ustoms and, in a certain degree, its peculiar language and
literature. The first two were rich, active, and powerful; the last,
poor and oppressed. There were three species of jurisdiction exercised
by the seigneurs, high, medium, and lower, though some of them had the
right only to the last two; these distinctions were frequently regulated
by the quality of the accused, and were definitely determined only in
succeeding centuries. The right to administer high justice carried with
it that of executing death-sentences, and the pillory and the gibbet,
erected near the chateau, were the visible evidences of this power. The
bishops and the abbots had the same rights as the seigneurs, even to the
extent of donning armor and combating in person if they so willed.

The obligations of the _vilains_, or serfs, included a long list of
services, taxes, and obligations of all kinds; in the cities, and
wherever possible, the seigneurs were in the habit of requiring payment
in money. There was for them a civil as well as a penal law, the _loi
vilaine_. They had, however, the right of appeal to the suzerain against
the decision of their seigneurs, and Saint-Louis favored these appeals
to his own court as tending to subordinate the seigneurial justice to
his own. In this royal court a change was taking place,--to the great
officers of the crown were now added _legistes_, as the procedures were
based upon written precedent, and these bookish personages, at first
treated with contempt by the nobles, gradually assumed the leading role
as their familiarity with the records and their legal knowledge
triumphed over the ignorant assurance of their betters.

In the thirteenth century, "the great revolutionist is the king, as the
aristocracy had been before Hugues Capet, as the people will be after
Louis XIV.... The royal authority had overthrown a great many barriers,
and it was marching with great strides toward absolute power. It had
imposed upon its turbulent vassals the king's peace, the king's justice,
the king's coinage, and it enacted laws for all." In the character of
Saint-Louis, "the spirit of justice which is in the Roman law was well
combined with his Christian sentiments. When he condemned, for example,
the judicial duel, he did so because _combat is not a means of
justice_,--this is the Roman conception, and because it is to
_criminally tempt God_,--this is the Christian spirit." The
enfranchisement of the serfs, which received so