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CHAP. without seignorial permission.

IV.

To emancipate themselves and their families from such oppression was the aim of the townsfolk of the north of France. Their neighbours, the Flemings, had long since acquired these liberties, and even greater ones; but the poorer towns of Picardy and Vernandois were not so arrogant.

Louis the Fat having displayed from his earliest years a desire to humble the extravagance and arbitrary power of the nobles, it was but natural that leagued citizens should have recourse to him. Those of Beauvais seem to have been the first that did so; and, as they were countenanced and supported in their efforts by their bishop, Louis granted them a charter, which is, however, only known by its subsequent sanction in the reign of Louis the Seventh. But the charter or municipalty instituted by the Bishop of Noyon in 1108, and formally sanctioned by Louis the Fat, is extant. The Countess of Vermandois, at the same time, granted to the inhabitants of St. Quentin a charter, formally declaring them free of serfage in their persons and their goods.

Louis the Fat was induced to sanction such grants of municipal freedom by the bishops recommending them, and, moreover, from the demand being accompanied by a sum of money. In some instances the king showed himself the contrary of liberal and just. The episcopal seat of Laon came to be filled by a prelate who had been a rude soldier and follower of Henry of England. He conducted himself as a cruel and rapacious tyrant. The citizens took advantage of his momentary absence to rise, and instituted a commune, in imitation of the towns of Picardy and Flanders. They even succeeded in procuring the bishop Gaudry's consent to this act by large payments. In time, however, the bishop repented of his acquiescence, as did the noblesse of Laon; and they took the opportunity of a visit which Louis the Fat paid the town in 1112, to propose that

IV.

he should sanction, and they execute, the abrogation of CHAP. the liberties of Laon. The townsfolk, alarmed by rumours of the plot, offered large sums to avert it. The bishop and noblesse bid higher, in order to have the king's assent, which Louis, with greed and with meanness unusual to him, finally granted. Fortunately for himself, he at the same time withdrew; when the people of Laon, indignantly rising, attacked the nobles and the soldiers of their bishop, massacring them without mercy. The prelate fled, and hid himself in a cask, from which he was dragged, and, despite of his supplications, was murdered, and his body cast with ignominy into a corner of the street.

The success of the Laonnois led to no durable result. They were themselves alarmed at it. They either had not the spirit, or did not see the possibility, of adopting the only mode in which popular resistance could be followed up and turned to profit. This was by towns leaguing together. Laon could find no other town bold. enough then to associate with it, and the only succour they found was in the son of the Baron de Coucy. It ended by the king and the Archbishop of Rheims taking possession of the walls and churches of the town; as to the population, it had fled, those who returned being treated as serfs. Sixteen years later, Louis the Fat, stung by remorse for his conduct, or at least persuaded of its impolicy, restored its municipal rights to Laon.

Whilst the French monarch thus, on the whole, favoured the freedom and organisation of the civic classes on the northern frontier of his kingdom, and, as we have seen from Orderic, made use of their militia against his enemy, he was far from introducing or sanctioning any real liberties in the towns of the Duchy of France, immediately subject to his sway. These he might not indeed oppress, but at least he retained the attributes of justice, and levied the taxes necessary for the government, without allowing those free institutions

CHAP.
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which were as embarrassing to royalty as inimical to aristocracy.*

Soon after the defeat of Louis at Brenneville, in 1119, his attention, as well as that of his kingdom, was called to the affairs of the Papacy. Pope Gelasius, driven from Rome by the Emperor, fled to the Abbey of Cluny, where he died. The cardinals who accompanied him clected a French prelate to be his successor. The new Pope Calixtus summoned a council to meet at Rheims. His object was to interest his countrymen in the great dispute between Pope and Emperor. It was a fortunate circumstance, this reference to a third and as it were a neutral power, of the quarrel between Italy and Germany. When it was fully stated to the French prelates, they declared that the two great countries and potentates, Emperor and Pope, were struggling and moving heaven and earth for a name rather than a thing. In France they knew nothing of investiture by cross and ring. The prelates were, to all appearance, freely chosen by the Church, but yet they never failed in obedience to the sovereign or the state,-paying tribute, rendering war service by their retainers, and performing every civic duty. The Emperor, on hearing this, declared he desired no better terms. And Church and Emperor accordingly, some time after, put an end to their long strife in the Treaty of Wurtzburg. So effective is a third and stranger party, as arbiter, to

