts, and officers of justice; and that they shall by no means appoint priests to these offices, so that if they commit any fault (delinquant) their superiors may straightway punish them. Whatever priests may fill the aforesaid offices must be removed.Also, it is ordered, that all who after the pres-open and living to receive and take. The king ent parliament have or shall have any suit in the court of our lord the king, and before the regular judges of the kingdom, shall choose laymen for their solicitors.-Registered in parliament, this All-Saints' day, in the year of our Lord 1287."* Philippe-le-Bel composed his parliament altogether of laymen. This is the first express separation of the civil ecclesiastical orders; rather, 'tis the foundation of civil order. The priests were far from humbly submitting. They seem to have endeavored to resume their seats in the parliament forcibly. In 1289, the king forbids"Philippe and Jean, door-keepers of the parliament, to allow any prelate to enter the chamber without the permission of the masters, (presidents.)" Placed on its proper basis by the exclusion of the foreign element, the parliament proceeded to organize itself, by a division of labor, and the distribution of its different functions. Some were to receive and expedite petitions; others formed themselves into committees of inquiry. Regular days were appointed for sitting, lists of challenge made out, and the functions of the king's officers determined. A great step was made towards judicial centralization. The parliament of Toulouse was suppressed, and the Languedocian appeals henceforward referred to Paris† business of importance must have been more calmly transacted at a distance from this impassioned land, which bore the trace of so many revolutions. The parliament has rejected the priests. It is not long before it proceeds to overt acts against them. In 1288, the king forbids the arresting of a Jew on the suit of a priest or monk, previous to information laid before the seneschal or the bailiff of the grounds of the arrest, and without handing him in a copy of the writ. The religious tyranny under which the South groaned was moderated; and the seneschal of Carcassonne forbidden to imprison any one on the requisition of the inquisitors alone. No doubt * Ordonnances, i. 316. †D. Vaissette, Hist. du Languedoc, 1. xxviii. c. 21, p. 72. Ordonnances, pp. 307, 322. In the same year, 1291, the king struck a bolder blow at the Church. He limited and loosened that fearfully absorbing power, which would by degrees have swallowed up all the lands of the kingdom*-gifts in mortmain, (main morte, "dead-hand.") Dead, indeed, either to sell or give, the priest's and monk's hand was raised the payment to be made by the clerical So much for the Church. Feudalism, all armed and warlike as it is, is not the less attacked. It gives out from itself the principle which is to be its ruin-the principle of the feudal suzerainty of the crown. St. Louis expressly says in his Establishments (Etablissemens,)" If any one bring an action against his lord in the king's court for debt due to him, or on account of promises or covenants entered into with him, his lord shall not hold the court ; for no lord ought to be judge, or to administer law in his own cause, according to the law inscribed in the code, 'Ne quis in suâ causâ judicet,' in the only law which begins with Generali, in red and black," &c. The Establishments of Louis were drawn up for the king's own domains. Beaumanoir, in the Coutume de Beauvoisis-laws drawn up for the domains of one of St. Louis's sons, Robert of Clermont, progenitor of the house of Bourbon-writes (this is in the time of Philippe-le-Bel) that the king has a right to draw up Establishments not for his own domains only, but for the whole kingdom. The original should be consulted, to see with what skill he advances this scandalous and paradoxical opinion.‡ Class from which the kings took their min. THE ROYAL MINISTERS. isters in the 13th and 14th centuries. 345 which county he was bailiff in the year 1253. We afterwards find him among the Masters of the parliament of Paris. In this capacity, he delivers a judgment in the king's favor against the abbot of St. Benoît-sur-Loire, (A. D. 1260;) and then another, in the king's favor as well, against the monks of the wood of Vincennes. In these judgments, we find him signing his Philippe-le-Hardi facilitated the acquisition of feudal property by plebeians, (roturiers.)