THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME VII SLICE VI
Coucy-le-Château to Crocodile

Articles in This Slice

COUCY-LE-CHÂTEAU, a village of northern France, in the department of Aisne, 18 m. W.S.W. of Laon on a branch of the Northern railway. Pop. (1906) 663. It has extensive remains of fortifications of the 13th century, the most remarkable feature of which is the Porte de Laon, a gateway flanked by massive towers and surmounted by a fine apartment. Coucy also has a church of the 15th century, preserving a façade in the Romanesque style. The importance of the place is due, however, to the magnificent ruins of a feudal fortress (see [Castle]) crowning the eminence on the slope of which the village is built. The remains, which embrace an area of more than 10,000 sq. yds., form an irregular quadrilateral built round a court-yard and flanked by four huge towers. The nucleus of the stronghold is a donjon over 200 ft. high and over 100 ft. in diameter, standing on the south side of the court. Three large vaulted apartments, one above the other, occupy its interior. The court-yard was surrounded on the ground-floor by storehouses, kitchens, &c., above which on the west and north sides were the great halls known as the Salle des preux and the Salle des preuses. A chapel projected from the west wing. The bailey or base-court containing other buildings and covering three times the area of the château extended between it and the village. The architectural unity of the fortress is due to the rapidity of its construction, which took place between 1230 and 1242, under Enguerrand III., lord of Coucy. A large part of the buildings was restored or enlarged at the end of the 14th century by Louis d’Orléans, brother of Charles VI., by whom it had been purchased. The place was dismantled in 1652 by order of Cardinal Mazarin. It is now state property. In 1856 researches were carried on upon the spot by Viollet-le-Duc, and measures for the preservation of the ruins were subsequently undertaken.

Sires de Coucy.—Coucy gave its name to the sires de Coucy, a feudal house famous in the history of France. The founder of the family was Enguerrand de Boves, a warlike lord, who, at the end of the 11th century seized the castle of Coucy by force. Towards the close of his life, he had to fight against his own son, Thomas de Marle, who in 1115 succeeded him, subsequently becoming notorious for his deeds of violence in the struggles between the communes of Laon and Amiens. He was subdued by King Louis VI. in 1117, but his son Enguerrand II. continued the struggle against the king. Enguerrand III., the Great, fought at Bouvines under Philip Augustus (1214), but later he was accused of aiming at the crown of France, and he took part in the disturbances which arose during the regency of Blanche of Castile. These early lords of Coucy remained till the 14th century in possession of the land from which they took their name. Enguerrand IV., sire de Coucy, died in 1320 without issue and was succeeded by his nephew Enguerrand, son of Arnold, count of Guines, and Alix de Coucy, from whom is descended the second line of the house of Coucy. Enguerrand VI. had his lands ravaged by the English in 1339 and died at Crécy in 1346. Enguerrand VII., sire de Coucy, count of Soissons and Marle, and chief butler of France, was sent as a hostage to England, where he married Isabel, the eldest daughter of King Edward III. Wishing to remain neutral in the struggle between England and France, he went to fight in Italy. Having made claims upon the domains of the house of Austria, from which he was descended through his mother, he was defeated in battle (1375-1376). He was entrusted with various diplomatic negotiations, and took part in the crusade of Hungary against the Sultan Bayezid, during which he was taken prisoner, and died shortly after the battle of Nicopolis (1397). His daughter Marie sold the fief of Coucy to Louis, duke of Orleans, in 1400. The Châtelain de Coucy (see above) did not belong to the house of the lords of Coucy, but was castellan of the castle of that name.

COUES, ELLIOTT (1842-1899), American naturalist, was born at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the 9th of September 1842. He graduated at Columbian (now George Washington) University, Washington, D.C., in 1861, and at the Medical school of that institution in 1863. He served as a medical cadet at Washington in 1862-1863, and in 1864 was appointed assistant-surgeon in the regular army. In 1872 he published his Key to North American Birds, which, revised and rewritten in 1884 and 1901, has done much to promote the systematic study of ornithology in America. In 1873-1876 Coues was attached as surgeon and naturalist to the United States Northern Boundary Commission, and in 1876-1880 was secretary and naturalist to the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, the publications of which he edited. He was lecturer on anatomy in the medical school of the Columbian University in 1877-1882, and professor of anatomy there in 1882-1887. He resigned from the army in 1881 to devote himself entirely to scientific research. He was a founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and edited its organ, The Auk, and several other ornithological periodicals. He died at Baltimore, Maryland, on the 25th of December 1899. In addition to ornithology he did valuable work in mammalogy; his book Fur-Bearing Animals (1877) being distinguished by the accuracy and completeness of its description of species, several of which are already becoming rare. In 1887 he became president of the Esoteric Theosophical Society of America. Among the most important of his publications, in several of which he had collaboration, are A Field Ornithology (1874); Birds of the North-west (1874); Monographs on North American Rodentia, with J. A. Allen (1877); Birds of the Colorado Valley (1878); A Bibliography of Ornithology (1878-1880, incomplete); New England Bird Life (1881); A Dictionary and Check List of North American Birds (1882); Biogen, A Speculation on the Origin and Motive of Life (1884); The Daemon of Darwin (1884); Can Matter Think? (1886); and Neuro-Myology (1887). He also contributed numerous articles to the Century Dictionary, wrote for various encyclopaedias, and edited the Journals of Lewis and Clark (1893), and The Travels of Zebulon M. Pike (1895).

COULISSE (French for “groove,” from couler, to slide), a term for a groove in which a gate of a sluice, or the side-scenes in a theatre, slide up and down, hence applied to the space on the stage between the wings, and generally to that part of the theatre “behind the scenes” and out of view of the public. It is also a term of the Paris Bourse, derived from a coulisse, or passage in which transactions were carried on without the authorized agents de change. The name coulissier was thus given to unauthorized agents de change, or “outside brokers” who, after many attempts at suppression, were finally given a recognized status in 1901. They bring business to the agents de change, and act as intermediaries between them and other parties. (See [Stock Exchange:] Paris.)

COULOMB, CHARLES AUGUSTIN (1736-1806), French natural philosopher, was born at Angoulême on the 14th of June 1736. He chose the profession of military engineer, spent three years, to the decided injury of his health, at Fort Bourbon, Martinique, and was employed on his return at Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. In 1781 he was stationed permanently at Paris, but on the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. Of the National Institute he was one of the first members; and he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died at Paris on the 23rd of August 1806. Coulomb is distinguished in the history alike of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction (Théorie des machines simples, en ayant regard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on fluid resistance. In 1785 appeared his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l’élasticité des fils de métal, &c. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance, an instrument used by him with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of electricity on surfaces and of the laws of electrical and magnetic action, of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. The practical unit of quantity of electricity, the coulomb, is named after him.

COULOMMIERS, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Seine-et-Marne, 45 m. E. of Paris by rail. Pop. (1906) 5217. It is situated in the fertile district of Brie, in a valley watered by the Grand-Morin. The church of St Denis (13th and 16th centuries), and the ruins of a castle built by Catherine of Gonzaga, duchess of Longueville, in the early 17th century, are of little importance. There is a statue to Commandant Beaurepaire, who, in 1792, killed himself rather than surrender Verdun to the Prussians. Coulommiers is the seat of a subprefect, and has a tribunal of first instance and a communal college. Printing is the chief industry, tanning, flour-milling and sugar-making being also carried on. Trade is in agricultural products, and especially in cheeses named after the town.

COUMARIN, C9H6O2, a substance which occurs naturally in sweet woodruff (Asperula odorata), in the tonka bean and in yellow melilot (Melilotus officinalis). It can be obtained from the tonka bean by extraction with alcohol. It is prepared artificially by heating aceto-ortho-coumaric acid (which is formed from sodium salicyl aldehyde) or from the action of acetic anhydride and sodium acetate on salicyl aldehyde (Sir W. H. Perkin, Berichte, 1875, 8, p. 1599). It can also be prepared by heating a mixture of phenol and malic acid with sulphuric acid, or by passing bromine vapour at 107° C. over the anhydride of melilotic acid. It forms rhombic crystals (from ether) melting at 67° C. and boiling at 290° C., which are readily soluble in alcohol, and moderately soluble in hot water. It is applied in perfumery for the preparation of the Asperula essence. On boiling with concentrated caustic potash it yields the potassium salt of coumaric acid, whilst when fused with potash it is completely decomposed into salicylic and acetic acids. Sodium amalgam reduces it, in aqueous solution, to melilotic acid. It forms addition products with bromine and hydrobromic acid. By the action of phosphorus pentasulphide it is converted into thiocoumarin, which melts at 101° C.; and in alcoholic solution, on the addition of hydroxylamine hydrochloride and soda, it yields coumarin oxime.

Ortho-coumaric acid (o-oxycinnamic acid) is obtained from coumarin as shown above, or by boiling coumarin for some time with sodium ethylate. It melts at 208° C. and is easily soluble in hot water and in alcohol. It cannot be converted into coumarin by heating alone, but it is readily transformed on heating with acetic anhydride or acetyl chloride. By the action of sodium amalgam it is readily converted into melilotic acid, which melts at 81° C., and on distillation furnishes its lactone, hydrocoumarin, melting at 25° C. For the relations of coumaric and coumarinic acid see Annalen, 254, p. 181. The homologues of coumarin may be obtained by the action of sulphuric acid on phenol and the higher fatty acids (propionic, butyric and isovaleric anhydrides), substitution taking place at the carbon atom in the α position to the -CO- group, whilst by the condensation of acetoacetic ester and phenols with sulphuric acid the β substituted coumarins are obtained.

Umbelliferone or 4-oxycoumarin, occurs in the bark of Daphne mezereum and may be obtained by distilling such resins as galbanum or asafoetida. It may be synthesized from resorcin and malic anhydride or from β resorcyl aldehyde, acetic anhydride and sodium acetate. Daphnetin and Aesculetin are dioxycoumarins.

The structural formulae of coumarin and the related substances are:

COUMARONES or Benzofurfuranes, organic compounds containing the ring system

This ring system may be synthesized in many different ways, the chief methods employed being as follows: by the action of hot alcoholic potash on α-bromcoumarin (R. Fittig, Ann., 1883, 216, p. 162),

from sodium salts of phenols and α-chloracetoacetic ester (A. Hantzsch, Ber., 1886, 19, p. 1292),

or from ortho-oxyaldehydes by condensation with ketones (S. Kostanecki and J. Tambor, Ber., 1896, 29, p. 237), or with chloracetic acid (A. Rossing, Ber., 1884, 17, p. 3000),

The parent substance coumarone, C8H6O, is also obtained by heating ω-chlor-ortho-oxystyrol with concentrated potash solution (G. Komppa, Ber., 1893, 26. p. 2971),

It is a colourless liquid which boils at 171-172° C. and is readily volatile in steam, but is insoluble in water and in potash solution. Concentrated acids convert it into a resin. When heated with sodium and absolute alcohol, it is converted into hydrocoumarone, C8H8O, and ethyl phenol.

COUNCIL (Lat. concilium, from cum, together, and the root cal, to call), the general word for a convocation, meeting, assembly. The Latin word was frequently confused with consilium (from consulere, to deliberate, cf. consul), advice, i.e. counsel, and thus specifically an advisory assembly. Du Cange (Gloss. Med. Infim. Latin.) quotes the Greek words σύνοδος, συνέδριον, συμβούλιον as the equivalent of concilium. In French the distinction between conseil (from consilium), advice, and concile, council (i.e. ecclesiastical—its only meaning) has survived, but the two English derivatives are much confused. In the New Testament, “council” is the rendering of the Hebrew Sanhedrin, Gr. συνέδριον. The word is generally used in English for all kinds of congregations or convocations assembled for administrative and deliberative purposes.[1]

The present article is confined to a history of the development of the ecclesiastical council, summoned to adjust matters in dispute with the civil authority or for the settlement of doctrinal and other internal disputes. For details see under separate headings, [Nicaea], &c.

From a very early period in the history of the Church, councils or synods have been held to decide on matters of doctrine and discipline. They may be traced back to the second half of the 2nd century A.D., when sundry churches in Asia Minor held consultations about the rise of Montanism. Their precise origin is disputed. The common Roman Catholic view is that they are apostolic though not prescribed by divine law, and the apostolic precedent usually cited is the “council” of Jerusalem (Acts xv.; Galatians ii.). Waiving the consideration of vital critical questions and accepting Acts xv. at its face value, the assembly at Jerusalem would scarcely seem to have been a council in the technical sense of the word; it was in essence a meeting of the Jerusalem church at which delegates from Antioch were heard but apparently had no vote, the decision resting solely with the mother church. R. Sohm argues that synods grew from the custom of certain local churches which, when confronted with a serious problem of their own, augmented their numbers by receiving delegates from the churches of the neighbourhood. Hauck, however, holds that these augmented church meetings, which dealt with the affairs of but a single church, are to be distinguished from the synods, which took cognizance of matters of general interest. Older Protestant writers have contented themselves with saying either that synods were of apostolic origin, or that they were the inevitable outcome of the need of the leaders of churches to take counsel together, and that they were perhaps modelled on the secular provincial assemblies (concilia provincialia).

Every important alteration in the constitution of the Church has affected the composition and function of synods; but the changes were neither simultaneous nor precisely alike throughout the Roman empire. The synods of the 2nd century were extraordinary assemblies which met to deliberate upon pressing problems. They had no fixed geographical limits for membership, no ex-officio members, nor did they possess an authority which did away with the independence of the local church. In the course of the 3rd century came the decisive change, which increased the prestige of the councils: the right to vote was limited to bishops. This was the logical outgrowth of the belief that each local church ought to have but one bishop (monarchical episcopate), and that these bishops were the sole legitimate successors of the apostles (apostolic succession), and therefore official organs of the Holy Spirit. Although as late as 250 the consensus of the priests, the deacons and the people was still considered essential to the validity of a conciliar decision at Rome and in certain parts of the East, the development had already run its course in northern Africa. It was a further step in advance when synods began to meet at regular intervals. They were held annually in Cappadocia by the middle of the 3rd century, and the council of Nicaea commanded in 325 that semiannual synods be held in every province, an arrangement which was not systematically enforced, and was altered in 692, when the Trullan Council reduced the number to one a year.

With the multiplication of synods came naturally a differentiation of type. In text-books we find clear lines drawn between diocesan, provincial, national, patriarchal and oecumenical synods; but the first thousand years of church history do not justify the sharpness of the traditional distinction. The provincial synods, presided over by the metropolitan (archbishop), were usually held at the capital of the province, and attempted to legislate on all sorts of questions. The state had nothing to do with calling them, nor did their decrees require governmental sanction. Various abortive attempts were made to set up synods of patriarchal or at least of more than provincial rank. In North Africa eighteen such synods were held between 393 and 424; during part of the 5th and 6th centuries primatial councils assembled at Arles; and the patriarchs of Constantinople were accustomed to invite to their “endemic synods” ( σύνοδοι ἐνδημοῦσαι) all bishops who happened to be sojourning at the capital. Papal synods from the 5th and especially from the 9th century onward included members such as the archbishops of Ravenna, Milan, Aquileia and Grado, who resided outside the Roman archdiocese; but the territorial limits from which the membership was drawn do not appear to have been precisely defined.