*M. Thierry distinguishes the communal movement of France, as it took place, into different zones. In the north, the charters were treaties of peace between the town and its lord after a popular insurrection. In the south, the citizens exhumed Roman traditions, and elected consuls, but consigned their privileges in no written charter. The towns of the east and southeast made themselves remarkable by a regular system of two repre

sentative assemblies, a great and a little council, periodically convoked. In the west, the charters were granted by the monarchs or feudal chiefs. The Norman dukes gave large liberties to their towns. In the centre, the towns were indulged with many privileges and rights, but enjoyed no autonomy, and had no popular magistrates, justice remaining in the hands of the king or his substitutes.

terminate, by the decision of common sense, a quarrel CHAP. which rivalry and chicane had embittered and prolonged

for centuries.

The French king did not interfere in this accommodation. He merely made use of the council of Rheims to utter strenuous accusations against his foe, Henry of England. Pope Calixtus ordered both to keep the truce of God, and afterwards had an interview with Henry at Gisors. The English king was not averse to peace. He had won over Foulques of Anjou, and sealed the alliance by a marriage between his son, William, and Foulques' daughter, Matilda. The King of France therefore consented to abandon the claim of the son of Robert Short Hose to Normandy; and peace was concluded on these terms.

Immediately afterwards took place the terrible shipwreck of Barfleur, in which Henry lost his son and so many of his friends. This catastrophe, though it suspended Henry's activity, caused great alarm in France, the heiress to the throne of England and duchy of Normandy being the Empress Matilda. The Normans once more began to conspire and to rise in behalf of the son of Robert. Not only Louis, but Foulques of Anjou, and the entire of the French great noblesse, sympathised with the general fear and hostility entertained towards Henry and the empress. And the sovereigns of Germany and England, aware of this hostility, prepared to meet and to crush it with overwhelming forces. The emperor raised a large army of Lorrainers as well as Transrhenans, and proclaimed his intention of capturing Rheims, and punishing it as the scene of his last excommunication. Although Henry the Fifth never advanced with this formidable army farther than Worms, where death put an end to his threatened invasion of France, it was still attended with great results to Louis the Fat. For the whole of the country, princes and people, rose for the first time, as one man, against the menaces of

IV.

IV.

CHAP. the German and the Englishman. The rendezvous was at Rheims, and the number of warriors was immense. It was the first occasion in which the King of France found himself at the head of a national army. The great feudatories rallied around him as the true military supporters of the crown; whilst the contingents of this army, though collected from different provinces, came with feelings of pride in their common country, which had not before actuated them, but which have proved the growing cause of its subsequent greatness.

Although Louis had no opportunity of trying the strength of this French army against the German or the English foe, he contrived to employ it in enforcing French suzerainty beyond the Loire. In that region the power of Louis was checked by the ascendancy of William, Count of Poictiers. This magnate had defended his father, Philip, on a memorable occasion. A council of ecclesiastics was assembled to anathematise the King of France on account of his marriage. The Count of Poictiers, who had returned from the Holy Land with Oriental and not Papal ideas of the union of the sexes, scouted the ecclesiastical censure, and raised a tumult against the clergy, which saved Philip. He had afterwards resumed the cross, and Louis never pushed his arms into Aquitaine. He however interfered in Auvergne, which was considered a dependency of that duchy. Quarrels between the Count and Bishop of Clermont gave him the pretext. (1121.) But Louis could not have thus interfered with a fief of Aquitaine, if he had not at the same time had with him a large army, and all the great princes of the north of France in his camp and council. Neither Poictiers nor Clermont could resist the behests of a monarch who appeared at the head of so powerful a confederacy, and both submitted.

The most important achievement of Louis's reign was this grouping of the great feudatories about him.

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