* He enjoined his officers of justice "not to molest those non-nobles who shall purchase feudal property." As the "non-noble" was unable to discharge the noble services attached to the fief, the consent of the intermediate lords, up to the monarch, was required for the completion of the purchase. This number Philippe III. restrict-name after the chancellor of France. He styles ed to three. himself knight, (chevalier ;*) which at this period is no great thing. These gentlemen of the long robe early assumed the ridiculous title of Chevaliers-ès-Loi, (knights-at-law.†) No more is there any thing to show that Philippe de Beaumanoir, bailiff of Senlis, the author of the bulky book—the Coutumes de Vermandois-could boast of his birth. The house of the same name, which figures in the wars with the English in the fourteenth century, is Breton, not Picard; and, besides, it cannot trace its descent regularly higher than the fifteenth. The tendency of this legislation is easily explained, when we know who were the royal counsellors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the class from which they were taken. Philippe-le-Hardi's chamberlain and counsellor was St. Louis's barber or surgeon, Pierre la Brosse, a native of Touraine. His brother, bishop of Bayeux, shared his power and his ruin as well. La Brosse had accused Philippe's second wife of having poisoned a son of his by his first. The party of the barons, at the head of which was the Count d'Artois, maintained that this was a calumny of the favorite's, and The two brothers, Marigni, so powerful unaccused him besides of selling the king's se- der Philippe-le-Bel, called themselves by their crets to the Castilians. La Brosse persuaded own family name of Le Portier. They were the king to consult a beguine, or mystic nun, of Normans, and purchased in their native country Flanders. The baronial party set up against the estate of Marigni. The most celebrated of her the Dominicans, ever the enemies of the the two, the king's chamberlain and treasurer, mystics; and a Dominican delivered a casket and captain of the tower of the Louvre, is styled to the king, in which were found, or supposed coadjutor and governor of all the kingdom of to be found, proofs of La Brosse's treason. His France. "He was," says a contemporary, "like trial was conducted secretly; and they did not a second king, and every thing was done at his fail to find him guilty. His execution was wit-pleasure." Nor are we inclined to suspect this nessed by the Count d'Artois and numerous to be an exaggeration, when we know that Malords, the heads of the baronial party. rigni placed his own statue in the Palais-deJustice by the side of the king's. At the head of St. Louis's counsellors we may place Pierre de Fontaines, the author of the Conseil à Mon Ami (Advice to My Friend) -a work chiefly translated from the Roman laws. He was a native of the Vermandois; of judgment, or in matters that affect the sovereign.' act in their territories according to the ancient usage; but when the ordinance is general, it ought to run through the whole kingdom, and we ought to believe that it is made with good advice, and for the common benefit' In another place he says, with more positiveness, that the king is sovereign above all, and has of right the general custody of the realm, for which cause he may make what ordinances he pleases for the common good, and what he ordains ought to be observed; nor is there any one so great, but may be drawn into the king's court, for default of right, or for false These latter words," subjoins Hallam, "give us a clue to the solution of the problem, by what means an absolute monarchy was established in France. For though the barons would have been little influenced by the authority of a lawyer like Beaumanoir, they were much less able to resist the coercive logic of a judicial tribunal. It was in vain for them to deny the obligation of royal ordinances within their own domains, when they were compelled to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the parliament of Paris, which took a very different view of their privileges." Hallam, State of Europe during the Middle Ages, vol. i. pp. 250, 251.)-TRANSLATOR. *(Hallam reimarks on this word-" We have no English word that conveys the full sense of roturier. How glorious is this deficiency in our political language, and how different are the ideas suggested by commoner! Roturier, according to Du Cange, is derived from ruptuarius, a peasant, ab agrum rumpendo-that is, from breaking the soil." See note at p. 207, vol. i. of Hallam's Middle Ages.)-TRANS LATOR. † Guill. Nangiac. p. 532.-Chron. de St. Denis, p. 107.Mariana, t. xiv. p. 616.-Sismondi, t. viii. p. 277. VOL. 1.