to become formidable.  At this time, besides, Parliament and the whole judicial system was beginning to take form; and many questions relating to the administration of the towns, many disputes between the provosts and burghers, were carried before the Parliament of Paris, and there decided with more independence and equity than they would have been by any other power.  A certain measure of impartiality is inherent in judicial power; the habit of delivering judgment according to written texts, of applying laws to facts, produces a natural and almost instinctive respect for old-acquired rights.  In Parliament the towns often obtained justice and the maintenance of their franchises against the officers of the king.  The collection of kingly ordinances at this time abounds with instances of the kind.  These judges, besides, these bailiffs, these provosts, these seneschals, and all these officers of the king or of the great suzerains, formed before long a numerous and powerful class.  Now the majority amongst them were burghers, and their number and their power were turned to the advantage of burgherdom, and led day by day to its further extension and importance.  Of all the original sources of the third estate, this it is, perhaps, which has contributed most to bring about the social preponderance of that order.  Just when burgherdom, but lately formed, was losing in many of the communes a portion of its local liberties, at that same moment it was seizing by the hand of Parliaments, provosts, judges, and administrators of all kinds, a large share of central power.  It was through burghers admitted into the king’s service and acting as administrators or judges in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of the state.

Philip the Handsome, that ambitious and despotic prince, was under no delusion when in 1302, 1308, and 1314, on convoking the first states-general of France, he summoned thither “the deputies of the good towns.”  He did not yet give them the name of third estate; but he was perfectly aware that he was thus summoning to his aid against Boniface VIII. and the Templars and the Flemings a class already invested throughout the country with great influence and ready to lend him efficient support.  His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he summoned to the states-general “the commonalties and good towns of the kingdom “to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the succession to the throne, “or to advise as to the means of establishing a uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;” he was perfectly aware that the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the accomplishment of acts so grave.  And the three estates played the prelude to the formation, painful and slow as it was, of constitutional monarchy, when, in 1338, under Philip of Valois, they declared, “in presence of the said king, Philip of Valois, who assented thereto, that there should be no power to impose or levy talliage in France if urgent necessity or evident utility did not require it, and then only by grant of the people of the estates.”