СНАР. VI. were known to be indifferent. Henry the Third had come to Vincennes to visit Louis, who sympathised with his fallen state, and no doubt promised to aid, as far as was possible, in the recovery of his royal power. Louis's offers were, therefore, more favourably received now, and a treaty was concluded in 1259. According to its tenor the French king yielded to Henry all the fiefs and domains which he possessed in the bishoprics and cities of Limoges, Cahors, and Perigord, except the homage of his brother, and whatever he could not dispose of by letters. But these he was bound to purchase and give up within a year. Louis was, moreover, to pay the yearly value of Agen, until it should fall to the Crown, when he was to transfer it to England. After the death of Alphonso Count of Poitou, the lands that he held in Xaintonge beyond the Charente were to be ceded, or a money value paid for them. The same was to be observed with respect to the land he held in Cahors, provided it could be proved that the first grant came from the King of England. The King of France, moreover, was to pay for the support of 500 knights for two years. All this is very far from a complete cession of the provinces immediately north of the Garonne. When portions of France were formerly held by the Plantagenets of the Capets, the sovereignty was complete in the lands of the royal vassal, the homage merely nominal. But now the suzerain kept the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the regale of all bishopricks, maintained the right of appeal to the royal court, contrived to keep his seneschals in the provinces nominally ceded. And in fact all that Henry acquired by these concessions, in return for which he waived the claims of his family upon Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, was a certain amount of annual income, stipulated but not paid. As to the Limousin and Perigord, they were held by counts, who nominally transferred a kind of allegi ance, but between whom and the suzerain was left no place for the authority of the sovereign vassal. French historians allege that the populations of these provinces were so incensed at Louis' ceding them to the English that, after his coronation, they refused to celebrate the fête of St. Louis. This was gratuitously severe and unjust on their part, for the provinces were not ceded, nor apparently did any change take place worth noticing; and after the death of the Count and Countess of Poitou and Toulouse, the lands of Agen and Xaintonge were demanded and redemanded for a long time, in vain, by Henry and by Edward. Perhaps the pious and just Louis thought he was making a fair and honest restoration, but his lawyer councillors took care that this should not be the case. Whilst the king thus terminated all differences between himself and foreign princes, he at the same time made equally strenuous efforts to put an end to enmities between his neighbours. A king so bent on peace could not tolerate the right or the habit of private war, which still continued within his dominions. He had sought to limit it by his edict of forty days' truce, or quaran taine le roi. In 1257 he learnt that the prohibitions of this edict were completely set at nought in Auvergne. He instantly ordered the seneschal and bishops to look to it, and seized the opportunity of issuing an edict to forbid private war throughout the kingdom. Trial by single combat was a kind of private war, though ordained by courts of justice and presided over by the authorities of the district. To abolish this solemn custom was a more difficult and complicated matter. But even this St. Louis undertook in 1260, and he prepared an edict for the purpose, with the legists of his parliament. It for bade judical combat, and commanded that in all cases where it prevailed, proof by witnesses should be substituted. This, in itself a revolution, required a remodelling of the whole criminal jurisdiction and law. And СНАР. VI. СНАР. VI. this St. Louis achieved later in the ordinances known by the name of his Etablissements. It was not merely by their right of appealing to arms, either in private war or legal battle, that the feudal aristocracy set freedom and justice at defiance. They were supreme in their own courts, and had the power of awarding even death. St. Louis shrunk from interfering with such seignorial privileges by an edict; but he seized a memorable occasion of showing that the king's justice was as paramount as it was equitable and humane, and that the highest should not set it at defiance. The house of Coucy was one of the first in France, as, indeed, the ruins of its castle still show. Enguerrand had succeeded to the title and possessions, when a very young man, in 1250. He was much addicted to the chase and chary of its privileges. It happened that three young Flemings, well connected and of good families, who were pursuing their studies at a Benedictine abbey near Laon, were engaged in the sport of killing rabbits with bow and arrow, and unconsciously pursued their game within the precincts or the preserves of Coucy. Seized and brought to the castle, the young lord, without inquiry, ordered them instantly to be hanged. The order was executed. The Benedictine abbot, shocked at such an occurrence, informed of the fact Gille Le Brun, constable of France, who was a relative of one of the victims. The king was instantly told, and he summoned De Coucy to appear before him in council. Enguerrand came to Paris, but demanded to be tried by the Court of Peers. This was denied him, and apparently without much justice, on the plea that he was not a peer or a baron, but held Couci as a fief of the diocese of Rheims. As lords of Boves, near Amiens, the De Coucys had been barons, but were no longer so, it was alleged. Such chicane showed the influence of legists in the council of St. Louis. They caused Enguerrand to be arrested and committed to the donjon of the Louvre. De Coucy was allied to all the The keen and natural sense of justice, felt by Louis, did not extend to those complications of politics, in СНАР. VI. CHAP. which class struggled with class, or with the Crown. Louis had no idea of mixed principles of government, or the right of subjects to control or make compromises with their sovereign. Of political constitutions he knew merely what churchmen and the legists of the Roman law taught. These made the monarch a divinity to the contempt of either natural or feudal freedom. In the quarrel therefore between Henry the Third and his barons, Louis only considered their resistance as rebellion. The first efforts of the French king to negotiate peace between contending parties was to reconcile King Henry and Prince Edward. Henry was probably encouraged by Louis in that assertion of his authority which he made in 1263. Louis and several of the French barons promised their aid to the English king on this occasion, and the Count of Saint Pol brought eighty knights with him to England. Foreign aid, however, could not enable Henry to reduce his noblesse, and both parties consented to take St. Louis as arbiter. He summoned them to Amiens at the commencement of 1264. Henry attended, whilst Leicester sent an excuse; he foresaw that a king who had rendered himself absolute could not give fair judgment in such a cause. Louis annulled the provisions of Oxford, merely on the grounds of the Pope having done so. He ordered all the fortresses to be restored to the king, who was to name what officers he pleased, and to employ as many foreigners as he liked. It was impossible to show a more complete contempt for national rights or a people's desire. Nor could any decision be at once more unjust or more imbecile; it was accordingly at once set aside. And the English of all parties learned that no Frenchman, not even one of the perspicuous intellect and noble nature of Louis, could understand, much less reconcile, those differences inherent in the nature of English progress. It is worthy of remark, that the only personage of the French court who favoured Leicester, was Charles |