-44 Among Philippe-le-Bel's ministers, we must number two Florentine bankers, to whom undoubtedly the fiscal violences of this reign are in great part to be ascribed. The managers of the great and cruel trials instituted by this prince were Pierre Flotte, chancellor of the kingdom, who had the honor of being killed, all the same as if he were a knight, at the battle of Courtrai; and Plasian and Nogaret, his colleagues and successors. The latter, who acquired so tragical a celebrity, was born at Caraman, in Lauraguais. His grandfather, if we credit the aspersions of his enemies, had been burnt as a heretic. Nogaret was, at first, law-professor at Montpellier, and then juge-mage (the Seneschal's lieutenant) at Nimes. The family of the Nogarets, so haughty in the sixteenth century under the name of Epernon, was noble on neither side in 1372. Shortly after that bold expedition in which Guillaume Nogaret laid hands on the pope, he was made chancellor and keep * Dupuy, Different de Boniface VIII. p. 615. † (The title of Sergeant-at-law, equally absurd, is still retained.)-TRANSLATOR. Dupuy, Templiers, 1751, note at p. 45. Ita ut secundus regulus videretur, ad cujus nutum regni negotia gerebantur. Bern. Guidonis, Vita Clem. V. ap. Baluze, p. 82. See Felibien, Histoire de Paris. 346 The kingly power extended by the legists. CENTRALIZATION OF THE MONARCHY. Effects of the 1292 er of the seals. Philippe-le-Long revoked the | system is already attacked by the complaint of grants which had been made him by Philippe- which the ancient died. It consumes, but does le-Bel; but he was not included in the proscrip- not produce. In process of time, manufactures, tion of the Marignis—an exemption no doubt commerce, and wealth, will issue out of the due to a fear of throwing discredit on his judi- bosom of order and security. But so vast is cial acts, which were of the last importance to the price of the establishment of this order, the crown. that it may be long doubted whether it does not increase the miseries it was designed to cure. These legists, who from the twelfth century had governed the English kings, and who in the thirteenth directed St. Louis, Alphonso X., and Frederick II., were under St. Louis's grandson the tyrants of France. These knightsat-law, these souls of lead and iron, these Plasians, Nogarets, and Marignis, proceeded with frightful coldness in their servile imitation of the Roman law and of imperial fiscality. The Pandects were their Bible, their Gospel. They stopped at nothing as soon as they could say, whether wrongly or rightly, Scriptum est. With texts, quotations, and falsifications, they battered down the middle age-popedom, feudalism, and chivalry. They went boldly to make bodily seizure on Pope Boniface VIII.; they burnt the crusade itself in the person of the Templars. Painful though it be to avow it, these cruel demolishers of the middle ages are the founders of civil order in modern times. It is they who organize the centralization of the monarchy; and who scatter over the provinces bailiffs, seneschals, provosts, auditors, notaries, royal attorneys, masters, and weighers of coin. The forests are invaded by royal verderers and gruiers.* All these functionaries set about confusing, discouraging, and destroying the feudal jurisdictions. In the centre of this vast spider's web, sits the council of legists under the name of Parliament, (fixed at Paris in 1302.) There, all will gradually be absorbed and swallowed up by the kingly power. This lay law is especially the enemy of the ecclesiastical. At need, the legists will enrol the citizens with themselves; in fact, they are nothing better, although, while persecuting the nobility, they solicit ennoblement. These evils are aggravated to excess by one circumstance. The baron of the middle age paid his servitors in lands, and in the produce of the land; great and small, they had seats at his table. Their pay was their daily food. To the immense machine of royal government. which substituted its complicated movement for the thousand natural and simple movements of feudal government, money alone can give the requisite impulse. If the new-born monarchy fail to possess itself of this vital element, it will perish, it will dissolve, and all its parts will crumble back into the isolation and barbarism of feudal government. 'Tis not the fault of this new system of government if it be greedy and hungry. Hunger is its nature, its necessity, the very basis of its constitution; to satisfy which, it must alternately employ craft and force. We have here in the king's individual person, as in the old romance, master Renard and master Isengrin-fox and wolf. For It is but right to observe, that naturally the king does not love war; but prefers all other means of getting-purchase and usury. At first, he traffics, exchanges, buys; the strong can thus strip his weak friends honestly. instance, as soon as the French monarch despairs of taking Spain by means of papal bulls, he at least buys the patrimony of the younger branch of Aragon, the good city of Montpellier, the only one which remained to King Jayme.