Whosoever loses sight of this fundamental fact, will form a false idea of the events accomplished under the reign of St. Louis, and of the direction which he desired to give to royalty. The man alone explains the progress of the institution.

Independently of the strictness of his conscience, Saint Louis was a man of great activity, of an activity not only warlike, chivalric, but political, intellectual even. He thought of many things, was strongly preoccupied with the state of his country, with the condition of men, required regularity, reformation; he concerned himself about evil wherever he saw it, and everywhere wished to give a remedy. The need of acting, and of acting well, equally possessed him. What more is necessary to ensure the influence of a prince, and to give to him a large share in the most general results?

Swayed by his moral exactitude, he began, as I have just said, by doubting the legitimacy of what his predecessors had done, especially the legitimacy of the conquests of Philip Augustus. Those provinces, formerly the property of the king of England, and which Philip Augustus had joined to his throne by way of confiscation, that confiscation, and the circumstances which attended it; the continued claims of the English prince; all this weighed upon the conscience of Saint Louis. This is not a conclusion simply drawn from his conduct; the fact is formally attested by the contemporaneous chroniclers. I read in the Annales of the reign of Saint Louis, by Guillaume de Nangis:

"His conscience smote him for the land of Normandy, and for other lands which he held, which the king of France, his ancestor, had taken away, by the judgment of his peers, from king John of England, called Lackland, who was father of this Henry, king of England."

He essayed at peace with his whole power; so that, in 1259, after lengthened negociations, he concluded a treaty with the king of England, Henry III., by which he gave up to him, Limousin, Perigord, Quercy, Agenois, and that part of Saintonge lying between Charente and Aquitaine. Henry on his side renounced all pretensions to Normandy, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, and did homage to Louis as duke of Aquitaine.1

▾ Annaies du Règne de Saint Louis, by Guillaume de Nangis, p. 245, folio edition of 1761,

The conscience of Saint Louis was then tranquil, and he considered himself the legitimate possessor of the conquests which he kept; but everyone was not so particular.

"At which peace many of his council were angry, and said to him thus: Sire, we marvel much that you should give to the king of England so large a portion of the land which you and your predecessor have acquired from him and his predecessors, kings of England, by reason of their misdeeds. It seems to us that if you consider yourself not entitled to these territories, you render not enough to the king of England, unless you render to him all the land which you and your predecessor acquired from him; and if you consider that you have right to hold them at all, it seems to us that you do damage to your crown by restoring that which you have restored.' Whereunto the holy king thus replied: "My lords, I know that the predecessors of the king of England justly lost these lands, and that which I give I do not give because I am bound to him or to his heirs to do so, but to create love between my children and his, who are cousins German; and it seems to me that that which I give him is well employed, since that he who was not my man has now become so.

The reasons of Saint Louis did not convince every one. The provinces which thus came under the English rule, complained bitterly; and this anger lasted so long, that we read in a manuscript chronicle of the time of Charles VI.. with regard to this treaty of 1259 between Louis IX. and Henry III.:

"At which peace the Perigordians and their neighbours were so indignant, that they never liked the king afterwards, and for that reason, even to the present day in the borders of Perigord, Quercy and other places, although Saint Louis is canonized by the church, they regard him not as a saint, and do not keep his festival as is done in other parts of France.”

Notwithstanding the disapprobation thus manifested both by politicians and by the people, Saint Louis adhered to his scruples and to his maxims. He had not deemed it just to retain, without due compensation to the parties, that which

Joinville, Hist. de Saint Louis, p. 142, ed. of 1761

• Observations de C. Ménard sur Joinville, edition of Du Cange, p. 371.

he did not regard as having been legitimately obtained; and neither by force nor fraud did he attempt any new acquisition. Instead of seeking to profit by the dissensions which arose within and around his states, he assiduously applied himself to allay them, and to prevent their resulting in ill consequences.

"He was," says Joinville, "ever laboriously intent upon making peace between his subjects, and more especially between the great men about, and the princes of the kingdom." And elsewhere:

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Touching the foreigners whose quarrels the king had appeased, some of his council said that he did ill not to allow them to continue their warfare; for were he to let them mutually impoverish one another, they would not be in so favourable a position for attacking him. Whereunto the king replied, that they said not well: 'for if the neighbouring princes see that I allow them to make war on one another without remonstrance, they may take counsel together, and say, it is the king's maliciousness that induces him to let us go on fighting; it would thus happen that by the hatred they would have for me, they would come and attack me, whereby I might very well be lost, not to speak of the hatred of God, who says: blessed are the peacemakers.' ”?

