But the loss of money was less important than the curtailment of privilege and the threatened absorption of power of which this reform was the precursor. Every step in advancing the influence of peaceful justice, as expounded by the jurists of the royal courts, was a heavy blow to the independence of the feudatories. They felt their ancestral rights assailed at the weakest point, and they instinctively recognized that, as the jurisdiction of the royal bailiffs became extended, and as appeals to the court of the Parlement of Paris became more frequent, their importance was diminished, and their means of exercising a petty tyranny over those around them were abridged. Entangled in the mazes of a code in which the unwonted maxims of Roman law were daily quoted with increasing veneration, the impetuous seigneur found himself the prey of those whom he despised, and he saw that subtle lawyers were busily undoing the work at which his ancestors had labored for centuries. These feelings are well portrayed in a song of the period, exhumed not long since by Le Roux de Lincy. Written apparently by one of the sufferers, it gives so truthful a view of the conservative ideas of the thirteenth century that a translation of the first stanza may not be amiss:—
Gent de France, mult estes esbahis!
Je di à touz ceus qui sont nez des fiez, etc.[736]
Ye men of France, dismayed and sore
Ye well may be. In sooth, I swear,
Gentles, so help me God, no more
Are ye the freemen that ye were!
Where is your freedom? Ye are brought
To trust your rights to inquest law,
Where tricks and quibbles set at naught