These dramas of oppression and retaliation, though
characteristic in the sense that they reveal the worst faults and the best
excuses of the communal movement, were happily exceptional in Northern France;
not because oppression was rare, but because rebellions defeated their own object.
No seignorial concessions were worth the parchment on which they were
inscribed, without a confirmation from the King; and it was not the King's
interest to condone sacrilege or overt treason against a feudal lord. Hence the
founders of a North French commune preferred to keep their agitation within the
bounds of law. They invoked the King's help, and he, for an adequate
consideration, destroyed seignorial rights by a few strokes of the pen; which
he did the more readily since his lawyers had formulated the doctrine that communes
were tenants of the Crown, liable to military service and to taxation at the
royal pleasure.
From the close of the twelfth century there was a firm alliance
between the Third Estate and the French monarchy. On the whole it was more advantageous
to the King than to the communes. Under St. Louis and his successors, when the
power of the feudatories was broken, the commune presented itself as an
obstacle in the path of central government. On one pretext or another, here
because of faction-fights and there for mismanagement of the communal finances,
the cities lost their charters and passed under the rule of royal
commissioners. It was a poor compensation that the Third Estate obtained the
right of sending delegates to the States General of the Kingdom. Representation
brought new liabilities without corresponding rights. The Third Estate, holding
jealously aloof from the estates of the nobles and the clergy, was powerless
against a determined sovereign.