* Our prince, well-advised and knowing in the law, had no scruples to acquire in this manner the last garment of his prodigal friend, a poor younger son, who sold his patrimony bit by bit; and the management of which he no doubt thought ought to be taken away from him in virtue of the Roman law, " Prodigus et furiosus.”† 66 Creating government on this fashion was certainly a costly process. We are without sufficient details to arrive at exactitude; but we On the north he acquired Valenciennes, which know that the provost's sergeants, that is, the placed itself in his hands, (A. D. 1293) unexecutors and agents of this administration, so doubtedly money had something to do with the tyrannical at its birth, had at first-the horse- transaction. Valenciennes brought him near sergeant three sous (Paris) daily, which was to wealthy Flanders, so desirable to lay hold of, subsequently doubled, and the foot-sergeant both for its wealth, and as being the ally of eighteen deniers, &c. Here is a complete England. On the side of English France, he judicial and administrative army. Presently, had purchased from the necessitous Edward I. mercenary troops will arrive. Philippe de the Quercy, a dry, mountainous country, of Valois will have at once several thousand little value, but affording an entrance into Genoese cross-bowmen. Whence draw the Guyenne. Edward was at the time entangled enormous sums which all this is to cost? Manufactures are not yet created. This new social *(Wood-rangers. According to Borel, the word comes from druid-gru for dru, dpus, "oak." In the Latin of the middle age, we find gruarius, gruerius. See Roquefort, Massaire de la Langue Romaine)-TRANSLATor. * Hist. de Languedoc, 1. xxviii. c. 30, p. 76. † Montpellier was at the same time a fief of the bishopric of Maguelone. The bishop, worn out by the opposition of the burgesses. and the support given them by the king of France, sold the latter all his rights; which, though previously judged invalid, seemed on this quite good enough to serve as a pretext for despoiling the aged Jayme. Sa mondi, t. viii. p. 464. A. D. 1297 -1300. Philip summons Ed- STATE OF FLANDERS. He gets possession of Guyenne 347 in his Welsh and Scotch wars, in which he | But, too busied with Scotland, he did not regained glory only. Indisputably, it would have pair to Guyenne in person, and his party only been much to have established Britannic unity, experienced reverses. The pope (Boniface and to have united in himself the sovereignty VIII.) sided with Philippe, to whom he owed of the whole island; an object for the effecting his tiara; and, to give him an ally, he released of which Edward made heroic efforts, and at the Scottish king from his oaths to the king of the same time committed atrocious barbarities. England. Finally, Philippe managed so well, But in vain did he break the harps of Wales, that the Flemings, discontented with their slay its bards; in vain did he reduce King count, summoned him to their assistance.* David to a traitor's doom, and transfer to West- Both kings relied on Flanders for supporting minster the famous stone, the Scottish pal- the war. This fat land was a natural temptaladium, from Scone; he could bring nothing to tion to these voracious governments. To that a conclusion, either in the island or on the con- whole world of barons and of knights, whom tinent. Whenever he looked towards France the French kings weaned from private wars, with eager desire to cross over, some bad news Flanders was their dream, their poetry, their would be sure to be brought him from the Jerusalem. All were ready to make a joyous Scotch border, or from the marches of Wales, pilgrimage to the magazines of Flanders, the some new attempt of Llewellyn's or of Wal- spices of Bruges, the fine cloths of Ypres, the lace's. The latter, the heroic chief of the tapestries of Arras. clans, was encouraged by Philippe-le-Bel, by this royal attorney, who took care not to stir; his end was secured by rousing Edward with his Scottish blood-hounds. He willingly allowed him to immortalize himself in the deserts of Wales and of Northumberland, proceeded against him at his ease, and let judgment go against him by default. Thus, when he saw him occupied with repressing Scotland, in arms under Baliol, he summoned him to answer for the piracies of his Gascons upon our Normans. He summoned this king, this conqueror, to appear and clear himself before what he called the tribunal of peers. He first threatened, then beguiled him; offering him in marriage a princess of France, as the price of a fictitious submission, a simple seizure which would arrange every thing. The arrangement ended in the Englishman's throwing open his strongholds, and in Philippe's keeping them, and withdrawing his offers; so that this great province, this kingdom of Guyenne, changed masters by sleight of hand. In vain did Edward exclaim against this proceeding. He sought and obtained against Philippe the alliance of the king of the Romans, Adolphus of Nassau, that of the dukes of Brittany and of Brabant, of the counts of Flanders, Bar, and of Gueldres. He wrote humbly to his subjects of Guyenne, asking their pardon for having consented to the seizure.