Before the form of the provincial synod had become absolutely fixed, there arose in the 4th century the oecumenical council. The Greek term σύνοδος οἰκουμενική[2] (1) (used by Eusebius, Vita Constantini, iii. 6) is preferable to the Latin concilium universale or generale, which has been applied loosely to national and even to provincial synods. The oecumenical synods were not the logical outgrowth of the network of provincial synods; they were creations of the imperial power. Constantine, who had not even been baptized, laid the foundations when, in response to a petition of the Donatists, he referred their case to a committee of bishops that convened at Rome, which meeting Eusebius calls a synod. After that the emperor summoned the council of Arles to settle the matter. For both of these assemblies it was the emperor that decided who should be summoned, paid the travelling expenses of the bishops, determined where the council should be held and what topics should be discussed. He regarded them as temporary advisory bodies, to whose recommendations the imperial authority might give the force of law. In the same manner he appointed the time and place for the council of Nicaea, summoned the episcopate, paid part of the expenses out of the public purse, nominated the committee in charge of the order of business, used his influence to bring about the adoption of the creed, and punished those who refused to subscribe. To be sure, the council of Nicaea commanded great veneration, for it was the first attempt to assemble the entire episcopate; but no more than the synods of Rome and of Arles was it an organ of ecclesiastical self-government—it was rather a means whereby the Church was ruled by the secular power. The subsequent oecumenical synods of the undivided Church were patterned on that of Nicaea. Most Protestant scholars maintain that the secular authorities decided whether or not they should be convened, and issued the summons; that imperial commissioners were always present, even if they did not always preside; that on occasion emperors have confirmed or refused to confirm synodal decrees; and that the papal confirmation was neither customary nor requisite. Roman Catholic scholars to-day tend to recede from the high ground very generally taken several centuries ago, and Funk even admits that the right to convoke oecumenical synods was vested in the emperor regardless of the wishes of the pope, and that it cannot be proved that the Roman see ever actually had a share in calling the oecumenical councils of antiquity. Others, however, while acknowledging the futility of seeking historical proofs that the popes formally called, directed and confirmed these synods, yet assert that the emperor performed these functions not of his own right but in his quality as protector of the Church, that this involved his acting at the request or at least with the permission and approval of the Church, and in particular of the pope, and that a special though not a stereotyped papal confirmation of conciliar decrees was necessary to their validity.

In the Germanic states which arose on the ruins of the Western Empire we find national and diocesan synods; provincial synods were unusual. National synods were summoned by the king or with his consent to meet special needs; and they were frequently concilia mixta, at which lay dignitaries appeared. Although the Frankish monarchs were not absolute rulers, nevertheless they exercised the right of changing or rejecting synodal decrees which ran counter to the interests of the state. Clovis held the first French national synod at Orleans in 511; Reccared, the first in Spain in 589 at Toledo. Under Charlemagne they were occasionally so representative that they might almost be ranked as general synods of the West (Regensburg, 792, Frankfort, 794). Contemporaneous with the evolution of the national synod was the development of a new type of diocesan synod, which included the priests of separate and mutually independent parishes and also the leaders of the monastic clergy.

The papal synods came into the foreground with the success of the Cluniac reform of the Church, especially from the Lateran synod of 1059 on. They grew in importance until at length Calixtus II. summoned to the Lateran the synod of 1123 as “generale concilium.” The powers which the pope as bishop of the church in Rome had exercised over its synods he now extended to the oecumenical councils. They were more completely under his control than the ancient ones had been under the sway of the emperor. The Pseudo-Isidorean principle that all major synods need papal authorization was insisted on, and the decrees were formulated as papal edicts.

The absolutist principles cherished by the papal court in the 12th and 13th centuries did not pass unchallenged; but the protests of Marsilius of Padua and the less radical William of Occam remained barren until the Great Schism of 1378. As neither the pope in Rome nor his rival in Avignon would give way, recourse was had to the idea that the supreme power was vested not in the pope but in the oecumenical council. This “conciliar theory,” propounded by Conrad of Gelnhausen and championed by the great Parisian teachers Pierre d’Ailly and Gerson, proceeded from the nominalistic axiom that the whole is greater than its part. The decisive revolutionary step was taken when the cardinals independently of both popes ventured to hold the council of Pisa (1409). The council of Constance asserted the supremacy of oecumenical synods, and ordered that these be convened at regular intervals. The last of the Reform councils, that of Basel, approved these principles, and at length passed a sentence of deposition against Pope Eugenius IV. Eugenius, however, succeeded in maintaining his power, and at the council of Florence (1439) secured the condemnation of the conciliar theory; and this was reiterated still more emphatically, on the eve of the Reformation, by the fifth Lateran council (1516). Thenceforward the absolutist theories of the 13th and 14th centuries increasingly dominated the Roman Church. The popes so distrusted oecumenical councils that between 1517 and 1869 they called but one; at this (Trent, 1545-1563), however, all treatment of the question of papal versus conciliar authority was purposely avoided. Although the Declaration of the French clergy of 1682 reaffirmed the conciliar doctrines of Constance, since the French Revolution this “Gallicanism” has shown itself to be but a passing phase of constitutional theory; and in the 19th century the ascendancy of Ultramontanism became so secure that Pius IX. could confidently summon to the Vatican a synod which set its seal on the doctrine of papal infallibility. Yet it would be a misconception to suppose that the Vatican decrees mean the surrender of the ancient belief in the infallibility of oecumenical synods; their decisions may still be regarded as more solemn and more impressive than those of the pope alone; their authority is fuller, though not higher. At present it is agreed that the pope has the sole right of summoning oecumenical councils, of presiding or appointing presidents and of determining the order of business and the topics which shall come up. The papal confirmation is indispensable; it is conceived of as the stamp without which the expression of conciliar opinion lacks legal validity. In other words, the oecumenical council is now practically in the position of the senate of an absolute monarch. It is in fact an open question whether a council is to be ranked as really oecumenical until after its decrees have been approved by the pope. (See [Vatican Council], [Ultramontanism], [Infallibility].)

The earlier oecumenical councils have well been called “the pitched battles of church history.” Summoned to combat heresy and schism, in spite of degrading pressure from without and tumultuous disorder within, they ultimately brought about a modicum of doctrinal agreement. On the one side as time went on they bound scholarship hand and foot in the winding-sheet of tradition, and also fanned the flames of intolerance; yet on the other side they fostered the sense of the Church’s corporate oneness. The diocesan and provincial synods have formed a valuable system of regularly recurring assemblies for disposing of ecclesiastical business. They have been held most frequently, however, in times of stress and of reform, for instance in the 11th, 16th and 19th centuries; at other periods they have lapsed into disuse: it is significant that to-day the prelate who neglects to convene them suffers no penalty. At present the main function of both provincial and oecumenical synods seems to be to facilitate obedience to the wishes of the central government of the Church.

The right to vote (votum definitivum) has been distinguished from early times from the right to be heard (votum consultativum). The Reform Synods of the 15th century gave a decisive vote to doctors and licentiates of theology and of laws, some of them sitting as individuals, some as representatives of universities. Roman Catholic canonists now confine the right to vote at oecumenical councils to bishops, cardinal deacons, generals or vicars general of monastic orders and the praelati nullius (exempt abbots, &c.); all other persons, lay or clerical, who are admitted or invited, have merely the votum consultativum—they are chiefly procurators of absent bishops, or very learned priests. It was but a clumsy and temporary expedient, designed to offset the preponderance of Italian bishops dependent on the pope when the council of Constance subdivided itself into several groups or “nations,” each of which had a single vote. In voting, the simple majority decides; yet such is the importance attached to a unanimous verdict that an irreconcilable minority may absent itself from the final vote, as was the case at the Vatican Council.

The numbering of oecumenical synods is not fixed; the list most used in the Roman Church to-day is that of Hefele (Conciliengeschichte, 2nd ed., I. 59 f.):

(Each of these and certain other important synods are treated in separate articles.)

By including Pisa (1409) and by treating Florence as a separate synod, certain writers have brought the number of oecumenical councils up to twenty-two. These standard lists are of the type which became established through the authority of Cardinal R. F. Bellarmine (1542-1621), who criticized Constance and Basel, while defending Florence and the fifth Lateran council against the Gallicans. As late as the 16th century, however, “the majority did not regard those councils in which the Greek Church did not take part as oecumenical at all” (Harnack, History of Dogma, vi. 17). The Greek Church accepts only the first seven synods as oecumenical; and it reckons the Trullan synod of 692 (the Quinisextum) as a continuation of the sixth oecumenical synod of 680. But concerning the first seven councils it should be remarked that Constantinople I. was but a general synod of the East; its claim to oecumenicity rests upon its reception by the West about two centuries later. Similarly the only representatives of the West present at Constantinople II. were certain Africans; the pope did not accept the decrees till afterwards and they made their way in the West but gradually. Just as there have been synods which have come to be considered oecumenical though not convoked as such, so there have been synods which though summoned as oecumenical, failed of recognition: for instance Sardica (343), Ephesus (449), Constantinople (754). The last two received the imperial confirmation and from the legal point of view were no whit inferior to the others; their decrees, however, were overthrown by subsequent synods. As the Protestant leaders of the 16th century held fast the traditional christology, they regarded with veneration the dogmatic decisions of Nicaea I., Constantinople I., Ephesus and Chalcedon. These four councils had enjoyed a more or less fortuitous pre-eminence both in Roman and in canon law, and by many Catholics at the time of the Reformation were regarded, along with the three great creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian), as a sort of irreducible minimum of orthodoxy. In the 17th century the liberal Lutheran George Calixtus based his attempts at reuniting Christendom on this consensus quinquesaecularis. Many other Protestants have accepted Constantinople II. and III. as supporting the first four councils; and still others, notably many Anglican high churchmen, have felt bound by all the oecumenical synods of the undivided Church. The common Protestant attitude toward synods is, however, that they may err and have erred, and that the Scriptures and not conciliar decisions are the sole infallible standard of faith, morals and worship.

Protestant Councils.—The churches of the Reformation have all had a certain measure of synodal life. The Church of England has maintained its ancient provincial synods or convocations, though for the greater part of the 18th and the first part of the 19th centuries they transacted no business. In the Lutheran churches of Germany there was no strong agitation in favour of introducing synods until the 19th century, when a movement, designed to render the churches less dependent on the governmental consistories, won its way, until at length Prussia itself fell into line (1873 and 1876). As the powers granted to the German synods are very limited, many of their advocates have been disillusioned; but the Lutheran churches of America, being independent of the state, have developed synods both numerous and potent. In the Reformed churches outside Germany synodal life is vigorous; its forms were developed by the Huguenots in days of persecution, and passed thence to Scotland and other presbyterian countries. Even many of the churches of congregational polity have organized national councils (see [Congregationalism]); but here the principle of the independence of the local church prevents the decisions from binding those congregations which do not approve of the decrees. Moreover, in the last decade of the 19th century a growing desire for a rapprochement between the Free Churches in the United Kingdom as a whole led to the annual assembly of the Free Church Council for the consideration of all matters affecting the dissenting bodies. This body has no executive or doctrinal authority and is rather a conference than a council. In general it may be said that synods are becoming more and more powerful in Protestant lands, and that they are destined to still greater prominence because of the growing sentiment for Christian unity.

Authorities.—General Collections: Collectio regia (Paris, 1644, 37 vols.) (the first very extensive work); P. Labbe (not Labbé) and G. Cossart, Sacrosancta concilia (Paris, 1672, 17 vols.), with supplement by Étienne Baluze (Baluzius), 1683 (based on above); J. Hardouin (Harduinus), Conciliorum collectio regia maxima (Paris, 1715), 11 tomi in 12 vols, (to 1714; more exact; indexed; serious omissions); enlarged edition by N. Coletus (Venice, 1728-1732), supplemented by J. D. Mansi, Sanctorum conciliorum et decretorum nova collectio (Lucca, 1748, 6 tomi). Convenient but fallible is Mansi’s Sacrorum conciliorum et decretorum nova et amplissima collectio (Florence, 1759-1767; completed Venice, 1769-1798, 31 vols.); facsimile reproduction by Welter (Paris, 1901 ff.), adding (tom. O) Introductio seu apparatus ad sacrosancta concilia, and (tom. 17B and 18B) Baluze, Capitularia regum Francorum, and continuing to date by reproducing parts of Coletus and of Mansi’s supplement to Coletus, and furnishing (tom. 37 ff.) a new edition of the councils from 1720 on by J. B. Martin and L. Petit. A careful text of Roman Catholic synods from 1682 to 1870 is Collectio Lacensis (Acta et decreta sacrorum conciliorum recentiorum, Friburgi, 1870 ff.), 7 vols.

Special Collections: Great Britain: Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins (London, 1737, 4 vols.); Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, ed. by A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs (Oxford, 1869 ff., 4 vols.); J. W. Joyce, Handbook of the Convocations or Provincial Synods of the Church of England (London, 1887); Concilia Scotiae (1225-1559), ed. Joseph Robertson (Edinburgh, Bannatyne Club, 1866, 2 tom.).

United States: Collectio Lacensis (Roman Catholic synods); The American Church History Series (New York, 1893 ff. 13 vols.) gives information on the various Protestant synods.

France.—Concilia aevi Merovingici, rec. F. Maassen (Hanover, 1893) (Monumenta Germaniae historica, Legum sectio iii., Concilia, tom. i.); Concilia antiqua Galliae, cur. J. Sirmond (Paris, 1629, 3 vols.); supplement by P. de la Lande (Paris, 1666); L. Odespun, Concilia novissima Galliae (Paris, 1646); Conciliorum Galliae tam editorum quam ineditorum, stud. congreg. S. Mauri, tom. i. (Paris, 1789). Synods of the Reformed Churches of France are contained in J. Quick, Synodicon in Gallia reformata (London, 1692, 2 vols.); J. Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux des églises réformées de France (La Haye, 1710, 2 vols.); E. Hugues, Les Synodes du désert (Paris, 1885 f., 3 vols.). For the synods of other countries see Herzog-Hauck, 3rd ed., 19,262 f., and Wetzer and Welte, 2nd ed., 3809 f.

Less Elaborate Texts: Canones apostolorum et conciliorum saeculorum, iv.-vii., rec. H. T. Bruns (Berlin, 1839, 2 vols.) (still useful); J. Fulton, Index Canonum (3rd ed., New York, 1892) (3rd and 4th centuries); W. Bright, Notes on the Canons of the First Four General Councils (2nd ed., Oxford, 1892); Die Kanones der wichtigsten altkirchlichen Conzilien nebst den apostolischen Kanones, ed. F. Lauchert (Freiburg i. B., 1896); Enchiridion symbolorum et definitionum, quae de rebus fidei et morum a conciliis oecumenicis et summis pontificibus emanarunt, ed. H. Denzinger (7th ed., Würzburg, 1895); Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der alten Kirche, ed. by A. Hahn (3rd edition, revised and enlarged, Breslau, 1897), with variant readings; C. Mirbt, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des römischen Katholizismus (2nd much enlarged ed., Tübingen, 1901); E. F. Karl Müller, Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche (Leipzig, 1903) (for all countries). These last five are elaborately indexed.

Translations: John Johnson, A Collection of the Laws and Canons of the Church of England [601-1519], 2 parts (London, 1720; reprinted Oxford, 1850 f., in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology); P. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (New York, 1877, 3 vols.) (texts and translations parallel); Canons and Creeds of the First Four Councils, ed. by E. K. Mitchell, in Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, published by the Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. iv. 2 (1897); H. R. Percival, The Ecumenical Councils (New York, 1900) (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. xiv.; translates canons and compiles notes; bibliography in Introduction).

General Histories of Councils: C. J. von Hefele, Conciliengeschichte (Freiburg i. B., 1855); English translation of the earlier volumes to A.D. 787, from A.D. 326 on, based on the second German edition (Edinburgh, 1871 ff.); French, by Delarc (Paris, 1869-1874, 10 vols.). This first edition not entirely superseded by the second, made after the Vatican council, and continued by Knöpfler and by Hergenröther (Freiburg, 1873-1890, 9 vols.); a French translation, with continuation and critical and bibliographical notes, par un religieux bénédictin de Farnborough, tome i. 1re partie (Paris, Létouzey, 1907); Paul Viollet, Examen de l’histoire des conciles de Mgr Hefele (Paris, 1876) (Extrait de la Revue historique); W. P. du Bose, The Ecumenical Councils (New York, 1896) (popular); P. Guérin, Les Conciles généraux et particuliers (Paris, 1868, 3rd impression, 1897, 3 tom.); see also A. Harnack, History of Dogma (Boston, 1895-1900, 7 vols.); F. Loofs, Leitfaden der Dogmengeschichte (4th ed., enlarged, Halle, 1906).

