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This king in history is chiefly renowned for having CHAP. emancipated the towns, and favoured the formation of municipalties. And no doubt he at first aided the growth of his power by his enlistment of the Church serfs and tenants in his ranks; and then by making a similar but more partial and guarded use of the town population. But it was far less by these measures, than by the ascendancy which he acquired over the great aristocracy, that Louis consolidated his power, and increased the prestige of the monarchy. The arguments which he made use of, and which his minister, Suger, uses for him in his chronicle, was the necessity of upholding French interests, nationality, and pride, against the German emperor on one side, and the English monarch on the other. It is difficult to descry this national French spirit in any monarch before Louis the Sixth, or in any writer before Suger. Both of them were most influential as founders of French nationality.

Louis was not so fortunate in his treatment of Flanders as in his subjugation of Aquitaine. The Flemings, indeed, proved always intractable to French treatment, whether of amity or hostility. The count of that province, perplexed and curbed by the frowardness of the townsfolk and the middle class, sought to taunt the family of Van der Straten by asserting they were serfs. One of them replied by cleaving the young count's skull as he knelt at prayers. There being no heir to the family of Flanders, Louis sought to give the country to the son of Robert Short Hose. This unfortunate prince soon after fell in an engagement: and Flanders passed to Theodoric of Alsace, a descendant of Robert the Frison.

Louis, after a divorce with the daughter of Guy de Rochefort, had married the daughter of Amé, Count of Savoy, by whom he had eight children. The corpulence, joined to the weakness of the king, rendering his life precarious, he associated with him his eldest son,

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CHAP. Philip, in 1129, and caused him to be crowned by the Archbishop of Rheims. Two years later, a hog ran between the legs of his horse in the streets of Paris : the horse fell with the prince under him, and crushed him to death.

Pope Innocent the Second was then in France strenuously supported against an anti-pope by Louis, and therefore closely bound to him. This induced Louis to

have the second son crowned by the pontiff at Rheims. This act of having a French coronation performed by a foreign pontiff, instead of the national prelate of Rheims, having called forth dissentient voices from the clergy, some of his followers slew the refractory church

men.

In 1136, William, last Duke of Aquitaine, weary of power and stricken with remorse, undertook a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostello. In departing, William made a will, declaring Louis, King of France, guardian to his daughter and sole heiress, Eleanor. The duke expired in the course of his pilgrimage, and Louis immediately ordered the marriage of his son and successor, Louis, with the heiress of Aquitaine. The ceremony was performed at Bordeaux with great solemnity in the summer of 1137. Shortly after, Louis the Fat expired.

The French Capetian monarchy during two centuries was blessed with great internal calm, and with a remarkable absence of those stirring movements and causes of strife which convulsed other countries. Germany and Italy were throughout those centuries in a continual turmoil of civil and religious war, church contending against State, and Pope against Cæsar. England and Normandy, during the same epoch, were torn by rival claimants. France scarcely felt these disturbances. It lay like a still lake in a mountain hollow -storms all around, itself slumbering in placidity.

The French monarchs did not experience the same

necessities as their brethren of Germany or of England. In Germany, all the attributes of sovereignty had been appropriated by the dukes, princes, and prelates, leaving nothing for the sovereign to aim at but a kind of lofty supremacy, more to be exercised abroad than at home. As a German monarch, the emperor was nothing; as a Cæsar, he was all. But this was a kind of European supremacy, opposed to the thoroughly local spirit of the age, and counteracted by another great pretender to European supremacy, the Pope, whose purposed empire was equally an impracticability and an anachronism. The two monster claims took centuries to destroy each other, which, in truth, they effectually did; but, unfortunately, they at the same time split up, destroyed, and neutralised, as nations, the two countries engaged in the strife. Germany and Italy remain each a chaos and an anomaly to this day.

The kings of England had other difficulties. They were lords of a conquering race, superposed upon another, which was indeed akin to them, and thus offered means of amalgamation, but which still increased a hundredfold the perils of government. The situation, however, called forth the energies and talents of the Norman princes and their followers, and rendered it imperative that they should make use of all the resources and all the strength of their country. In England, accordingly, no class was neglected. The king summoned around him his noblesse, to seek their council and demand their aid, both in military service and in money. Those who refused to attend or to comply were considered foes and traitors, and were visited with the strong hand; fined, if not powerful enough to resist; crushed, if they did so. The citizen class was also mulcted, but conciliated. Great liberties were allowed to burghers. Church and churchmen were, indeed, shorn of the privileges and immunities which they enjoyed in other countries; but still the

CHAP.

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CHAP. church was prominent, and fought its battle. All these stormy elements and powers, struggling with each other, gave rise to a system of law, of judicial and parliamentary liberty, of rights long conflicting and at length adjusted, which ended by making the English a constitutional and free people.

In France there was nothing of this struggle, this energy, or this life. The reason lay in there being no necessity or no cause to evoke them. The population was, notwithstanding what certain writers may pretend, of one race, or of races long and completely amalgamated. There were few or no disputants to the throne, which itself at first was scarcely worth disputing. The duchy or kingdom of France was not a conquering or a conquered country. It was central, out of the great lines of trade and adventure; the great churchmen and the great feudatories were paramount in their dioceses or provinces; and the early Capets lived on the best of terms with their prelates, intermarried with the great princely families near them, and were, in truth, more ruled and supported by these nominally-subject princes than accustomed to exercise predominance over them.

One great difference between France and England was the existence in the former country of a princely aristocracy, placed far too high above the provincial baronage to form with it one order or assembly. A Count of Champagne or a Duke of Normandy could not be brought to attend a king's court twice in the year; whilst a decree or decision of lesser barons could scarcely be binding, except upon each other. Even such minor meetings seemed to have fallen into disuse; kings, like Robert, relying upon ecclesiastical synods. And though a king's court existed, there was nothing like a parliament in France, for either judicial or legislative purposes, throughout the eleventh century.

With Louis the Fat, and with Suger his friend and minister, not only did a France arise, but institutions

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sprung up in France, partly resuscitated, partly adopted CHAP. from imitation of the Norman kings, partly suggested by the peculiar state of the country. Amongst these institutions was the royal court or assembly of the barons of the duchy of France, considered as a tribunal before which refractory nobles might be summoned. It was the court of the lesser peers, which, as the power and dominion of the monarchy increased, was swelled into a court of great peers or princes, and to which such magnates became amenable. The remarkable institution of raising the peasantry under their curates, and leading them to war, a habit scarcely reconcilable with either feudal or civic organisation, was another remarkable creation. Louis the Fat's sanction of municipalties was equally anomalous. It was not, like Henry the First's charter to London, a recognition of middle class and civic rights in his own capital and chief towns. This Louis carefully avoided. It was the acknowledgment of franchises in towns which belonged to his neighbours and his rivals, and intended more to injure and diminish the power of these than to arouse the civic classes to the support of the crown.

There was, in fact, great hesitation and uncertainty in the policy of Suger and Louis the Fat, except so far as they seemed determined to vindicate and raise up the royal authority by all modes. That monarch saw in the general enthusiasm to support him against the pretensions of the Emperor of Germany how this was best to be done. But it was the fortune of the French monarch and monarchy to be ruled, developed, and rendered powerful by events and by the progress of things, rather than by any efforts of their own. What eventually raised, we may say created, the monarchy of France, was the rivalry of the English kings, which taxed and incited fresh energies to resist them. At the death of Henry the First, however, an epoch of civil war commenced in England, and left that country in a kind of