† The idea of Scotland and that of clanship seem so identified in the minds of Englishmen, let alone foreigners, that it is not surprising to find M. Michelet falling into this error with regard to Wallace.)-TRANSLATOR. "We had concluded a treaty with the king of France, by which we had made on behalf of you and your duchy certain concessions, which we had conceived to be for the good of peace and the benefit of Christendom. But in so doing, we were guilty towards you, since we did it without your consent; and we were the more guilty, inasmuch as you were prepared to guard and defend your land. However, we beg you to be pleased to hold us as excused, since we were circumvented and deceived at that conjuncture. We regret it more than any one, as Hugh de Vere and Raymond de Ferrers, who negotiated this treaty in our name at the court of France, will assure you. But, by God's blessing, we will henceforward do nothing important with regard to this duchy without your counsel and consent." Ap. Rymer, t. ii. p. 644. Sismondi, t. viii. p. 480. It would seem as if God had made this good Flanders, and placed it between all, to be eaten of one or other. Before England was the Colossus we now see, Flanders was an England; but how inferior and incomplete in comparison. Drapers without wool, soldiers without cavalry, merchants without a navy, were the Flemings; and it is these three things, cattle, horses, and ships, which now constitute the marrow of England-the material, vehicle, and defence of her industry. This is not all. The name of Flanders does not express a people, but a union of several very different countries, a collection of tribes and of cities. Nothing can be less homogeneous. Not to speak of differences of race and tongue, there has ever been hatred between city and city, hatred between the towns and the country, hatred between classes, hatred between trades, hatred between the sovereign and the people.t In a land where women inherited and transferred the sovereignty, the sovereign was often a foreign husband. Flemish sensuality, the materialism of this people of flesh, is manifested in the precocious indulgence of the Coutume de Flandre to women and bastards. The Flemish women brought in by marriage masters from all countries-a Dane, an Alsacian; then, Frenchmen of different branches, Dampierre, (a Bourbon,) Louis de Mâle, (a Capetian,) Philippe-le-Hardi, (a Valois ;) finally, Austria, Spain, then, Austria again. And now, Flanders is under the sway of a Saxon, (Cobourg.) Flanders complained of the French count, Guy Dampierre. Philippe offered the Flemings his protection. Guy applied to the Eng * Oudegherst, Chron. de Flandres, c. 131, f. 214. "Who could injure Flanders if those two states, (civitates,) Bruges and Ghent, were of one accord?" Meyer. Chron. p. 92. "It has been ruled in Flanders from the earliest times, that none are bastards on the mother's side." Meyer, fol. 75. This privilege was extended to the men of Bruges by Louis de Nevers: "He freed them from bastardy, were the bastard a citizen, or a citizen's son, without fraud." (1331.) Oudegherst. Chron. de Flandres. lish, and sought to marry his daughter, Philippa, to Edward's son. According to the feudal law, this marriage, directed against the king of France, could not take place without his consent, as suzerain of Guy Dampierre. However, Philippe entered no protest; but hypocritically declared, that being the maiden's god-father, he could not allow her to cross the strait without embracing her.