Literature: Dictionnaire universel et complet des conciles, rédigé par A. C. Peltier, publié par Migne (Paris, 1847, 2 vols.) (Migne, Encyclopédie théologique, vol. 13 f.); Z. Zitelli-Natali, Epitome historico-canonica conciliorum generalium (Rome, 1881); F. X. Kraus, Realencyklopädie der christlichen Altertümer, vol. i. (Freiburg-i.-B., 1882) (art. “Concilien” by Funk); William Smith and S. Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (London, 1876-1880, 2 vols.) (erudite detail); Wetzer und Welte’s Kirchenlexikon, 2nd ed. by Hergenröther and Kaulen (Freiburg i. B., 1882-1903, 13 vols.) (art. “Concil” by Scheeben); La Grande Encyclopédie (Paris, s.d., 31 vols.) (numerous articles); P. Hinschius, Das Kirchenrecht der Katholiken und Protestanten in Deutschland, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1883) (fundamental and masterly); R. von Scherer, Handbuch des Kirchenrechtes, vol. i. (Graz, 1886) (excellent notes and references); E. H. Landon, A Manual of Councils of the Holy Catholic Church, (revised ed., London, [1893], 2 vols.) (paraphrases chief canons; needs revision); Martigny, Dictionnaire des antiquités chrétiennes (3rd ed., Paris, 1889) (for ceremonial); R. Sohm, Kirchenrecht, vol. i. (Leipzig, 1892) (brilliant); A. Kneer, Die Entstehung der konziliaren Theorie (Rome, 1893); Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, begründet von J. J. Herzog, 3rd revised ed. by A. Hauck (Leipzig, 1896 ff.) (in vol. 19 Hauck’s excellent Synoden, 1907); F. X. Funk, Kirchengeschichtliche Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen (Paderborn, 1897); A. V. G. Allen, Christian Institutions (New York, 1897), chap. xi.; C. A. Kneller, “Papst und Konzil im ersten Jahrtausend” (Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, vols. 27 and 28, Innsbruck, 1893 f.); F. Bliemetzrieder, Das Generalkonzil im grossen abendländischen Schisma (Paderborn, 1904); Wilhelm and Scannell, Manual of Catholic Theology (3rd ed., London, 1906, sect. 32); J. Forget, “Conciles,” in A. Vacant and E. Mangeot, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, tome 3, 636-676 (Paris, 1906 ff.), with elaborate bibliography; The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907 ff.).

(W. W. R.*)

[1] For the Greek Council see [Boule]; for the Hebdomadal Council see [Oxford]; see also [England]: Local Government.

[2] From ἡ οἰκουμἐνη (γῆ). the inhabited world; Latin oecumenicus or universalis. The English forms “oecumenical” and “ecumenical” are both used.

COUNCIL BLUFFS, a city and the county-seat of Pottawattamie county, Iowa, U.S.A., about 2½ m. E. of the Missouri river opposite Omaha, Nebraska, with which it is connected by a road bridge and two railway bridges. Pop. (1890) 21,474; (1900) 25,802, of whom 3723 were foreign-born; (1910) 29,292. It is pre-eminently a railway centre, being served by the Union Pacific, of which it is the principal eastern terminus, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago, Milwaukee & Saint Paul, the Chicago & Northwestern, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, the Chicago Great-Western, the Illinois Central, and the Wabash, which together have given it considerable commercial importance. It is built for the most part on level ground at the foot of high bluffs; and has several parks, the most attractive of which, commanding fine views, is Fairmount Park. With the exception of bricks and tiles, carriages and wagons, agricultural implements, and the products of its railway shops, its manufactures are relatively unimportant, the factory product in 1905 being valued at only $1,924,109. Council Bluffs is the seat of the Western Iowa Business College, and of the Iowa school for the deaf. On or near the site of Council Bluffs, in 1804, Lewis and Clark held a council with the Indians, whence the city’s name. In 1838 the Federal government made this the headquarters of the Pottawattamie Indians, removed from Missouri. They remained until 1846-1847, when the Mormons came, built many cabins, and named the place Kanesville. The Mormons remained only about five years, but on their departure for Utah their places were speedily taken by new immigrants. During 1849-1850 Council Bluffs became an important outfitting point for California gold seekers—the goods being brought by boat from Saint Louis—and in 1853 it was incorporated as a city.

COUNSEL AND COUNSELLOR, one who gives advice, more particularly in legal matters. The term “counsel” is employed in England as a synonym for a barrister-at-law, and may refer either to a single person who pleads a cause, or collectively, to the body of barristers engaged in a case. Counsellor or, more fully, counsellor-at-law, is practically an obsolete term in England, but is still in use locally in Ireland as an equivalent to barrister. In the United States, a counsellor-at-law is, specifically, an attorney admitted to practice in all the courts; but as there is no formal distinction of the legal profession into two classes, as in England, the term is more often used loosely in the same sense as “lawyer,” i.e. one who is versed in, or practises law.

COUNT (Lat. comes, gen. comitis, Fr. comte, Ital. conte, Span. conde), the English translation of foreign titles equivalent generally to the English “earl.”[1] In Anglo-French documents the word counte was at all times used as the equivalent of earl, but, unlike the feminine form “countess,” it did not find its way into the English language until the 16th century, and then only in the sense defined above. The title of earl, applied by the English to the foreign counts established in England by William the Conqueror, is dealt with elsewhere (see [Earl]). The present article deals with (1) the office of count in the Roman empire and the Frankish kingdom, (2) the development of the feudal count in France and under the Holy Roman Empire, (3) modern counts.

1. The Latin comes meant literally a companion or follower. In the early Roman empire the word was used to designate the companions of the emperor (comites principis) and so became a title of honour. The emperor Hadrian chose senators as companions on his travels and to help him in public business. They formed a permanent council, and Hadrian’s successors entrusted these comites with the administration of justice and finance, or placed them in military commands. The designation comes thus developed into a formal official title of high officers of state, some qualification being added to indicate the special duties attached to the office in each case. Thus in the 5th century, among the comites attached to the emperor’s establishment, we find, e.g., the comes sacrarum largitionum and the comes rei privatae; while others, forming the council, were styled comites consistorii. Others were sent into the provinces as governors, comites per provincias constituti; thus in the Notitia dignitatum we find a comes Aegypti, a comes Africae, a comes Belgicae, a comes Lugdunensis and others. Two of the generals of the Roman province of Britain were styled the comes Britanniae and the comes littoris Saxonici (count of the Saxon shore).

At Constantinople in the latter Roman empire the Latin word comes assumed a Greek garb as κόμης and was declined as a Greek noun (gen. κόμητος); the comes sacrarum largitionum (count of the sacred bounties) was called at Constantinople ὁ κόμης τῶν σακρῶν λαργιτιώνων and the comes rerum privatarum (count of the private estates) was called κόμης τῶν πριβάτων. The count of the sacred bounties was the lord treasurer or chancellor of the exchequer, for the public treasury and the imperial fisc had come to be identical; while the count of the private estates managed the imperial demesnes and the privy purse. In the 5th century the “sacred bounties” corresponded to the aerarium of the early Empire, while the res privatae represented the fisc. The officers connected with the palace and the emperor’s person included the count of the wardrobe (comes sacrae vestis), the count of the residence (comes domorum), and, most important of all, the comes domesticorum et sacri stabuli (graecized as κόμης τοῦ στάβλου). The count of the stable, originally the imperial master of the horse, developed into the “illustrious” commander-in-chief of the imperial army (Stilicho, e.g., bore the full title as given above), and became the prototype of the medieval constable (q.v.).

An important official of the second rank (spectabilis, “respectable” as contrasted with those of highest rank who were “illustrious”) was the count of the East, who appears to have had the control of a department in which 600 officials were engaged. His power was reduced in the 6th century, when he was deprived of his authority over the Orient diocese, and became civil governor of Syria Prima, retaining his “respectable” rank. Another important officer of the later Roman court was the comes sacri patrimonii, who was instituted by the emperor Anastasius. In this connexion it should be observed that the word patrimonium gradually changed in meaning. In the beginning of the 3rd century patrimonium meant crown property, and res privata meant personal property: at the beginning of the 6th century patrimonium meant personal property, and res privata meant crown property. It is difficult to give briefly a clear idea of the functions of the three important officials comes sacrarum largitionum, comes rei privatae and comes sacri patrimonii; but the terms have been well translated by a German author as Finanzminister des Reichsschatzes (finance minister of the treasury of the Empire), F. des Kronschatzes (of the crown treasury), and F. des kaiserlichen Privatvermögens (of the emperor’s private property).

The Frankish kings of the Merovingian dynasty retained the Roman system of administration, and under them the word comes preserved its original meaning; the comes was a companion of the king, a royal servant of high rank. Under the early Frankish kings some comites did not exercise any definite functions; they were merely attached to the king’s person and executed his orders. Others filled the highest offices, e.g. the comes palatii and comes stabuli (see [Constable]). The kingdom was divided for administrative purposes into small areas called pagi (pays, Ger. Gau), corresponding generally to the Roman civitates (see [City]).[2] At the head of the pagus was the comes, corresponding to the German Graf (Gaugraf, cf. Anglo-Saxon scire-gerefa,[3] sheriff). The comes was appointed by the king and removable at his pleasure, and was chosen originally from all classes, sometimes from enfranchised slaves. His essential functions were judicial and executive, and in documents he is often described as the king’s agent (agens publicus) or royal judge (judex publicus or fiscalis). As the delegate of the executive power he had the right to military command in the king’s name, and to take all the measures necessary for the preservation of the peace, i.e. to exercise the royal “ban” (bannus regis). He was at once public prosecutor and judge, was responsible for the execution of the sentences of the courts, and as the king’s representative exercised the royal right of protection (mundium regis) over churches, widows, orphans and the like. He enjoyed a triple wergeld, but had no definite salary, being remunerated by the receipt of certain revenues, a system which contained the germs of discord, on account of the confusion of his public and private estates. He also retained a third of the fines which he imposed in his judicial capacity.

Under the early Carolings the title count did not indicate noble birth. A comes was generally raised from childhood in the king’s palace, and rose to be a count through successive stages. The count’s office was not yet a dignity, nor hereditary; he was not independent nor appointed for life, but exercised the royal power by delegation, as under the Merovingians. While, however, he was theoretically paid by the king, he seems to have been himself one of the sources of the royal revenue. The counties were, it appears, farmed out; but in the 7th century the royal choice became restricted to the larger landed proprietors, who gradually emancipated themselves from royal control, and in the 8th century the term comitatus begins to denote a geographical area, though there was little difference in its extent under the Merovingian kings and the early Carolings. The count was about to pass into the feudatory stage. Throughout the middle ages, however, the original official and personal connotation of the title was never wholly lost; or perhaps it would be truer to say, with Selden, that it was early revived with the study of the Roman civil law in the 12th century. The unique dignity of count of the Lateran palace,[4] bestowed in 1328 by the emperor Louis IV. the Bavarian on Castrucio de’ Antelminelli, duke of Lucca, and his heirs male, was official as well as honorary, being charged with the attendance and service to be performed at the palace at the emperor’s coronation at Rome (Du Cange, s.v. Comites Palatii Lateranensis; Selden, op. cit. p. 321). This instance, indeed, remained isolated; but the personal title of “count palatine,” though honorary rather than official, was conferred on officials—especially by the popes on those of the Curia—had no territorial significance, and was to the last reminiscent of those early comites palatii whose relations to the sovereign had been purely personal and official (see [Palatine]). A relic of the old official meaning of “count” still survives in Transylvania, where the head of the political administration of the Saxon districts is styled count (comes, Graf) of the Saxon Nation.

2. Feudal Counts.—The process by which the official counts were transformed into feudal vassals almost independent is described in the article [Feudalism]. In the confusion of the period of transition, when the title to possession was usually the power to hold, designations which had once possessed a definite meaning were preserved with no defined association. In France, by the 10th century, the process of decomposition of the old organization had gone far, and in the 11th century titles of nobility were still very loosely applied. That of “count” was, as Luchaire points out, “equivocal” even as late as the 12th century; any castellan of moderate rank could style himself comte who in the next century would have been called seigneur (dominus). Even when, in the 13th century, the ranks of the feudal hierarchy in France came to be more definitely fixed, the style of “count” might imply much, or comparatively little. In the oldest register of Philip Augustus counts are reckoned with dukes in the first of the five orders into which the nobles are divided, but the list includes, besides such almost sovereign rulers as the counts of Flanders and Champagne, immediate vassals of much less importance—such as the counts of Soissons and Dammartin—and even one mediate vassal, the count of Bar-sur-Seine. The title was still in fact “equivocal,” and so it remained throughout French history. In the official lists it was early placed second to that of duke (Luchaire, Manuel, p. 181, note 1), but in practice at least the great comtes-pairs (e.g. of Champagne) were the equals of any duke and the superiors of many. Thus, too, in modern times royal princes have been given the title of count (Paris, Flanders, Caserta), the heir of Charles X. actually changing his style, without sense of loss, from that of duc de Bordeaux to that of comte de Chambord. From the 16th century onwards the equivocal nature of the title in France was increased by the royal practice of selling it, either to viscounts or barons in respect of their fiefs, or to rich roturiers.

In Germany the change from the official to the territorial and hereditary counts followed at the outset much the same course as in France, though the later development of the title and its meaning was different. In the 10th century the counts were permitted by the kings to divide their benefices and rights among their sons, the rule being established that countships (Grafschaften) were hereditary, that they might be held by boys, that they were heritable by females and might even be administered by females. The Grafschaft became thus merely a bundle of rights inherent in the soil; and, the count’s office having become his property, the old counties or Gauen rapidly disappeared as administrative units, being either amalgamated or subdivided. By the second half of the 12th century the official character of the count had quite disappeared; he had become a territorial noble, and the foundation had been laid of territorial sovereignty (Landeshoheit). The first step towards this was the concession to the counts of the military prerogatives of dukes, a right enjoyed from the first by the counts of the marches (see [Margrave]), then given to counts palatine (see [Palatine]) and, finally, to other counts, who assumed by reason of it the style of landgrave (Landgraf, i.e. count of a province). At first all counts were reckoned as princes of the Empire (Reichsfürsten); but since the end of the 12th century this rank was restricted to those who were immediate tenants of the crown,[5] the other counts of the Empire (Reichsgrafen) being placed among the free lords (barones, liberi domini). Counts of princely rank (gefürstete Grafen) voted among the princes in the imperial diet; the others (Reichsgrafen) were grouped in the Grafenbänke—originally two, to which two more were added in the 17th century—each of which had one vote. In 1806, on the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine, the sovereign counts were all mediatized (see [Mediatization]). Even before the end of the Empire (1806) the right of bestowing the title of count was freely exercised by the various German territorial sovereigns.

3. Modern Counts.—Any political significance which the feudal title of count retained in the 18th century vanished with the changes produced by the Revolution. It is now simply a title of honour and one, moreover, the social value of which differs enormously, not only in the different European countries, but within the limits of the same country. In Germany, for instance, there are several categories of counts: (1) the mediatized princely counts (gefürstete Grafen), who are reckoned the equals in blood of the European sovereign houses, an equality symbolized by the “closed crown” surmounting their armorial bearings. The heads of these countly families of the “high nobility” are entitled (by a decree of the federal diet, 1829) to the style of Erlaucht (illustrious, most honourable); (2) Counts of the Empire[6] (Reichsgrafen), descendants of those counts who, before the end of the Holy Roman Empire (1806), were Reichsständisch i.e. sat in one of the Grafenbänke in the imperial diet, and entitled to a ducal coronet; (3) Counts (a) descended from the lower nobility of the old Empire, titular since the 15th century, (b) created since; their coronet is nine-pointed (cf. the nine points and strawberry leaves of the English earl). The difficulty of determining in any case the exact significance of the title of a German count, illustrated by the above, is increased by the fact that the title is generally heritable by all male descendants, the only exception being in Prussia, where, since 1840, the rule of primogeniture has prevailed and the bestowal of the title is dependent on a rent-roll of £3000 a year. The result is that the title is very widespread and in itself little significant. A German or Austrian count may be a wealthy noble of princely rank, a member of the Prussian or Austrian Upper House, or he may be the penniless cadet of a family of no great rank or antiquity. Nevertheless the title, which has long been very sparingly bestowed, always implies a good social position. The style Altgraf (old count), occasionally found, is of some antiquity, and means that the title of count has been borne by the family from time immemorial.

