these sixteen years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year 1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament. (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. pp. 120, 339.) Side by side with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a moral proof taken from Joinville’s often-quoted account of St. Louis’s familiar intervention in his subjects’ disputes about matters of private interest.  “Many a time,” says he, “it happened in summer that the king went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against an oak, and made us sit down round about him.  And all those who had business came to speak to him without restraint of usher or other folk.  And then he demanded of them with his own mouth, ’Is there here any who hath a suit?’ and they who had their suit rose up; and then he said, ’Keep silence, all of ye; and ye shall have despatch one after the other.’  And then he called my Lord Peter de Fontaines and my Lord Geoffrey de Villette (two learned lawyers of the day and counsellors of St. Louis), and said to one of them, ‘Despatch me this suit.’  And when he saw aught to amend in the words of those who were speaking for another, he himself amended it with his own mouth.  I sometimes saw in summer that, to despatch his people’s business, he went into the Paris garden, clad in camlet coat and linsey surcoat without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety round his neck, hair right well combed and without coif, and on his head a hat with white peacock’s plumes.  And he had carpets laid for us to sit round about him.  And all the people who had business before him set themselves standing around him; and then he had their business despatched in the manner I told you of before as to the wood of Vincennes.” (Joinville, chap. xii.)

The active benevolence of St. Louis was not confined to this paternal care for the private interests of such subjects as approached his person; he was equally attentive and zealous in the case of measures called for by the social condition of the times and the general interests of the kingdom.  Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, seven, at the least, are great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances, and abuses of the feudal system.  Many other of St. Louis’s legislative and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois, or in similar collections, and the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still remaining