* To refuse, was to declare war; and before the time had come. To go to Paris, was to run the risk of remaining there. Guy went; and did remain. Both father and daughter were detained in the tower of the Louvre. Thus Philippe deprived Edward of his ally and of his wife, just as he had of Guyenne. Subsequently, it is true, the count made his escape: but the maiden died, to Philippe's great damnification, who was interested in keeping such a hostage, and yet was accused of her death. Edward thought he had roused the whole world against his disloyal enemy. The emperor Adolphus of Nassau, a poor petty prince despite of his title, would willingly have made war in Edward's pay, as Otho of Brunswick had formerly done in John's, and as, subsequently, Maximilian battled for Henry VIII. on a subsidy of a hundred crowns a day. The counts of Savoy, Auxerre, Montbelliard, Neufchâtel, Hainault, and Gueldres, the duke of Brabant, the bishops of Liege and of Utrecht, and the archbishop of Cologne, all promised to attack Philippe, all took English money, and, with the exception of the count of Bar, they to a man remained quiet. Edward paid them to act; Philippe, to do nothing. Growing envy of the wealth At tion than the crowd of faithless debtors. This repulsive name, invented by the people, was boldly accepted by the king himself. It was a last means-an invention from which, if there still remained any substance, if there was still any thing left to be sucked out of the marrow of the people, that remainder was to be expected. But in vain did they press and screw. The patient was so dry that the new machine could express nothing out of him. Nor could the king of England any more draw any thing from his people. His distress reduced him to despair; and in one of his parliaments he was even seen to weep. Between this famished king and consumptive people there was, however, some one who was rich that some one was the Church. Archbishops and bishops, canons and monks, ancient monks of St. Benedict, new monks called mendicants, all were rich and gorged with wealth. The whole of this tonsured world throve on the blessings of heaven, and on the fat of the earth. They were a small, happy people, round, fat, and oily, in the heart of the vast, hungered people, who then began to eye them with sidelong looks. The German bishops were princes, and levied armies. The Anglican Church was said to possess half the lands of the island. Its revenue in 1337 amounted to seven hundred and thirty thousand marks. At present, it is true, the archbishop of Canterbury receives only twelve hundred thousand francs a year, and the archbishop of York eight hundred thousand. When the Restoration (la Restauration) was in 1822, among other items of information it was ascertained, that the archbishop of Toledo distributed daily before his farms and palaces ten thousand basins of soup, and the archbishop of Seville six thousand.† Confiscation of the Church was the dominant idea of kings from the thirteenth century, and the chief instigation of their contests with the popes: all the difference is, that the Protestants took, and the Catholics compelled her to give. Henry VIII. employed schism, François I. the concordat. The war was thus waged without tumult or battle. It was a struggle of corruption, a con-making preparations for the Spanish expedition, test of money-to see which would first ruin the other. They had to give to their friends, they had to give to their enemies. Poor and wretched were the resources of kings of those days to meet such expenses. True, Edward and Philippe banished the Jews, and kept their property; but the Jew is slippery, and glided out of France, managing to take much of his means with him. The French king, whose ministers were at the time Italian bankers, bethought himself, no doubt by their advice, of levying contributions on the Italians, the Lombards, who were then turning France to profit, and who were a variety of the Jewish species. Then, in order to reach more surely still the whole race of money-makers, of those who bought and sold, the king, for the first time, had recourse to that evil expedient so often employed in the fourteenth century-the debasement of the coin.‡ It was an easy and silent tax, a secret bankruptcy; at least, at the outset. But soon all (Maltote, meaning maltolte, "wrongfully taken." The profited by it; each paid his debts in debased tax amounted to the fiftieth penny on every article deemed money. The king gained less by the transac-taxable, and was arbitrarily and violently raised, with a total disregard to justice.)-TRANSLATOR. Id. ibid. c. 130, fol. 213-Sismondi, t. viii. p. 496. + Edward, in 1289; Philippe, in 1290. Leblanc, Traité des Monnaies, p. 202. Which then of the two, in the fourteenth century, the king or the Church, was henceforward to make the most of France? This was the question. Already, when Philippe laid on his people the terrible tax of the maltôte, when he debased the coin, when he stripped the Lom *Guill. Nangiac. ann. 1296, p. 51. † I should hardly have believed this, had it not been confirmed in my presence by the very minister by whose orders information had been collected.-One of the monasteries recently suppressed at Madrid (that of St. Salvador) had two millions of revenue, and but one monk. |