In medieval France the significance of the title of count varied with the power of those who bore it; in modern France it varies with its historical associations. It is not so common as in Germany or Italy; because it does not by custom pass to all male descendants. The title was, however, cheapened by its revival under Napoleon. By the decree of the 1st of March 1808, reviving titles of nobility, that of count was assigned ex officio to ministers, senators and life councillors of state, to the president of the Corps Législatif and to archbishops. The title was made heritable in order of primogeniture, and in the case of archbishops through their nephews. These Napoleonic countships, increased under subsequent reigns, have produced a plentiful crop of titles of little social significance, and have tended to lower the status of the counts deriving from the ancien régime. The title of marquis, which Napoleon did not revive, has risen proportionately in the estimation of the Faubourg St Germain. As for that of count, it is safe to say that in France its social value is solely dependent on its historical associations.

Of all European countries Italy has been most prolific of counts. Every petty Italian prince, from the pope downwards, created them for love or money; and, in the absence of any regulating authority, the title was also widely and loosely assumed, while often the feudal title passed with the sale of the estate to which it was attached. Casanova remarked that in some Italian cities all the nobles were baroni, in others all were conti. An Italian conte may or may not be a gentleman; he has long ceased, qua count, to have any social prestige, and his rank is not recognized by the Italian government. As in France, however, there are some Italian conti whose titles are respectable, and even illustrious, from their historic associations. The prestige belongs, however, not to the title but to the name. As for the papal countships, which are still freely bestowed on those of all nations whom the Holy See wishes to reward, their prestige naturally varies with the religious complexion of the country in which the titles are borne. They are esteemed by the faithful, but have small significance for those outside. In Spain, on the other hand, the title of conde, the earlier history of which follows much the same development as in France, is still of much social value, mainly owing to the fact that the rule of primogeniture exists, and that, a large fee being payable to the state on succession to a title, it is necessarily associated with some degree of wealth. The Spanish counts of old creation, some of whom are grandees and members of the Upper House, naturally take the highest rank; but the title, still bestowed for eminent public services or other reasons, is of value. The title, like others in Spain, can pass through an heiress to her husband. In Russia the title of count (graf, fem. grafinya), a foreign importation, has little social prestige attached to it, being given to officials of a certain rank. In the British empire the only recognized counts are those of Malta, who are given precedence with baronets of the United Kingdom.

See Selden, Titles of Honor (London, 1672); Du Cange, Glossarium Med. Lat. (ed. Niort, 1883) s.v. “Comes”; La Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. “Comte”; A. Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises (Paris, 1892); P. Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l’origine de la noblesse en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1902); Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, Band ii. (Leipzig, 1892).

[1] The exact significance of a title is difficult to reproduce in a foreign language. Actually, only some foreign counts could be said to be equivalent to English earls; but “earl” is always translated by foreigners by words (comte, Graf) which in English are represented by “count,” itself never used as the synonym of “earl.” Conversely old English writers had no hesitation in translating as “earl” foreign titles which we now render “count.”

[2] The changing language of this epoch speaks of civitates, subsequently of pagi, and later of comitatus (counties).

[3] The A.S. gerefa, however, meaning “illustrious,” “chief,” has apparently, according to philologists, no connexion with the German Graf, which originally meant “servant” (cf. “knight,” “valet,” &c.). It is the more curious that the gerefa should end as a servant (“reeve”), the Graf as a noble (count).

[4] “Count of the Lateran Palace” (Comes Sacri Lateranensis Palatii) was later the title usually bestowed by the popes in creating counts palatine. The emperors, too, continued to make counts palatine under this title long after the Lateran had ceased to be an imperial palace.

[5] Of these there were four who, as counts of the Empire par excellence, were sometimes styled “simple counts” (Schlechtgrafen), i.e. the counts of Cleves, Schwarzburg, Cilli and Savoy; they were entitled to the ducal coronet. Three of these had become dukes by the 17th century, but the count (now prince) of Schwarzburg still styled himself “Of the four counts of the Holy Roman Empire, count of Schwarzburg” (see Selden, ed. 1672, p. 312).

[6] This title is borne by certain English families, e.g. by Lord Arundell of Wardour. In other cases it has been assumed without due warrant. See J. H. Round, “English Counts of the Empire,” in The Ancestor, vii. 15 (Westminster, October 1903).

COUNTER. (1) (Through the O. Fr. conteoir, modern comptoir, from Lat. computare, to reckon), a round piece of metal, wood or other material used anciently in making calculations, and now for reckoning points in games of cards, &c., or as tokens representing actual coins or sums of money in gambling games such as roulette. The word is thus used, figuratively, of something of no real value, a sham. In the original sense of “a means of counting money, or keeping accounts,” “counter” is used of the table or flat-topped barrier in a bank, merchant’s office or shop, on which money is counted and goods handed to a customer. The term was also applied, usually in the form “compter,” to the debtors’ prisons attached to the mayor’s or sheriff’s courts in London and some other boroughs in England. The “compters” of the sheriff’s courts of the city of London were, at various times, in the Poultry, Bread St., Wood St. and Giltspur St.; the Giltspur St. compter was the last to be closed, in 1854. (2) (From Lat. contra, opposite, against), a circular parry in fencing, and in boxing, a blow given as a parry to a lead of an opponent. The word is also used of the stiff piece of leather at the back of a boot or shoe, of the rounded angle at the stern of a ship, and, in a horse, of the part lying between the shoulder and the under part of the neck. In composition, counter is used to express contrary action, as in “countermand,” “counterfeit,” &c.

COUNTERFEITING (from Lat. contra-facere, to make in opposition or contrast), making an imitation without authority and for the purpose of defrauding. The word is more particularly used in connexion with the making of imitations of money, whether paper or coin. (See [Coinage Offences]; [Forgery].)

COUNTERFORT (Fr. contrefort), in architecture, a buttress or pier built up against the wall of a building or terrace to strengthen it, or to resist the thrust of an arch or other constructional feature inside.

COUNTERPOINT (Lat. contrapunctus, “point counter point,” “note against note”), in music, the art happily defined by Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley as that “of combining” melodies: this should imply that good counterpoint is the production of beautiful harmony by a combination of well-characterized melodies. The individual audibility of the melodies is a matter of which current criticism enormously overrates the importance. What is always important is the peculiar life breathed into harmony by contrapuntal organization. Both historically and aesthetically “counterpoint” and “harmony” are inextricably blended; for nearly every harmonic fact is in its origin a phenomenon of counterpoint. And if in later musical developments it becomes possible to treat chords as, so to speak, harmonic lumps with a meaning independent of counterpoint, this does not mean that they have really changed their nature; but it shows a difference between modern and earlier music precisely similar to that between modern English, in which metaphorical and abstract expressions are so constantly used that they have become a mere shorthand for the literal and concrete expression, and classical Greek, where metaphors and abstractions can appear only as elaborate similes or explicit philosophical ideas. The laws of counterpoint are, then, laws of harmony with the addition of such laws of melody as are not already produced by the interaction of harmonic and melodic principles. In so far as the laws of counterpoint are derived from purely harmonic principles, that is to say, derived from the properties of concord and discord, their origin and development are discussed in the article [Harmony]. In so far as they depend entirely on melody they are too minute and changeable to admit of general discussion; and in so far as they show the interaction of melodic and harmonic principles it is more convenient to discuss them under the head of harmony, because they appear in such momentary phenomena as are more easily regarded as successions of chords than as principles of design. All that remains, then, for the present article is the explanation of certain technical terms.

1. Canto Fermo (i.e. plain chant) is a melody in long notes given to one voice while others accompany it with quicker counterpoints (the term “counterpoint” in this connexion meaning accompanying melodies). In the simplest cases the Canto Fermo has notes of equal length and is unbroken in flow. When it is broken up and its rhythm diversified, the gradations between counterpoint on a Canto Fermo and ordinary forms of polyphony, or indeed any kind of melody with an elaborate accompaniment, are infinite and insensible.

2. Double Counterpoint is a combination of melodies so designed that either can be taken above or below the other. When this change of position is effected by merely altering the octave of either or both melodies (with or without transposition of the whole combination to another key), the artistic value of the device is simply that of the raising of the lower melody to the surface. The harmonic scheme remains the same, except in so far as some of the chords are not in their fundamental position, while others, not originally fundamental, have become so. But double counterpoint may be in other intervals than the octave; that is to say, while one of the parts remains stationary, the other may be transposed above or below it by some interval other than an octave, thus producing an entirely different set of harmonies.

Double Counterpoint in the 12th has thus been made a powerful means of expression and variety. The artistic value of this device depends not only on the beauty and novelty of the second scheme of harmony obtained, but also on the change of melodic expression produced by transferring one of the melodies to another position in the scale. Two of the most striking illustrations of this effect are to be found in the last chorus of Brahms’s Triumphlied and in the fourth of his variations on a theme by Haydn.

Double Counterpoint in the 10th has, in addition to this, the property that the inverted melody can be given in the new and in the original positions simultaneously.

Double counterpoint in other intervals than the octave, 10th and 12th, is rare, but the general principle and motives for it remain the same under all conditions. The two subjects of the Confiteor in Bach’s B minor Mass are in double counterpoint in the octave, 11th and 13th. And Beethoven’s Mass in D is full of pieces of double counterpoint in the inversions of which a few notes are displaced so as to produce momentary double counterpoint in unusual intervals, obviously with the intention of varying the harmony. Technical treatises are silent as to this purpose, and leave the student in the belief that the classical composers used these devices, if at all, in a manner as meaningless as the examples in the treatises.

3. Triple, Quadruple and Multiple Counterpoint.—When more than two melodies are designed so as to combine in interchangeable positions, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid chords and progressions of which some inversions are incorrect. In triple counterpoint this difficulty is not so great; although a complete triad is dangerous, as it is apt to invert as a “6/46⁄4” which requires careful handling. On the other hand, in triple counterpoint the necessity for strictness is at its greatest, because there are only six possible inversions, and in a long polyphonic work most of these will be required. Moreover, the artistic value of the device is at its highest in three-part polyphonic harmony, which, whether invertible or not, is always a fine test of artistic economy, while the inversions are as evident to the ear, especially where the top part is concerned, as those in double counterpoint. Triple counterpoint (and a fortiori multiple counterpoint) is normally possible only at the octave; for it will be found that if three parts are designed to invert in some other interval this will involve two of them inverting in a third interval which will give rise to incalculable difficulty. This makes the fourth of Brahms’s variations on a theme of Haydn almost miraculous. The plaintive expression of the whole variation is largely due to the fact that the flowing semiquaver counterpoint below the main theme is on each repeat inverted in the 12th, with the result that its chief emphasis falls upon the most plaintive parts of the scale. But in the first eight bars of the second part of the variation a third contrapuntal voice appears, and this too is afterwards inverted in the 12th, with perfectly natural and smooth effect. But this involves the inversion of two of the counterpoints with each other in the 9th, a kind of double counterpoint which is almost impossible. The case is unique, but it admirably illustrates the difference between artistic and merely academic mastery of technical resource.

Quadruple Counterpoint is not rare with Bach. It would be more difficult than triple, but for the fact that of its twenty-four possible inversions not more than four or five need be correct. Quintuple counterpoint is admirably illustrated in the finale of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, in which everything in the successive statement and gradual development of the five themes conspires to give the utmost effect to their combination in the coda. Of course Mozart has not room for more than five of the 120 possible combinations, and from these he selects such as bring fresh themes into the outside parts, which are the most clearly audible. Sextuple Counterpoint may be found in Bach’s great double chorus, Nun ist das Heil, and in the finale of his concerto for three claviers in C, and probably in other places.

4. Added Thirds and Sixths.—An easy and effective imitation of triple and quadruple counterpoint, embodying much of the artistic value of inversion, is found in the numerous combinations of themes in thirds and sixths which arise from an extension of the principle which we mentioned in connexion with double counterpoint in the 10th, namely, the possibility of performing it in its original and inverted positions simultaneously. The Pleni sunt coeli of Bach’s B minor Mass is written in this kind of transformation of double into quadruple counterpoint; and the artistic value of the device is perhaps never so magnificently realized as in the place, at bar 84, where the trumpet doubles the bass three octaves and a third above while the alto and second tenor have the counter subjects in close thirds in the middle.

Almost all other contrapuntal devices are derived from the principle of the canon and are discussed in the article [Contrapuntal Forms].

As a training in musical grammar and style, the rhythms of 16th-century polyphony were early codified into “the five species of counterpoint” (with various other species now forgotten) and practised by students of composition. The classical treatise on which Haydn and Beethoven were trained was Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725). This was superseded in the 19th century by Cherubini’s, the first of a long series of attempts to bring up to date as a dead language what should be studied in its original and living form.

(D. F. T.)

COUNTERSCARP ( = “opposite scarp,” Fr. contrescarpe), a term used in fortification for the outer slope of a ditch; see [Fortification] and [Siegecraft].

COUNTERSIGN, a military term for a sign, word or signal previously arranged and required to be given by persons approaching a sentry, guard or other post. In some armies the “countersign” is strictly the reply of the sentry to the pass-word given by the person approaching.

COUNTRY (from the Mid. Eng. contre or contrie, and O. Fr. cuntrée; Late Lat. contrata, showing the derivation from contra, opposite, over against, thus the tract of land which fronts the sight, cf. Ger. Gegend, neighbourhood), an extent of land without definite limits, or such a region with some peculiar character, as the “black country,” the “fen country” and the like. The extension from such descriptive limitation to the limitation of occupation by particular owners or races is easy; this gives the common use of the word for the land inhabited by a particular nation or race. Another meaning is that part of the land not occupied by towns, “rural” as opposed to “urban” districts; this appears too in “country-house” and “country town”; so too “countryman” is used both for a rustic and for the native of a particular land. The word appears in many phrases, in the sense of the whole population of a country, and especially of the general body of electors, as in the expression “go to the country,” for the dissolution of parliament preparatory to a general election.

COUNTY (through Norm. Fr. counté, cf. O. Fr. cunté, conté, Mod. Fr. comté, from Lat. comitatus, cf. Ital. comitato, Prov. comtat; see [Count]), in its most usual sense the name given to certain important administrative divisions in the United Kingdom, the British dominions beyond the seas, and the United States of America. The word was first introduced after the Norman Conquest as the equivalent of the old English “shire,” which has survived as its synonym, though occasionally also applied to divisions smaller than counties, e.g. Norhamshire, Hexhamshire and Hallamshire. The word “county” is also sometimes used, alternatively with “countship,” to translate foreign words, e.g. the French comté and the German Grafschaft, which connote the territorial jurisdiction of a count (q.v.). The present article is confined to a sketch of the origin and development of English counties, which have served in a greater or less degree as the model for the county organizations in the various countries of the English-speaking world which are described under their proper headings.

About one-third of the English counties represent ancient kingdoms, sub-kingdoms or tribal divisions, such as Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Devon; but most of the remaining counties take their names from some important town within their respective boundaries. The counties to the south of the Thames (except Cornwall) already existed in the time of Alfred, but those of the midlands seem to have been created during the reign of Edward the Elder (901-925) and to have been artificially bounded areas lying around some stronghold which became a centre of civil and military administration. There is reason, however, for thinking that the counties of Bedford, Cambridge, Huntingdon and Northampton are of Danish origin. Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland were not recognized as English counties until some time after the Norman Conquest, the last two definitely appearing as fiscal areas in 1177. The origin of Rutland as a county is obscure, but it had its own sheriff in 1154.