Well, notwithstanding this reserve, notwithstanding this scrupulous antipathy to conquest, properly so called, Saint Louis is one of those princes who most efficaciously laboured to extend the kingdom of France. While he ever refused to avail himself of violence and fraud, he was vigilantly attentive never to lose an opportunity of concluding advantageous treaties, and of acquiring by fair means additional territory. He thus annexed to the kingdom, either through his mother, the queen Blanche, or by his own means, and sometimes for a pecuniary consideration, sometimes by disherison, sometimes by other measures:

1. In 1229, the domains of the count de Toulouse on the right bank of the Rhone, namely-the duchy of Narbonne, the counties of Beziers, Agde, Maguelone, Nîmes, Uzes, and Viviers; a part of the country of Toulouse; half of the country of Alby, the viscounty of Gevaudan, and the claims

of the count of Toulouse, over the ancient counties of Velay, Gevaudan, and Lodeve.

2. In 1234, the fiefs and jurisdiction of the counties of Chartres, Blois et Sancerre and the viscounty of Chateaudun. 3. In 1239, the county of Macon;

4. In 1257, the county of Perche;

5. In 1262, the counties of Arles, Forcalquier, Foix, and Cahors; and at various periods, several towns with their districts, which would take up too much time to detail.

This you perceive was, in a territorial point of view, not a fruitless reign; and notwithstanding the entire difference of the means employed, the work of Philip Augustus found in Saint Louis a skilful and successful continuator.

What political changes were introduced by his influence into the kingdom thus extended? What did he for royalty? I will say nothing to you about the state of weakness into which it seemed fallen at the period of his accession. A minority was for the powerful vassals an excellent occasion of self-aggrandizement, for asserting their independence, and for escaping awhile that supremacy of the crown which Philip Augustus had begun to make them sensible of. Such a movement as this appears throughout the thirteenth century, at the opening of each new reign. The ability of queen Blanche, and some fortunate circumstances, prevented Saint Louis from experiencing any very enduring consequences from this movement in his instance; and when he himself began to reign, he found royalty once more in very nearly the same position in which Philip Augustus had left it.

Thoroughly to appreciate what it became in the hands of Saint Louis, it is necessary to consider, on the one hand, his relations with the feudal society, his conduct towards the possessors of fiefs, great and small, with whom he had to do; on the other, his administration of the interior of his domains, his conduct towards his subjects peculiarly so called.

The relations of Saint Louis with feudalism have been presented under two very different aspects; there have been attributed to him two wholly contradictory designs. According to some writers, far from labouring as his predecessors had done to abolish feudalism, and to usurp, for the benefit of the crown, the rights of the seigneurs, he fully accepted

the feudal society, its principles and its rights, and applied all his efforts to regulate it, to constitute it, to give it a fixed form, a legal existence. The other class of writers will have it that Saint Louis had no other thought, during the whole course of his reign, but that of destroying feudalism, that he incessantly struggled against it, and systematically laboured to invade the right of the possessors of fiefs, and to raise royalty upon their ruins, sole and absolute.

And accordingly as the writers have been friends or enemies of feudalism, they have admired and celebrated Saint Louis for the one or for the other of these his alleged purposes.

In our opinion, neither purpose can be really attributed to him: both are equally repugnant to the facts, carefully considered and presented in their real aspect.

That Saint Louis, more so than any other king of France, spontaneously respected the rights of the possessors of fiefs, and regulated his conduct according to the maxims generally adopted by the vassals around him, cannot be doubted. I have already had occasion to show you the right of resistance, even to the extent of making war upon the king himself, formally recognised and sanctioned in his Etablissemens. It were difficult to render more marked homage to the principles of feudal society; and this homage frequently recurs in the monuments of Saint Louis. He had evidently an exalted idea of the reciprocal rights and duties of vassals and suzerains, and admitted that, on a variety of occasions, they were entitled to prevail over the pretensions of the king.

And it was not merely in theory that he recognised these rights; in practice, also, he scrupulously respected them, even when he was the sufferer by their exercise. In 1242, he took by storm the castle of Fontenay, afterwards called L'Abattu, in Poitou, belonging to the count de la Marche, and which had been for a long time defended by a bastard of the count's, "forty-one knights, eighty sergeants, and a body of common soldiers under them." He was advised to put all the prisoners to death, as a punishment for their obstinacy, and the losses which they had occasic ned him, but he refused. 'No,” said he, "the leader could not be to blame,