d, which had
already become numerous; and being no doubt convinced that royalty
required magnificence, he surrounded himself with as much pomp as the
times permitted.

Under the two Philips, his successors, this magnificence increased, and
descended to the great vassals, who were soon imitated by the knights
"bannerets." There seemed to be a danger of luxury becoming so great, and
so general in all classes of feudal society, that in 1294 an order of the
King was issued, regulating in the minutest details the expenses of each
person according to his rank in the State, or the fortune which he could
prove. But this law had the fate of all such enactments, and was either
easily evaded, or was only partially enforced, and that with great
difficulty. Another futile attempt to put it in practice was made in 1306,
when the splendour of dress, of equipages, and of table had become still
greater and more ruinous, and had descended progressively to the bourgeois
and merchants.

It must be stated in praise of Philip le Bel (Fig. 50) that,
notwithstanding the failure of his attempts to arrest the progress of
luxury, he was not satisfied with making laws against the extravagances of
his subjects, for we find that he studied a strict economy in his own
household, which recalled the austere times of Philip Augustus. Thus, in
the curious regulations relating to the domestic arrangements of the
palace, the Queen, Jeanne de Navarre, was only allowed two ladies and
three maids of honour in her suite, and she is said to have had only two
four-horse carriages, one for herself and the other for these ladies. In
another place these regulations require that a butler, specially
appointed, "should buy all the cloth and furs for the king, take charge of
the key of the cupboards where these are kept, know the quantity given to
the tailors to make clothes, and check the accounts when the tailors send
in their claims for the price of their work."

[Illustration: Fig. 50.--King Philip le Bel in War-dress, on the Occasion
of his entering Paris in 1304, after having conquered the Communes of
Flanders.--Equestrian Statue placed in Notre Dame, Paris, and destroyed in
1772.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut from Thevet's "Cosmographie Universelle,"
1575.]

After the death of the pious Jeanne de Navarre, to whom perhaps we must
attribute the wise measures of her husband, Philip le Bel, the expenses of
the royal household materially increased, especially on the o