igation; but
the rich, on the contrary, were most anxious to seize the occasion of
proudly displaying before their sovereign all the pomp in their power, at
the risk even of mortgaging their revenues for several years, and of
ruining their vassals. History is full of stories bearing witness to the
extravagant prodigalities of certain nobles on such occasions.

Payments in kind fell generally on the abbeys, up to 1158. That of St.
Denis, which was very rich in lands, was charged with supplying the house
and table of the King. This tax, which became heavier and heavier,
eventually fell on the Parisians, who only succeeded in ridding themselves
of it in 1374, when Charles V. made all the bourgeois of Paris noble. In
the twelfth century, all furniture made of wood or iron which was found in
the house of the Bishop at his death, became the property of the King. But
in the fourteenth century, the abbots of St. Denis, St. Germain des Pres,
St. Genevieve (Fig. 32), and a few priories in the neighbourhood of Paris,
were only required to present the sovereign with two horse-loads of
produce annually, so as to keep up the old system of fines.

This system of rents and dues of all kinds was so much the basis of social
organization in the Middle Ages, that it sometimes happened that the lower
orders benefited by it.

Thus the bed of the Bishop of Paris belonged, after his death, to the poor
invalids of the Hotel Dieu. The canons were also bound to leave theirs to
that hospital, as an atonement for the sins which they had committed. The
Bishops of Paris were required to give two very sumptuous repasts to
their chapters at the feasts of St. Eloi and St. Paul. The holy men of
St. Martin were obliged, annually, on the 10th of November, to offer to
the first President of the Court of Parliament, two square caps, and to
the first usher, a writing-desk and a pair of gloves. The executioner too
received, from various monastic communities of the capital, bread,
bottles of wine, and pigs' heads; and even criminals who were taken to
Montfaucon to be hung had the right to claim bread and wine from the nuns
of St. Catherine and the Filles Dieux, as they passed those establishments
on their way to the gibbet.

[Illustration: Fig. 32.--Front of the Ancient Church of the Abbey of
Sainte-Genevieve, in Paris, founded by Clovis, and rebuilt from the
Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries.--State of the Building before its
Destruction at the End of the La