[Illustration:  Fig. 31.—­Fellows of the University of Paris haranguing the Emperor Charles IV. in 1377.—­From a Miniature of the Manuscript of the “Chroniques de St. Denis,” No. 8395 (National Library of Paris).]

Toulouse had to pay dearly for the respect shown to its municipal dignity.  The parents of the student presented a petition to the King against the city, for having dared to execute a noble and to hang his body on a gibbet, in opposition to the sacred right which this noble had of appealing to the judgment of his peers.  The Parliament of Paris finally decided the matter with the inflexible partiality to the rights of rank, and confiscated all the goods of the inhabitants, forced the principal magistrates to go on their knees before the house of Aimeri de Berenger, and ask pardon; themselves to take down the body of the victim, and to have it publicly and honourably buried in the burial-ground of the Daurade.  Such was the sentence and humiliation to which one of the first towns of the south was subjected, for having practised immediate justice on a noble, whilst it would certainly have suffered no vindication, if the culprit condemned to death had belonged to the middle or lower orders.

We must nevertheless remember that heavy dues fell upon the privileged class themselves to a certain degree, and that if they taxed their poor vassals without mercy, they had in their turn often to reckon with their superiors in the feudal hierarchy.

Albere, or right of shelter, was the principal charge imposed upon the noble.  When a great baron visited his lands, his tenants were not only obliged to give him and his followers shelter, but also provisions and food, the nature and quality of which were all arranged beforehand with the most extraordinary minuteness.  The lesser nobles took advantage sometimes of the power they possessed to repurchase this obligation; but the rich, on the contrary, were most anxious to seize the occasion of proudly displaying before their sovereign all the pomp in their power, at the risk even of mortgaging their revenues for several years, and of ruining their vassals.  History is full of stories bearing witness to the extravagant prodigalities of certain nobles on such occasions.

Payments in kind fell generally on the abbeys, up to 1158.  That of St. Denis, which was very rich in lands, was charged with supplying the house and table of the King.  This tax, which became heavier and heavier, eventually fell on the Parisians, who only succeeded in ridding themselves of it in 1374, when Charles V. made all the bourgeois of Paris noble.  In the twelfth century, all furniture made of wood or iron which was found in the house of the Bishop at his death, became the property of the King.  But in the fourteenth century, the abbots of St. Denis, St. Germain des Pres, St. Genevieve (Fig. 32), and a few priories in the neighbourhood of Paris, were only required to present the sovereign with two horse-loads of produce annually, so as to keep up the old system of fines.