In the period preceding the Norman Conquest two officers appear at the head of the county organization. These are the ealdorman or earl, and the scirgerefa or sheriff. The shires of Wessex appear each to have had an ealdorman, whose duties were to command its military forces, to preside over the county assembly (scirgemot), to carry out the laws and to execute justice. The name ealdorman gave way to that of earl, probably under Danish influence, in the first half of the 11th century, and it is probable that the office of sheriff came into existence in the reign of Canute (1017-1035), when the great earldoms were formed and it was no longer possible for the earl to perform his various administrative duties in person in a group of counties. After the Norman Conquest the earl was occasionally appointed sheriff of his county, but in general his only official connexion with it was to receive the third penny of its pleas, and the earldom ceased to be an office and became merely a title. In the 12th century the office of coroner was created, two or more of them being chosen in the county court as vacancies occurred. In the same century verderers were first chosen in the same manner for the purpose of holding inquisitions on vert and venison in those counties which contained royal forests. It was the business of the sheriff (vicecomes) as the king’s representative to serve and return all writs, to levy distresses on the king’s behalf, to execute all royal precepts and to collect the king’s revenue. In this work he was assisted by a large staff of clerks and bailiffs who were directly responsible to him and not to the king. The sheriff also commanded the armed forces of the crown within his county, and either in person or by deputy presided over the county court which was now held monthly in most counties. In 1300 it was enacted that the sheriffs might be chosen by the county, except in Worcestershire, Cornwall, Rutland, Westmorland and Lancashire, where there were then sheriffs in fee, that is, sheriffs who held their offices hereditarily by royal grant. The elective arrangement was of no long duration, and it was finally decided in 1340 that the sheriffs should be appointed by the chancellor, the treasurer and the chief baron of the exchequer, but should hold office for one year only. The county was from an early period regarded as a community, and approached the king as a corporate body, while in later times petitions were presented through the knights of the shire. It was also an organic whole for the purpose of the conservation of the peace. The assessment of taxation by commissioners appointed by the county court developed in the 13th century into the representation of the county by two knights of the shire elected by the county court to serve in parliament, and this representation continued unaltered save for a short period during the Protectorate, until 1832, when many of the counties received a much larger representation, which was still further increased by later acts.

The royal control over the county was strengthened from the 14th century onward by the appointment of justices of the peace. This system was further developed under the Tudors, while in the middle of the 16th century the military functions of the sheriff were handed over to a new officer, the lord-lieutenant, who is now more prominently associated with the headship of the county than is the sheriff. The lord-lieutenant now usually holds the older office of custos rotulorum, or keeper of the records of the county. The justices of the peace are appointed upon his nomination, and until lately he appointed the clerk of the peace. The latter appointment is now made by the joint committee of quarter sessions and county council.

The Tudor system of local government received little alteration until the establishment of county councils by the Local Government Act of 1888 handed over to an elected body many of the functions previously exercised by the nominated justices of the peace. For the purposes of this act the ridings of Yorkshire, the divisions of Lincolnshire, east and west Sussex, east and west Suffolk, the soke of Peterborough and the Isle of Ely are regarded as counties, so that there are now sixty administrative counties of England and Wales. Between 1373 and 1692 the crown granted to certain cities and boroughs the privilege of being counties of themselves. There were in 1835 eighteen of these counties corporate, Bristol, Chester, Coventry, Gloucester, Lincoln, Norwich, Nottingham, York and Carmarthen, each of which had two sheriffs, and Canterbury, Exeter, Hull, Lichfield, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Poole, Southampton, Worcester and Haverfordwest, each of which had one sheriff. All these boroughs, with the exception of Carmarthen, Lichfield, Poole and Haverfordwest, which remain counties of themselves, and forty-seven others, were created county boroughs by the Local Government Act 1888, and are entirely dissociated from the control of a county council. The City of London is also a county of itself, whose two sheriffs are also sheriffs of Middlesex, while for the purposes of the act of 1888 the house-covered district which extends for many miles round the City constitutes a county.

The county has always been the unit for the organization of the militia, and from about 1782 certain regiments of the regular army were associated with particular counties by territorial titles. The army scheme of 1907-1908 provided for the formation of county associations under the presidency of the lords-lieutenant for the organization of the new territorial army.

See Statutes of the Realm; W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (1874-1878); F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897); Sir F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, History of English Law (1895); H. M. Chadwick, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions (1905), and The Victoria History of the Counties of England.

(G. J. T.)

COUNTY COURT, in England, a local court of civil jurisdiction. The county court, it has been said, is at once the most ancient and the most modern of English civil tribunals. The Saxon Curia Comitatus, maintained after the Norman Conquest, was a local court and a small debts court. It was instituted by Alfred the Great, its jurisdiction embracing civil, and, until the reign of William I., ecclesiastical matters. The officers of the court consisted of the earldorman, the bishop and the sheriff. The court was held once in every four weeks, being presided over by the earl, or, in his absence, the sheriff. The suitors of the court, i.e. the freeholders, were the judges, the sheriff being simply a presiding officer, pronouncing and afterwards executing the judgment of the court. The court was not one of record. The appointment of judges of assize in the reign of Henry II., as well as the expensive and dilatory procedure of the court, brought about its gradual disuse, and other local courts, termed courts of request or of conscience, were established. These, in turn, proved unsatisfactory, owing both to the limited nature of their jurisdiction (restricted to causes of debt not exceeding 40s. in value, and to the fact that they were confined to particular places). Accordingly, with the view of making justice cheaper and more accessible the County Courts Act 1846 was passed. This act had the modest title of “An Act for the Recovery of Small Debts and Demands in England.” The original limit of the jurisdiction of the new courts was £20, extended in 1850 to £50 in actions of debt, and in 1903 (by an act which came into force in 1905) to £100. Thirteen amending acts were passed, by which new jurisdiction was from time to time conferred on the county courts, and in the year 1888 an act was passed repealing the previous acts and consolidating their provisions, with some amendment. This is now the code or charter of the county courts.

The grain of mustard-seed sown in 1846 has grown into a goodly tree, with branches extending over the whole of England and Wales; and they embrace within their ambit a more multifarious jurisdiction than is possessed by any other courts in the kingdom. England and Wales were mapped out into 59 circuits (not including the city of London), with power for the crown, by order in council, to abolish any circuit and rearrange the areas comprised in the circuits (sec. 4). There is one judge to each circuit, but the lord chancellor is empowered to appoint two judges in a circuit, provided that the total number of judges does not exceed 60. The salary of a county court judge was originally fixed at £1200, but he now receives £1500. He must at the time of his appointment be a barrister-at-law of at least seven years’ standing, and not more than sixty years of age; after appointment he cannot sit as a member of parliament or practise at the bar.

Every circuit (except in Birmingham, Clerkenwell, and Westminster) is divided into districts, in each of which there is a court, with a registrar and bailiffs. The judges are directed to attend and hold a court in each district at least once in every month, unless the lord chancellor shall otherwise direct (secs. 10, 11). But in practice the judge sits several times a month in the large centres of population, and less frequently than once a month in the court town of sparsely inhabited districts. By sec. 185 of the act of 1888 the judges and officers of the city of London court have the like jurisdiction, powers, and authority as those of a county court, and the county court rules apply to that court.

The ordinary jurisdiction of the county courts may be thus tabulated:—

There is no discoverable principle upon which these limits of the jurisdiction of the county courts have been determined. But the above table is not by any means an exhaustive statement of the jurisdiction of the county courts. For many years it has been the practice of parliament to throw on the county court judges the duty of acting as judges or arbitrators for the purpose of new legislation relating to social subjects. It is impossible to classify the many statutes which have been passed since 1846 and which confer some jurisdiction, apart from that under the County Courts Act, on county courts or their judges. Some of these acts impose exceptional duties on the judges of the county courts, others confer unlimited jurisdiction concurrently with the High Court or some other court, others, again, confer limited or, sometimes, exclusive jurisdiction. A list of all the acts will be found in the Annual County Courts Practice. A county court judge may determine all matters of fact as well as law, but a jury may be summoned at the option of either plaintiff or defendant when the amount in dispute exceeds £5, and in actions under £5 the judge may in his discretion, on application of either of the parties, order that the action be tried by jury. The number of jurymen impanelled and sworn at the trial was, by the County Courts Act 1903, increased from five to eight.

There is an appeal from the county courts on matters of law to a divisional court of the High Court, i.e. to the admiralty division in admiralty cases and to the king’s bench division in other cases (sec. 120 of act of 1888). The determination of the divisional court is final, unless leave be given by that court or the court of appeal (Judicature Acts 1894). (See further [Appeal].) In proceedings under the Workmen’s Compensation Act the appeal from a county court judge is to the court of appeal, with a subsequent appeal to the House of Lords. In 1908 a Committee was appointed by the lord chancellor “to inquire into certain matters of county court procedure.” The committee presented a report in 1909 (H.C. 71), recommending the extension of existing county court jurisdiction, but a bill introduced to give effect to the recommendations was not proceeded with.

See Annual County Courts Practice, also “Fifty Years of the English County Courts,” by County Court Judge Sir T. W. Snagge, in Nineteenth Century, October 1897.

COUPÉ (French for “cut off”), a small closed carriage of the brougham type, with four wheels and seats for two persons; the term is also used of the front compartment on a diligence or mail-coach on the continent of Europe, and of a compartment in a railway carriage with seats on one side only.

COUPLET, a pair of lines of verse, which are welded together by an identity of rhyme. The New English Dict. derives the use of the word from the French couplet, signifying two pieces of iron riveted or hinged together. In rhymed verse two lines which complete a meaning in themselves are particularly known as a couplet. Thus, in Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard:—

In much of old English dramatic literature, when the mass of the composition is in blank verse or even in prose, particular emphasis is given by closing the scene in a couplet. Thus, in the last act of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Thierry and Theodoret the action culminates in an unexpected rhyme:—

In French literature, the term couplet is not confined to a pair of lines, but is commonly used for a stanza. A “square” couplet, in French, for instance, is a strophe of eight lines, each composed of eight syllables. In this sense it is employed to distinguish the more emphatic parts of a species of verse which is essentially gay, graceful and frivolous, such as the songs in a vaudeville or a comic opera. In the 18th century, Le Sage, Piron and even Voltaire did not hesitate to engage their talents on the production of couplets, which were often witty, if they had no other merit, and were well fitted to catch the popular ear. This signification of the word couplet is not unknown in England, but it is not customary; it is probably used in a stricter and a more technical sense to describe a pair of rhymed lines, whether serious or merry. The normal type, as it may almost be called, of English versification is the metre of ten-syllabled rhymed lines designated as heroic couplet. This form of iambic verse, with five beats to each line, is believed to have been invented by Chaucer, who employs it first in the Prologue The Legend of Good Women the composition of which is attributed to the year 1385. That poem opens with the couplet:—

This is an absolutely correct example of the heroic couplet, which ultimately reached such majesty in the hands of Dryden and such brilliancy in those of Pope. It has been considered proper for didactic, descriptive and satirical poetry, although in the course of the 19th century blank verse largely took its place. Epigram often selects the couplet as the vehicle of its sharpened arrows, as in Sir John Harington’s

(E. G.)

COUPON (from Fr. couper, to cut), a certificate entitling its owner to some payment, share or other benefit; more specifically, one of a series of interest certificates or dividend warrants attached to a bond running for a number of years. The word coupon (a piece cut off) possesses an etymological meaning so comprehensive that, while on the Stock Exchange it is only used to denote such an interest certificate or a certificate of stock of a joint-stock company, it may be as suitably, and elsewhere is perhaps more frequently, applied to tickets sold by tourist agencies and others. The coupons by means of which the interest on a bond or debenture is collected are generally printed at the side or foot of that document, to be cut off and presented for payment at the bank or agency named on them as they become due. The last portion, called a “talon,” is a form of certificate, and entitles the holder, when all the coupons have been presented, to obtain a fresh coupon sheet. They pass by delivery, and are as a rule exempt from stamp duty. Coupons for the payment of dividends are also attached to the share warrants to bearer issued by some joint-stock companies. The coupons on the bonds of most of the principal foreign loans are payable in London in sterling as well as abroad.

COURANTE (a French word derived from courir, to run), a dance in 3-2 time march in vogue in France in the 17th century (see [Dance]). It is also a musical term for a movement or independent piece based on the dance. In a suite it followed the Allemande (q.v.), with which it is contrasted in rhythm.

COURAYER, PIERRE FRANÇOIS LE (1681-1776), French Roman Catholic theological writer, was born at Rouen on the 17th of November 1681. While canon regular and librarian of the abbey of St Geneviève at Paris, he conducted a correspondence with Archbishop Wake on the subject of episcopal succession in England, which supplied him with material for his work, Dissertation sur la validité des ordinations des Anglais et sur la succession des évêques de l’Église anglicane, avec les preuves justificatives des faits avancés (Brussels, 1723; Eng. trans. by D. Williams, London, 1725; reprinted Oxford, 1844, with memoir of the author), an attempt to prove that there has been no break in the line of ordination from the apostles to the English clergy. His opinions exposed him to a prosecution, and with the help of Bishop Atterbury, then in exile in Paris, he took refuge in England, where he was presented by the university of Oxford with a doctor’s degree. In 1736 he published a French translation of Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, and dedicated it to Queen Caroline, from whom he received a pension of £200 a year. Besides this he translated Sleidan’s History of the Reformation, and wrote several theological works. He died in London on the 17th of October 1776, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. In his will, dated two years before his death, he declared himself still a member of the Roman Catholic Church, although dissenting from many of its opinions.

COURBET, GUSTAVE (1819-1877), French painter, was born at Ornans (Doubs) on the 10th of June 1819. He went to Paris in 1839, and worked at the studio of Steuben and Hesse; but his independent spirit did not allow him to remain there long, as he preferred to work out his own way by the study of Spanish, Flemish and French painters. His first works, an “Odalisque,” suggested by Victor Hugo, and a “Lélia,” illustrating George Sand, were literary subjects; but these he soon abandoned for the study of real life. Among other works he painted his own portrait with his dog, and “The Man with a Pipe,” both of which were rejected by the jury of the Salon; but the younger school of critics, the neo-romantics and realists, loudly sang the praises of Courbet, who by 1849 began to be famous, producing such pictures as “After Dinner at Ornans” and “The Valley of the Loire.” The Salon of 1850 found him triumphant with the “Burial at Ornans,” the “Stone-Breakers” and the “Peasants of Flazey.” His style still gained in individuality, as in “Village Damsels” (1852), the “Wrestlers,” “Bathers,” and “A Girl Spinning” (1852). Though Courbet’s realistic work is not devoid of importance, it is as a landscape and sea painter that he will be most honoured by posterity. Sometimes, it must be owned, his realism is rather coarse and brutal, but when he paints the forests of Franche-Comté, the “Stag-Fight,” “The Wave,” or the “Haunt of the Does,” he is inimitable. When Courbet had made a name as an artist he grew ambitious of other glory; he tried to promote democratic and social science, and under the Empire he wrote essays and dissertations. His refusal of the cross of the Legion of Honour, offered to him by Napoleon III., made him immensely popular, and in 1871 he was elected, under the Commune, to the chamber. Thus it happened that he was responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme column. A council of war, before which he was tried, condemned him to pay the cost of restoring the column, 300,000 francs (£12,000). To escape the necessity of working to the end of his days at the orders of the State in order to pay this sum, Courbet went to Switzerland in 1873, and died at La Tour du Peilz, on the 31st of December 1877, of a disease of the liver aggravated by intemperance. An exhibition of his works was held in 1882 at the École des Beaux-Arts.

See Champfleury, Les Grandes Figures d’hier et d’aujourd’ hui (Paris, 1861); Mantz, “G. Courbet,” Gaz. des beaux-arts (Paris, 1878); Zola, Mes Haines (Paris, 1879); C. Lemonnier, Les Peintres de la Vie (Paris, 1888).

(H. Fr.)

COURBEVOIE, a town of northern France, in the department of Seine, 5 m. W.N.W. of Paris on the railway to Versailles. Pop. (1906) 29,339. It is a residential suburb of Paris, and has a fine avenue opening on the Neuilly bridge, and forming with it a continuation of the Champs Elysées. It carries on bleaching and the manufacture of carriage bodies, awnings, drugs, biscuits, &c.

