ion, to reform abuses, and make justice prevail
there. From 1051 to 1281 there are to be found in the _Recueil des
ordonnances des rois_ seven important charters relating to Orleans. In
1051, at the demand of the people of Orleans and its bishop, who appears
in the charter as the head of the people, the defender of the city, Henry
I. secures to the inhabitants of Orleans freedom of labor and of going to
and fro during the vintages, and interdicts his agents from exacting
anything upon the entry of wines. From 1137 to 1178, during the
administration of Suger, Louis the Young in four successive ordinances
gives, in respect of Orleans, precise guarantees for freedom of trade,
security of person and property, and the internal peace of the city; and
in 1183 Philip Augustus exempts from all talliage, that is, from all
personal impost, the present and future inhabitants of Orleans, and
grants them divers privileges, amongst others that of not going to
law-courts farther from their homes than Etampes. In 1281 Philip the
Bold renews and confirms the concessions of Philip Augustus. Orleans was
not, within the royal domain, the only city where the kings of that
period were careful to favor the progress of the population, of wealth,
and of security; several other cities, and even less considerable burghs,
obtained similar favor; and in 1155 Louis the Young, probably in
confirmation of an act of his father, Louis the Fat, granted to the
little town of Lorris, in Gatinais (nowadays chief place of a canton in
the department of the Loiret), a charter, full of detail, which regulated
its interior regimen in financial, commercial, judicial, and military
matters, and secured to all its inhabitants good conditions in respect of
civil life. This charter was in the course of the twelfth century
regarded as so favorable that it was demanded by a great number of towns
and burghs; the king was asked for _the customs of Lorris_
(_consuetudines Lauracienses_), and in the space of fifty years they were
granted to seven towns, some of them a considerable distance from
Orleanness. The towns which obtained them did not become by this
qualification communes properly so called in the special and historical
sense of the word; they had no jurisdiction of their own, no independent
magistracy; they had not their own government in their hands; the king's
officers, provosts, bailiffs, or others, were the only persons who
exercised there a real and decis