COURCELLE-SENEUIL, JEAN GUSTAVE (1813-1892), French economist, was born at Seneuil (Dordogne) on the 22nd of December 1813. Seneuil was an additional name adopted from his native place. Devoting himself at first to the study of the law, he was called to the French bar in 1835. Soon after, however, he returned to Dordogne and settled down as a manager of ironworks. He found leisure to study economic and political questions, and was a frequent contributor to the republican papers. On the establishment of the second republic in 1848 he became director of the public domains. After the coup d’état of Napoleon III. in 1851 he went to South America, and held the professorship of political economy at the National Institute of Santiago, in Chile, from 1853 to 1863, when he returned to France. In 1879 he was made a councillor of state, and in 1882 was elected a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. He died at Paris on the 29th of June 1892. Courcelle-Seneuil, as an economist, was strongly inclined towards the liberal school, and was equally partial to the historical and experimental methods; but his best energies were directed to applied economy and social questions. His principal work is Traité théorique et pratique d’économie politique (2 vols., 1858); among his others may be mentioned Traité théorique et pratique des opérations de banque (1853); Études sur la science sociale (1862); La Banque libre (1867); Liberté et socialisme (1868); Protection et libre échange (1879); he also translated into French John Stuart Mill’s Principles.

COURCI, JOHN DE (d. 1219?), Anglo-Norman conqueror of Ulster, was a member of a celebrated Norman family of Oxfordshire and Somersetshire, whose parentage is unknown, and around whose career a mass of legend has grown up. It would appear that he accompanied William Fitz-Aldelm to Ireland when the latter, after the death of Strongbow, was sent thither by Henry II., and that he immediately headed an expedition from Dublin to Ulster, where he took Downpatrick, the capital of the northern kingdom. After some years of desultory fighting de Courci established his power over that part of Ulster comprised in the modern counties of Antrim and Down, throughout which he built a number of castles, where his vassals, known as “the barons of Ulster,” held sway over the native tribes. After the accession of Richard I., de Courci in conjunction with William de Lacy appears in some way to have offended the king by his proceedings in Ireland. De Lacy quickly made his peace with Richard, while de Courci defied him; and the subsequent history of the latter consisted mainly in the vicissitudes of a lasting feud with the de Lacys. In 1204 Hugh de Lacy utterly defeated de Courci in battle, and took him prisoner. De Courci, however, soon obtained his liberty, probably by giving hostages as security for a promise of submission which he failed to carry out, seeking an asylum instead with the O’Neills of Tyrone. He again appeared in arms on hearing that Hugh de Lacy had obtained a grant of Ulster with the title of earl; and in alliance with the king of Man he ravaged the territory of Down; but was completely routed by Walter de Lacy, and disappeared from the scene till 1207, when he obtained permission to return to England. In 1210 he was in favour with King John, from whom he received a pension, and whom he accompanied to Ireland. There is some indication of his having sided with John in his struggle with the barons; but of the later history of de Courci little is known. He probably died in the summer of 1219. Both de Courci and his wife Affreca were benefactors of the church, and founded several abbeys and priories in Ulster.

A story is told that de Courci when imprisoned in the Tower volunteered to act as champion for King John in single combat against a knight representing Philip Augustus of France; that when he appeared in the lists his French opponent fled in panic; whereupon de Courci, to gratify the French king’s desire to witness his prowess, “cleft a massive helmet in twain at a single blow,” a feat for which he was rewarded by a grant of the privilege for himself and his heirs to remain covered in the presence of the king and all future sovereigns of England. This tale, which still finds a place in Burke’s Peerage in the account of the baron Kingsale, a descendant of the de Courci family, is a legend without historic foundation which did not obtain currency till centuries after John de Courci’s death. The statement that he was created earl of Ulster, and that he was thus “the first Englishman dignified with an Irish title of honour,” is equally devoid of foundation. John de Courci left no legitimate children.

See J. H. Round’s art. “Courci, John de,” in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xii. (London, 1887), to which is added a bibliography of the original and later authorities for the life of de Courci.

COURIER, PAUL LOUIS (1773-1825), French Hellenist and political writer, was born in Paris on the 4th of January 1773. Brought up on his father’s estate of Méré in Touraine, he conceived a bitter aversion for the nobility, which seemed to strengthen with time. He would never take the name “de Méré,” to which he was entitled, lest he should be thought a nobleman. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Paris to complete his education; his father’s teaching had already inspired him with a passionate devotion to Greek literature, and although he showed considerable mathematical ability, he continued to devote all his leisure to the classics. He entered the school of artillery at Châlons, however, and immediately on receiving his appointment as sub-lieutenant in September 1793 he joined the army of the Rhine. He served in various campaigns of the Revolutionary wars, especially in those of Italy in 1798-99 and 1806-7, and in the German campaign of 1809. He became chef d’escadron in 1803.

He made his first appearance as an author in 1802, when he contributed to the Magasin encyclopédique a critique on Johannes Schweighäuser’s edition of Athenaeus. In the following year appeared his Éloge d’Hélène, a free imitation rather than a translation from Isocrates, which he had sketched in 1798. Courier had given up his commission in the autumn of 1808, but the general enthusiasm in Paris over the preparations for the new campaign affected him, and he attached himself to the staff of a general of artillery. But he was horror-struck by the carnage at Wagram (1809), refusing from that time to believe that there was any art in war. He hastily quitted Vienna, escaping the formal charge of desertion because his new appointment had not been confirmed. The savage independence of his nature rendered subordination intolerable to him; he had been three times disgraced for absenting himself without leave, and his superiors resented his satirical humour. After leaving the army he went to Florence, and was fortunate enough to discover in the Laurentian Library a complete manuscript of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, an edition of which he published in 1810. In consequence of a misadventure—blotting the manuscript—he was involved in a quarrel with the librarian, and was compelled by the government to leave Tuscany. He retired to his estate at Véretz (Indre-et-Loire), but frequently visited Paris, and divided his attention between literature and his farm.

After the second restoration of the Bourbons the career of Courier as political pamphleteer began. He had before this time waged war against local wrongs in his own district, and had been the adviser and helpful friend of his neighbours. He now made himself by his letters and pamphlets one of the most dreaded opponents of the government of the Restoration. The first of these was his Pétition aux deux chambres (1816), exposing the sufferings of the peasantry under the royalist reaction. In 1817 he was a candidate for a vacant seat in the Institute; and failing, he took his revenge by publishing a bitter Lettre à Messieurs de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1819). This was followed (1819-1820) by a series of political letters of extraordinary power published in Le Censeur Européen. He advocated a liberal monarchy, at the head of which he doubtless wished to see Louis Philippe. The proposal, in 1821, to purchase the estate of Chambord for the duke of Bordeaux called forth from Courier the Simple Discours de Paul Louis, vigneron de la Chavonnière, one of his best pieces. For this he was tried and condemned to suffer a short imprisonment and to pay a fine. Before he went to prison he published a compte rendu of his trial, which had a still larger circulation than the Discours itself. In 1823 appeared the Livret de Paul Louis, the Gazette de village, followed in 1824 by his famous Pamphlet des pamphlets, called by his biographer, Armand Carrel, his swan-song. Courier published in 1807 his translation from Xenophon, Du commandement de la cavalerie et de l’équitation, and had a share in editing the Collections des romans grecs. He also projected a translation of Herodotus, and published a specimen, in which he attempted to imitate archaic French; but he did not live to carry out this plan. In the autumn of 1825, on a Sunday afternoon (August 18th), Courier was found shot in a wood near his house. The murderers, who were servants of his own, remained undiscovered for five years.

The writings of Courier, dealing with the facts and events of his own time, are valuable sources of information as to the condition of France before, during, and after the Revolution. Sainte-Beuve finds in Courier’s own words, “peu de matière et beaucoup d’art,” the secret and device of his talent, which gives his writings a value independent of the somewhat ephemeral subject-matter.

A Collection complète des pamphlets politiques et opuscules littéraires de P. L. Courier appeared in 1826. See editions of his Œuvres (1848), with an admirable biography by Armand Carrel, which is reproduced in a later edition, with a supplementary criticism by F. Sarcey (1876-1877); also three notices by Sainte-Beuve in the Causeries du lundi and the Nouveaux Lundis.

COURIER (from the O. Fr. courier, modern courrier, from Lat. currere, to run), properly a running messenger, who carried despatches and letters; a system of couriers, mounted or on foot, formed the beginnings of the modern post-office (see [Post], and [Postal Service]). The despatches which pass between the foreign office and its representatives abroad, and which cannot be entrusted to the postal service or the telegraph, are carried by special couriers, styled, in the British service, King’s Messengers. “Courier,” more particularly, is applied to a travelling attendant, whose duties are to arrange for the carrying of the luggage, obtaining of passports, settling of hotel accommodation, and generally to look to the comfort and facility of travel. The name “courier” and the similar word “courant” (Ital. coranto) have often been used as the title of a newspaper or periodical (see [Newspapers]); the Courier, founded in 1792, was for some time the leading London journal.

COURLAND, or Kurland, one of the Baltic provinces of Russia, lying between 55° 45′ and 57° 45′ N. and 21° and 27° E. It is bounded on the N.E. by the river Dvina, separating it from the governments of Vitebsk and Livonia, N. by the Gulf of Riga, W. by the Baltic, and S. by the province of East Prussia and the Russian government of Kovno. The area is 10,535 sq. m., of which 101 sq. m. are occupied by lakes. The surface is generally low and undulating, and the coast-lands flat and marshy. The interior is characterized by wooded dunes, covered with pine, fir, birch and oak, with swamps and lakes, and fertile patches between. The surface nowhere rises more than 700 ft. above sea-level. The Mitau plain divides it into two parts, of which the western is fertile and thickly inhabited, except in the north, while the eastern is less fertile and thinly inhabited. One-third of the area is still forest.

Courland is drained by nearly one hundred rivers, of which only three, the Dvina, the Aa and the Windau, are navigable. They all flow north-westwards and discharge into the Baltic Sea. Owing to the numerous lakes and marshes, the climate is damp and often foggy, as well as changeable, and the winter is severe. Agriculture is the chief occupation, the principal crops being rye, barley, oats, wheat, flax and potatoes. The land is mostly owned by nobles of German descent. In 1863 laws were issued to enable the Letts, who form the bulk of the population, to acquire the farms which they held, and special banks were founded to help them. By this means some 12,000 farms were bought by their occupants; but the great mass of the population are still landless, and live as hired labourers, occupying a low position in the social scale. On the large estates agriculture is conducted with skill and scientific knowledge. Fruit grows well. Excellent breeds of cattle, sheep and pigs are kept. Libau and Mitau are the principal industrial centres, with iron-works, agricultural machinery works, tanneries, glass and soap works. Flax spinning is mostly a domestic industry. Iron and limestone are the chief minerals; a little amber is found on the coast. The only seaports are Libau, Windau and Polangen, there being none on the Courland coast of the Gulf of Riga. The population was 619,154 in 1870; 674,437 in 1897, of whom 345,756 were women; 714,200 (estimate) in 1906. Of the whole, 79% are Letts, 8¼% Germans, 1.7% Russians, and 1% each Poles and Lithuanians. In addition there are about 8% Jews and some Lives. The chief towns of the ten districts are Mitau (Doblenskiy district), capital of the government (pop. 35,011 in 1897), Bauske (6543), Friedrichstadt (5223), Goldingen (9733), Grobin (1489), Hasenpoth (3338), Illuxt (2340), Talsen (6215), Tuckum (7542) and Windau (7132). The prevailing religion is the Lutheran, to which 76% of the population belong; the rest belong to the Orthodox Eastern and the Roman Catholic churches.

Anciently Courland was inhabited by the Cours or Kurs, a Lettish tribe, who were subdued and converted to Christianity by the Brethren of the Sword, a German military order, in the first quarter of the 13th century. In 1237 it passed under the rule of the Teutonic Knights owing to the amalgamation of this order with that of the Brethren of the Sword. At that time it comprised the two duchies of Courland and Semgallen. Under the increasing pressure of Russia (Muscovy) the Teutonic Knights in 1561 found it expedient to put themselves under the suzerainty of Poland, the grandmaster Gotthard Kettler (d. 1587) becoming the first duke of Courland. The duchy suffered severely in the Russo-Swedish wars of 1700-9. But by the marriage in 1710 of Kettler’s descendant, Duke Frederick William (d. 1711), to the princess Anne, niece of Peter the Great and afterwards empress of Russia, Courland came into close relation with the latter state Anne being duchess of Courland from 1711 to 1730. The celebrated Marshal Saxe was elected duke in 1726, but only managed to maintain himself by force of arms till the next year. The last Kettler, William, titular duke of Courland, died in 1737, and the empress Anne now bestowed the dignity on her favourite Biren, who held it from 1737 to 1740 and again from 1763 till his death in 1772. During nearly the whole of the 18th century Courland, devastated by continual wars, was a shuttlecock between Russia and Poland; until eventually in 1795 the assembly of the nobles placed it under the Russian sceptre. The Baltic provinces—Esthonia, Livonia and Courland—ceased to form collectively one general government in 1876.

See H. Hollmann, Kurlands Agrarverhältnisse (Riga, 1893), and E. Seraphim, Geschichte Liv-, Esth-, und Kurlands (2 vols., Reval, 1895-1896).

COURNOT, ANTOINE AUGUSTIN (1801-1877), French economist and mathematician, was born at Gray (Haute-Saône) on the 28th of August 1801. Trained for the scholastic profession, he was appointed assistant professor at the Academy of Paris in 1831, professor of mathematics at Lyons in 1834, rector of the Academy of Grenoble in 1835, inspector-general of studies in 1838, rector of the Academy of Dijon and honorary inspector-general in 1854, retiring in 1862. He died in Paris on the 31st of March 1877. Cournot was the first who, with a competent knowledge of both subjects, endeavoured to apply mathematics to the treatment of economic questions. His Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses (English trans. by N. T. Bacon, with bibliography of mathematics of economics by Irving Fisher, 1897) was published in 1838. He mentions in it only one previous enterprise of the same kind (though there had in fact been others)—that, namely, of Nicholas François Canard (c. 1750-1833), whose book, Principes d’économie politique (Paris, 1802), was crowned by the French Academy, though “its principles were radically false as well as erroneously applied.” Notwithstanding Cournot’s just reputation as a writer on mathematics, the Recherches made little impression. The truth seems to be that his results are in some cases of little importance, in others of questionable correctness, and that, in the abstractions to which he has recourse in order to facilitate his calculations, an essential part of the real conditions of the problem is sometimes omitted. His pages abound in symbols representing unknown functions, the form of the function being left to be ascertained by observation of facts, which he does not regard as a part of his task, or only some known properties of the undetermined function being used as bases for deduction. In his Principes de la théorie des richesses (1863) he abandoned the mathematical method, though advocating the use of mathematical symbols in economic discussions, as being of service in facilitating exposition. Other works of Cournot’s were Traité élémentaire de la théorie des fonctions et du calcul infinitésimal (1841); Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités (1843); De l’origine et des limites de la correspondance entre l’algèbre et la géométrie (1847); Traité de l’enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire (1861); and Revue sommaire des doctrines économiques (1877).

COURSING (from Lat. cursus, currere, to run), the hunting of game by dogs solely by sight and not by scent. From time to time the sport has been pursued by various nations against various animals, but the recognized method has generally been the coursing of the hare by greyhounds. Such sport is of great antiquity, and is fully described by Arrian in his Cynegeticus about A.D. 150, when the leading features appear to have been much the same as in the present day. Other Greek and Latin authors refer to the sport; but during the middle ages it was but little heard of. Apart from private coursing for the sake of filling the pot with game, public coursing has become an exhilarating sport. The private sportsman seldom possesses good strains of blood to breed his greyhounds from or has such opportunities of trying them as the public courser.

The first known set of rules in England for determining the merits of a course were drawn up by Thomas, duke of Norfolk, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign; but no open trials were heard of until half a century later, in the time of Charles I. The oldest regular coursing club of which any record exists is that of Swaffham, in Norfolk, which was founded by Lord Orford in 1766; and in 1780 the Ashdown Park (Berkshire) meeting was established. During the next seventy years many other large and influential societies sprang up throughout England and Scotland, the Altcar Club (on the Sefton estates, near Liverpool) being founded in 1825. The season lasts about six months, beginning in the middle of September. It was not until 1858 that a coursing parliament, so to speak, was formed, and a universally accepted code of rules drawn up. In that year the National Coursing Club was founded. It is composed of representatives from all clubs in the United Kingdom of more than a year’s standing, and possessing more than twenty-four members. Their rules govern meetings, and their committee adjudicate on matters of dispute. A comparative trial of two dogs, and not the capture of the game pursued, is the great distinctive trait of modern coursing. A greyhound stud-book was started in 1882.

The breeding and training of a successful kennel is a precarious matter; and the most unaccountable ups and downs of fortune often occur in a courser’s career. At a meeting an agreed-on even number of entries are made for each stake, and the ties drawn by lot. After the first round the winner of the first tie is opposed to the winner of the second, and so on until the last two dogs left in compete for victory; but the same owner’s greyhounds are “guarded” as far as it is possible to do so. A staff of beaters drive the hares out of their coverts or other hiding-places, whilst the slipper has the pair of dogs in hand, and slips them simultaneously by an arrangement of nooses, when they have both sighted a hare promising a good course. The judge accompanies on horseback, and the six points whereby he decides a course are—(1) speed; (2) the go-by, or when a greyhound starts a clear length behind his opponent, passes him in the straight run, and gets a clear length in front; (3) the turn, where the hare turns at not less than a right angle; (4) the wrench, where the hare turns at less than a right angle; (5) the kill; (6) the trip, or unsuccessful effort to kill. He may return a “no course” as his verdict if the dogs have not been fairly tried together, or an “undecided course” if he considers their merits equal. The open Waterloo meeting, held at Altcar every spring,—the name being taken from its being originated by the proprietor of the Waterloo Hotel, Liverpool,—is now the recognized fixture for the decision of the coursing championship, and the Waterloo Cup (1836) is the “Blue Riband” of the leash. In the United States, several British colonies, and other countries, the name has been adopted, and Waterloo Coursing Cups are found there as in England. In America an American Coursing Board controls the sport, the chief meetings being in North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.

The chief works on coursing are:—Arrian’s Cynegeticus, translated by the Rev. W. Dansey (1831); T. Thacker, Courser’s Companion and Breeder’s Guide (1835); Thacker’s Courser’s Annual Remembrancer (1849-1851); D. P. Blaine, Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports (3rd ed., 1870); and J. H. Walsh, The Greyhound (3rd ed., 1875). See also the Coursing Calendar (since 1857); Coursing and Falconry (Badminton Library, 1892); The Hare (“Fur and Feather” series, 1896); and The Greyhound Stud Book (since 1882).

COURT, ANTOINE (1696-1760), French Protestant divine, was born in the village of Villeneuve-de-Berg, in the province of the Vivarais. He has been designated the “Restorer of Protestantism in France,” and was the organizer of the “Church of the Desert.” He was eight years old when the Camisard revolt was finally suppressed, and nineteen when on the 8th of March 1715 the edict of Louis XIV. was published, declaring that “he had abolished entirely the exercise of the so-called reformed religion” (“qu’il avait aboli tout exercice de la religion prétendue réformée”). Antoine, taken to the secret meetings of the persecuted Calvinists, began, when only seventeen, to speak and exhort in these congregations of “the desert.” He came to suspect after a time that many of the so-called “inspired” persons were “dupes of their own zeal and credulity,” and decided that it was necessary to organize at once the small communities of believers into properly constituted churches. To the execution of this vast undertaking he devoted his life. On the 21st of August 1715 he summoned all the preachers in the Cévennes and Lower Languedoc to a conference or synod near the village of Monoblet. Here elders were appointed, and the preaching of women, as well as pretended revelations, was condemned. The village of Monoblet “thus seems entitled to the honour of having had the first organized Protestant church after the revocation of the edict of Nantes” (H. M. Baird). But there were as yet no ordained pastors. Pierre Corteiz was therefore sent to seek ordination. He was ordained at Zürich, and from him Court himself received ordination. The scene of his labours for fifteen years was Languedoc, the Vivarais, and Dauphiné. His beginnings were very small prayer-meetings in “the desert.” But the work progressed under his wise direction, and he was able “to be present, in 1744, at meetings of ten thousand souls.” In 1724 Louis XV., again assuming that there were no Protestants in France, prohibited the most secret exercise of the Reformed religion, and imposed severe penalties. It was impossible fully to carry out this menace. But persecution raged, especially against the pastors. A price was set on the life of Court; and in 1730 he escaped to Lausanne. He had already, with the aid of some of the Protestant princes, established a theological college (“Seminaire de Lausanne”) there, and during the remaining thirty years of his life he filled the post of director. He had the title of deputy-general of the churches, and was really the pillar of their hope. The Seminary of Lausanne sent forth all the pastors of the Reformed Church of France till the days of the first French Empire. Court formed the design of writing a history of Protestantism, and made large collections for the purpose, which have been preserved in the Public Library of Geneva; but this he did not live to carry out. He died at Lausanne in 1760. He wrote, amongst other works, a Histoire des troubles des Cévennes ou de la guerre des Camisards (1760). He was the father of the more generally known Antoine Court de Gebelin (q.v.).

For details of his life see Napoléon Peyrat’s Histoire des pasteurs du désert (1842; English translation, 1852); Edmond Hugues, Antoine Court, histoire de la restauration du protestantisme en France au XVIIIe siècle (2nd ed., 1872), Les Synodes du désert (3 vols., 1885-1886), Mémoires d’Antoine Court (1885); E. and E. Haag, La France protestante, vol. iv. (1884, new edition); H. M. Baird, The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1895), vol. ii.; cf. Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français (1893-1906).

COURT (from the O. Fr. court, Late Lat. cortis, curtis, a popular form of class. Lat. cohors, gen. cohortis; the mod. Fr. form cour is due to the influence of the Lat. curia, the word used in medieval documents to translate “court” in the feudal sense), a word originally denoting an enclosed place, and so surviving in its architectural sense (courtyard, &c.), but chiefly used as a general term for judicial tribunals and in the special sense of the household of the king, called “the court.”[1] All law courts were not, however, purely judicial in character; the old county court, for instance, was the assembly of the freeholders of the county in which representatives and certain officers were elected. Such assemblies in early times exercised political and legislative as well as judicial functions. But these have now been almost entirely separated everywhere, and only judicial bodies are now usually called courts. In every court, says Blackstone, there must be three parts,—an actor or plaintiff, reus or defendant, and judex, or judge.

The language of legal fictions, which English lawyers invariably use in all constitutional subjects, makes the king the ultimate source of all judicial authority, and assumes his personal presence in all the courts.

“As by our excellent constitution,” says Blackstone, “the sole executive power of the laws is vested in the person of the king, it will follow that all courts of justice, which are the medium by which he administers the laws, are derived from the power of the crown. For whether created by act of parliament or letters patent, or subsisting by prescription (the only methods by which any court of judicature can exist), the king’s consent in the two former is expressly, in the latter impliedly given. In all these courts the king is supposed in contemplation of law to be always present; but as that is in fact impossible, he is then represented by his judges, whose power is only an emanation of the royal prerogative.”

These words might give a false impression of the historical and legal relations of the courts and the crown, if it is not remembered that they are nothing more than the expression of a venerable fiction. The administration of justice was, indeed, one of the functions of the king in early times; the king himself sat on circuit so late as the reign of Edward IV.; and even after regular tribunals were established, a reserve of judicial power still remained in the king and his council, in the exercise of which it was possible for the king to participate personally. The last judicial act of an English king, if such it can be called, was that by which James I. settled the dispute between the court of chancery and courts of common law. Since the establishment of parliamentary government the courts take their law directly from the legislature, and the king is only connected with them indirectly as a member of the legislative body. The king’s name, however, is still used in this as in other departments of state action. The courts exercising jurisdiction in England are divided by certain features which may here be briefly indicated.

We may distinguish between (1) superior and inferior courts. The former are the courts of common law and the court of chancery, now High Court of Justice. The latter are the local or district courts, county courts, &c. (2) Courts of record and courts not of record. “A court of record is one whereof the acts and judicial proceedings are enrolled for a perpetual memory and testimony, which rolls are called the records of the court, and are of such high and supereminent authority that their truth is not to be called in question. For it is a settled rule and maxim that nothing shall be averred against a record, nor shall any plea or even proof be admitted to the contrary. And if the existence of the record shall be denied it shall be tried by nothing but itself; that is, upon bare inspection whether there be any such record or no; else there would be no end of disputes. All courts of record are the courts of the sovereign in right of the crown and royal dignity, and therefore any court of record has authority to fine and imprison for contempt of its authority” (Stephen’s Blackstone). (3) Courts may also be distinguished as civil or criminal. (4) A further distinction is to be made between courts of first instance and courts of appeal. In the former the first hearing in any judicial proceeding takes place; in the latter the judgment of the first court is brought under review. Of the superior courts, the High Court of Justice in its various divisions is a court of first instance. Over it is the court of appeal, and over that again the House of Lords. The High Court of Justice is (through divisional courts) a court of appeal for inferior courts. (5) There is a special class of local courts, which do not appear to fall within the description of either superior or inferior courts. Some, while administering the ordinary municipal law, have or had jurisdiction exclusive of their superior courts; such were the common pleas of Durham and Lancaster. Others have concurrent jurisdiction with the superior courts; such are the lord mayor’s court of London, the passage court of Liverpool, &c.

The distribution of judicial business among the various courts of law in England may be exhibited as follows.

Criminal Courts.—(1) The lowest is that of the justice of the peace, sitting in petty sessions of two or more, to determine in a summary way certain specified minor offences. In populous districts, such as London, Manchester, &c., stipendiary magistrates are appointed, generally with enlarged powers. Besides punishing by summary conviction, justices may commit prisoners for trial at the assizes. (2) The justices in quarter sessions are commissioned to determine felonies and other offences. An act of 1842 (5 & 6 Vict. c. 38) contains a list of offences not triable at quarter sessions—treason, murder, forgery, bigamy, &c. (see [Quarter Sessions, Court of]). The corresponding court in a borough is presided over by a recorder. (3) The more serious offences are reserved for the judges of the superior courts sitting under a commission of oyer and terminer or gaol delivery for each county. The assize courts, as they are called, sit in general in each county twice a year, following the division of circuits; but additional assizes are also held under acts of 1876 and 1877, which permit several counties to be united together for that purpose (see [Circuit]). London, which occupies an exceptional position in all matters of judicature, has a high criminal court of its own, established by the Central Criminal Court Act 1834, under the name of the central criminal court. Its judges usually present are a rota selected from the superior judges of common law, the recorder, common serjeant, and the judge of the City of London court.[2] The criminal appeal court, to which all persons convicted on indictment may appeal, superseded in 1908 (by the Criminal Appeal Act 1907) the court for crown cases reserved, to which any question of law arising on the trial of a prisoner could after conviction be remitted by the judge in his discretion. To the criminal appeal court there is an appeal both on questions of fact and of law (see [Appeal]).

Civil Courts.—In certain special cases, civil claims of small importance may be brought before justices or stipendiaries. Otherwise, and excepting the special and peculiar jurisdictions above mentioned, the civil business of England and Wales may be said to be divided between the county courts (taking small cases) and the High Court of Justice (taking all others).

The effect of the Judicature Acts on the constitution of the superior courts may be briefly stated. There is now one Supreme Court of Judicature, consisting of two permanent divisions called the High Court of Justice and the court of appeal. The former takes the jurisdiction of the court of chancery, the three common law courts, the courts of admiralty, probate, and divorce, the courts of pleas at Lancaster and Durham, and the courts created by commissions of assize, oyer and terminer, and gaol delivery. The latter takes the jurisdiction of the court of appeal in chancery (including chancery of Lancaster), the court of the lord warden of the stannaries, and of the exchequer chamber, and the appellate jurisdiction in admiralty and heresy matters of the judicial committee; and power is given to the sovereign to transfer the remaining jurisdiction of that court to the court of appeal. By the Appellate Jurisdiction Act of 1876 the House of Lords is enabled to sit for the hearing of appeals from the English court of appeal and the Scottish and Irish courts during the prorogation and dissolution of parliament. The lords of appeal, of whom three must be present, are the lord chancellor, the lords of appeal in ordinary, and peers who have held “high judicial office” in Great Britain or Ireland. The lords in ordinary are an innovation in the constitution of the House. They hold the rank of baron for life only, have a right to sit and vote in the House during tenure of office only, and a salary of £6000 per annum.

There are also many obsolete or decayed courts, of which the most noticeable are dealt with under their individual headings, as [Court Baron], [Court Leet], &c.

The history of English courts affords a remarkable illustration of the continuity that characterizes English institutions. It might perhaps be too much to say that all the courts now sitting in England may be traced back to a common origin, but at any rate the higher courts are all offshoots from the same original judicature. Leaving out of account the local courts, we find the higher jurisdiction after the Norman Conquest concentrated along with all other public functions in the king and council. The first sign of a separation of the judicial from the other powers of this body is found in the recognition of a Curia Regis, which may be described as the king’s council, or a portion of it, charged specially with the management of judicial and revenue business. In relation to the revenue it became the exchequer, under which name a separate court grew up whose special field was the judicial business arising out of revenue cases. By Magna Carta the inconvenience caused by the curia following the king’s person was remedied, in so far as private litigation was concerned, by the order that common pleas (Communia Placita) should be held at some fixed place; and hence arose the court of common pleas. The Curia Regis, after having thrown off these branches, is represented by the king’s bench, so that from the same stock we have now three courts, differing at first in functions, but through competition for business, and the ingenious use of fictions, becoming finally the co-ordinate courts of common law of later history. But an inner circle of counsellors still surrounded the king, and in his name claimed to exercise judicial as well as other power; hence the chancellor’s jurisdiction, which became, partly in harmony with the supra-legal power claimed from which it sprang, and partly through the influence of the ecclesiastical chancellors by whom it was first administered, the equity of English law. Similar developments of the same authority were the court of requests (which was destroyed by a decision of the common pleas) and the court of star chamber—a court of criminal equity, as it has been called,—which, having been made the instrument of tyranny, was abolished in 1641. Even then the productive power of the council was not exhausted; the judicial committee of the privy council, established in 1832, superseding the previous court of delegates, exercises the jurisdiction in appeal belonging to the king in council. The appellate jurisdiction of the Lords rests on their claim to be the representatives of the ancient great council of the realm.

See further [Admiralty, High Court of]; [Appeal]; [Chancery]; [Common Law]; [Common Pleas, Court of]; [Divorce]; [Equity]; &c.

United States.—The Federal judicial system of the United States is made by the Constitution independent both of the Legislature and of the Executive. It consists of the Supreme Court, the circuit courts, and the district courts.

The Supreme Court is created by the Constitution, and consisted in 1909 of nine judges, who are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. They hold office during good behaviour, i.e. are removable only by impeachment, thus having a tenure even more secure than that of English judges. The court sits at Washington from October to July in every year. The sessions of the court are held in the Capitol. A rule requiring the presence of six judges to pronounce a decision prevents the division of the court into two or more benches; and while this secures a thorough consideration of every case, it also retards the despatch of business. Every case is discussed twice by the whole body, once to ascertain the view of the majority, which is then directed to be set forth in a written opinion; then again, when the written opinion, prepared by one of the judges, is submitted for criticism and adoption by the court as its judgment.

The other Federal courts have been created by Congress under a power in the Constitution to establish “inferior courts.” The circuit courts consist of twenty-nine circuit judges, acting in nine judicial circuits, while to each circuit there is also allotted one of the justices of the Supreme Court. Circuit courts of appeals, established to relieve the Supreme Court, consist of three judges (two forming a quorum), and are made up of the circuit and district judges of each circuit and the Supreme Court justice assigned to the circuit. Some cases may, however, be appealed to the Supreme Court from the circuit court of appeals, and others directly from the lower courts. The district courts number (1909) ninety, in most cases having a single justice. There is also a special tribunal called the court of claims, which deals with the claims of private persons against the Federal government. It is not strictly a part of the general judicial system, but is a creation of Congress designed to relieve that body of a part of its own labours.

The jurisdiction of the Federal courts extends only to those cases in which the Constitution makes Federal law applicable. All other cases are left to the state courts, from which there is no appeal to the Federal courts, unless where some specific point arises which is affected by the Federal Constitution or a Federal law. The classes of cases dealt with by the Federal courts are as follows:—

1. Cases in law and equity arising under the Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made under their authority;

2. Cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;

3. Cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;

4. Controversies to which the United States shall be a party;

5. Controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizens of another state, between citizens of different states, between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state or the citizens thereof and foreign states, citizens or subjects (Const., Art. III., § 2). Part of this jurisdiction has, however, been withdrawn by the eleventh Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that “the judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.”

The jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is original in cases affecting ambassadors, and wherever a state is a party; in other cases it is appellate. In some matters the jurisdiction of the Federal courts is exclusive; in others it is concurrent with that of the state courts.

As it frequently happens that cases come before state courts in which questions of Federal law arise, a provision has been made whereby due respect for the latter is secured by giving the party to a suit who relies upon Federal law, and whose contention is overruled by a state court, the right of having the suit removed to a Federal court. The Judiciary Act of 1789 (as amended by subsequent legislation) provides for the removal to the Supreme Court of the United States of “a final judgment or decree in any suit rendered in the highest court of a state in which a decision could be had, where is drawn in question the validity of a treaty or statute of, or an authority exercised under the United States, and the decision is against their validity; or where is drawn in question the validity of a statute of, or an authority exercised under, any state, on the ground of their being repugnant to the Constitution, treaties or laws of the United States, and the decision is in favour of their validity; or where any title, right, privilege or immunity is claimed under the Constitution, or any treaty or statute of, or commission held, or authority exercised under the United States, and the decision is against the title, right, privilege or immunity specially set up or claimed by either party under such Constitution, treaty, statute, commission or authority.” If the decision of the state court is in favour of the right claimed under Federal law or against the validity or applicability of the state law set up, there is no ground for removal, because the applicability or authority of Federal law in the particular case could receive no further protection from a Federal court than has in fact been given by the state court.

The power exercised by the Supreme Court in declaring statutes of Congress or of state legislatures (or acts of the Executive) to be invalid because inconsistent with the Federal Constitution, has been deemed by many Europeans a peculiar and striking feature of the American system. There is, however, nothing novel or mysterious about it. As the Federal Constitution, which emanates directly from the people, is the supreme law of the land everywhere, any statute passed by any lower authority (whether the Federal Congress or a state legislature), which contravenes the Constitution, must necessarily be invalid in point of law, just as in the United Kingdom a railway by-law which contravened an act of parliament would be invalid. Now, the functions of judicial tribunals—of all courts alike, whether Federal or state, whether superior or inferior—is to interpret the law, and if any tribunal finds a Congressional statute or state statute inconsistent with the Constitution, the tribunal is obliged to hold such statute invalid. A tribunal does this not because it has any right or power of its own in the matter, but because the people have, in enacting the Constitution as a supreme law, declared that all other laws inconsistent with it are ipso jure void. When a tribunal has ascertained that an inferior law is thus inconsistent, that inferior law is therewith, so far as inconsistent, to be deemed void. The tribunal does not enter any conflict with the Legislature or Executive. All it does is to declare that a conflict exists between two laws of different degrees of authority, whence it necessarily follows that the weaker law is extinct. This duty of interpretation belongs to all tribunals, but as constitutional cases are, if originating in a lower court, usually carried by appeal to the Supreme Court, men have grown accustomed to talk of the Supreme Court as in a special sense the guardian of the Constitution.

The Federal courts never deliver an opinion on any constitutional question unless or until that question is brought before them in the form of a lawsuit. A judgment of the Supreme Court is only a judgment on the particular case before it, and does not prevent a similar question being raised again in another lawsuit, though of course this seldom happens, because it may be assumed that the court will adhere to its former opinion. There have, however, been instances in which the court has virtually changed its view on a constitutional question, and it is understood to be entitled so to do.

[1] Cf. the German Hof for court-yard, court of law, and royal court.

[2] The sittings are held in the court-house in the Old Bailey. The old sessions house was destroyed in the Gordon riots of 1780. The building erected in its place, although enlarged from time to time, was very incommodious, and a new structure, occupying the site of Newgate Prison, which was pulled down for the purpose, was completed in 1907.

COURT BARON, an English manorial court dating from the middle ages and still in existence. It was laid down by Coke that a manor had two courts, “the first by the common law, and is called a court baron,” the freeholders (“barons”) being its suitors; the other a customary court for the copyholders. Stubbs adopted this explanation, but the latest learning, expounded by Professor Maitland, holds that court baron means curia baronis, “la court de seigneur,” and that there is no evidence for there being more than one court. The old view that at least two freeholders were required for its composition is also now discarded. Prof. Maitland’s conclusion is that the “court baron” was not even differentiated from the “court-leet” at the close of the 13th century, but that there was a distinction of jurisdictional rights, some courts having only feudal rights, while others had regalities as well. When the court-leet was differentiated, the court baron remained with feudal rights alone. These rights he was disposed to trace to a lord’s jurisdiction over his men rather than to his possession of the manor, although in practice, from an early date, the court was associated with the manor. Its chief business was to administer the “custom of the manor” and to admit fresh tenants who had acquired copyholds by inheritance or purchase, and had to pay, on so doing, a “fine” to the lord of the manor. It is mainly for the latter purpose that the court is now kept. It is normally presided over by the steward of the lord of the manor, who is a lawyer, and its proceedings are recorded on “the court rolls,” of which the older ones are now valuable for genealogical as well as for legal purposes.

See Select Pleas in Manorial and other Seignorial Courts, vol. i., and The Court Baron (Selden Society).

(J. H. R.)

COURT DE GEBELIN, ANTOINE (1728-1784), French scholar, son of Antoine Court (q.v.), was born at Nîmes in 1728. He received a good education, and became, like his father, a pastor of the Reformed Church. This office, however, he soon relinquished, to devote himself entirely to literary work. He had conceived the project of a work which should set in a new light the phenomena, especially the languages and mythologies, of the ancient world; and, after his father’s death, he went to Paris in order to be near the necessary books. After long years of research, he published in 1775 the first volume of his vast undertaking under the title of Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne. The ninth volume appeared in 1784, leaving the work still unfinished. The literary world marvelled at the encyclopaedic learning displayed by the author, and supposed that the French Academy, or some other society of scholars, must have combined their powers in its production. Now, however, the world has well-nigh forgotten the huge quartos. These learned labours did not prevent Gebelin from pleading earnestly the cause of religious tolerance. In 1760 he published a work entitled Les Toulousaines, advocating the rights of the Protestants; and he afterwards established at Paris an agency for collecting information as to their sufferings, and for exciting general interest in their cause. He co-operated with Franklin and others in the periodical work entitled Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique (1776, sqq.), which was devoted to the support of American independence. He was also a supporter of the principles of the economists, and Quesnay called him his well-beloved disciple. In the last year of his life he became acquainted with Mesmer, and published a Lettre sur le magnétisme animal. He was imposed upon by speculators in whom he placed confidence, and was reduced to destitution by the failure of a scheme in which they engaged him. He died at Paris on the 10th of May 1784.

See La France protestante, by the brothers Haag, tome iv.; Charles Dardier, Court de Gebelin (Nîmes, 1890).

COURTENAY, the name of a famous English family. French genealogists head the pedigree of this family with one Athon or Athos, who is said to have fortified Courtenay in Gâtinois about the year 1010. His son Josselin had, with other issue, Miles, lord of Courtenay, founder of the Cistercian abbey of Fontaine-Jean. By his wife Ermengarde, daughter of Renaud, count of Nevers, Miles left a son Renaud, one of the magnates who followed Louis le Jeune to the Holy Land. This was the last lord of Courtenay of the line of Athon. Elizabeth, his elder daughter—a younger daughter died without issue,—carried Courtenay and other lordships to her husband Pierre, seventh and youngest son of the French king Louis VI. the Fat, the marriage taking place about 1150, and the many descendants of this royal match bore the surname of Courtenay.

Pierre, the eldest son, was founder of a short-lived dynasty of emperors of Constantinople, which ended in 1261 when Baldwin (Baudouin), last of the Frankish emperors, fled before Michael Palaeologus from a capital in flames. Baldwin’s son Philip, however, bore the empty title, and his granddaughter Catherine, wife of Charles, count of Valois, was titular empress. Other lines of the royal Courtenays, sprung from Pierre of France, were lords of Champignolles, Tanlai, Yerre, Bleneau, La Ferté Loupière and Chevillon. On the death of Gaspard, sieur de Bleneau, in 1655, his cousin Louis de Courtenay, comte de Cési (jure uxoris) and sieur de Chevillon, had Bleneau, and reckoned himself the surviving chief of his house. He styled himself Prince de Courtenay and his family made attempts to obtain recognition for their royal blood. But their laboriously constructed genealogies availed nothing to this impoverished race. The last “Prince de Courtenay,” an ex-captain of dragoons, died in 1730; his uncle Roger de Courtenay, abbé des Eschalis, who died in 1733, was the last recognized member of the line of Pierre of France.

A younger branch of the first house of Courtenay came from Josselin, second son of Josselin, son of Athon. This Josselin, a notable crusader, went to the Holy Land with the count of Blois, and held by the sword for eleven years the county of Edessa, given him by his cousin King Baldwin II. Edessa was won back by the infidel from his son Josselin, who died a prisoner in Aleppo in 1147. A grandson, also a Josselin, was seneschal of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

In England a house of Courtenay has flourished with varying fortunes since the reign of the first Angevin king. The monks of Ford, to whom they were benefactors, complacently set down their patrons as the offspring of the royal Courtenays, of whose origin they had some dim knowledge, deriving them from “Florus,” son of Louis the Fat. A comparison of dates destroys the story. But they were, doubtless, Courtenays of the stock of Athon. Josselin, the first count of Edessa, has been suggested by modern writers as their founder, but the name Reinaud, borne by the first known ancestor of the English house, suggests that they may have sprung from a younger son of Josselin I. of Courtenay by his marriage about 1095 with Ermengarde, daughter of Reinaud, count of Nevers. It is also notable that the English Courtenays have, from the first introduction of armorial bearings, borne with various differences the three red roundels in a golden field, the arms of the Courtenays in France, the shield of the earls of Devonshire being identical with that of the lords of La Ferté Loupière.

Several Courtenays whose kinship cannot be exactly ascertained, appear in English records of the 12th century. One of them, Robert de Courtenay, married the daughter and heir of Reynold fitz Urse, the leader of the murderers of Archbishop Thomas Becket. His son, William, a Shropshire baron, held the castle of Montgomery, as heir by his mother of Baldwin de Buslers, or Bollers, to whom Henry I. had given it with his “niece” Sibil de Falaise. This William married Ada of Dunbar, daughter of Patrick, earl of Dunbar, but died in the reign of King John, without issue.

Reinaud de Courtenay, ancestor of the main English line, may well have been a brother of the Robert above named. The English pedigrees confuse him with his son of the same name. He was a favourite with Henry II., his attestations of charters showing him as a constant companion at home and abroad of the king, whom he followed to Wexford in the Irish expedition of 1172. Henry gave him Berkshire lands at Sutton, still known as Sutton Courtenay, by a charter to which the date of 1161 can be assigned. In England he had to wife Maude, daughter of Robert fitz Roy by Maude of Avranches, the elder Maude being the heir of the house of Brionne. By her, who survived him, dying before January 1224, he had no issue, but by a wife who may have died before his coming to England he had, with other issue, Robert and Reinaud. Robert, who succeeded to Sutton about 1192, was husband of Alice de Rumeli, widow of Gilbert Pipard, and one of the three sisters and co-heirs of William, the boy of Egremond, of whose drowning in the Strid Wordsworth has made a ballad. Robert died childless in 1209. Of his brother Reinaud or Reynold de Courtenay little is known, save that he was a married man in 1178 when he and his wife Hawise were given by the pope a licence to have a free chapel at Okehampton. This wife, Hawise de Ayencourt, was, with Maude his father’s second wife, a daughter and co-heir of Maude of Avranches, her father being the lord of Ayencourt, first husband of the last named Maude. Her great inheritance included the honour of Okehampton in Devonshire of which, as a widow, she had livery about 1205. Her son, Robert de Courtenay, succeeded to her land in 1219, having been his uncle Robert’s heir in Sutton ten years before. Like his father he advanced his house by a great marriage, his wife being Mary, the younger daughter of William de Vernon, earl of Devon and of the Isle of Wight. He was succeeded in 1242 by his son John, who by Isabel, a daughter of Hugh de Vere, earl of Oxford, has issue Hugh, whose wife was Eleanor, daughter of the earl of Winchester, elder of the two favourites of Edward II. The son of this marriage, another Hugh, followed his father at Okehampton in 1291. Two years later died Isabel, surviving sister and heir of Baldwin de Reviers, earl of Devon, and widow of William de Forz, last earl of Aumerle (Albemarle). On her death-bed she had granted her lordship of the Wight to the king, but her cousin Hugh de Courtenay succeeded her in the unalienated estates of the house of Reviers. He was summoned as a baron on the 6th of February 1298/9, and in 1300 he displayed his banner before the castle of Caerlaverock. Claiming the “third penny” of the county of Devon, he was refused by the exchequer as he did not claim in the name of an earl. Following, however, a writ of inquiry, a patent of the 22nd of February 1334/5 declared him earl of Devon and qualified to take such style as his ancestors, earls of Devon, were wont to take. Hugh, his son, the second earl, a warrior who drove the French back from their descent on Cornwall in 1339, made another of the brilliant marriages of this family, his wife being Eleanor, daughter of Humfrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex, by Elizabeth daughter of Edward I. Their eldest son, Sir Hugh de Courtenay, shared in the honours of Crécy and Calais, and was one of the knights founders of the order of the Garter, the stall-plate of his arms being yet in St George’s chapel at Windsor. This knight died in the lifetime of the earl, as did his only son Hugh, summoned as a baron on the 3rd of January 1370/1, a companion at Najara of the Black Prince, whose step-daughter Maude of Holland he had married. The earl was therefore succeeded by his grandson Edward (son of Edward his third son), earl marshal of England in 1385, who died blind in 1419, the year after the death of Sir Edward his heir apparent, one of the conquerors at Agincourt. Hugh, a second son of Earl Edward, succeeded as fourth earl of the Courtenay line. By his wife, a sister of the renowned Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, he had issue Thomas the fifth earl, a partisan of Henry VI., whose wife was Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John, earl of Somerset. The effigy of this grandaughter of John of Gaunt, with the shields of Courtenay and Beaufort above it, is in Colyton church. It is less than life size, a fact which has given rise to a village legend that it represents “Little choke-a-bone,” an infant daughter of the tenth earl, who died “choked by a fish bone.” In spite of the evidence of the shields and the 15th century dress of the effigy, the legend has now been strengthened by an inscription upon a brass plate, and in the year 1907 ignorance engaged a monumental sculptor to deface the effigy by giving its broken features the newly carved face of a young child. Both sons of this marriage fell in the Wars of the Roses, Thomas the sixth earl being taken at Towton by the Yorkists and beheaded at York in 1462, his younger brother Henry having the same fate at Salisbury in 1466.

The earldom being extinguished by attainder, Sir Humphrey Stafford was created earl of Devon in 1469, but in the same year, having retired with his men from the expedition against Robin of Redesdale, another earl of Devon suffered at the headsman’s hands, his patent being afterwards annulled by a statute of Henry VII. On the restoration of Henry VI. John Courtenay, only surviving brother of Thomas and Henry, was restored to the earldom by the reversal of attainder. He, too, died in the Lancastrian cause, being killed on the 4th of May 1471 at Tewkesbury, where he led the rear of the host. The representation of the Reviers earls and of the Courtenay barony fell then to his sisters and their descendants. Beside him at Tewkesbury died his cousin Sir Hugh Courtenay of Boconnoc, son of Hugh, a younger brother of the blind earl, leaving a son Edward, who thus became the heir male of the house though not its heir general. Joining in the cause which had cost so many of his kinsmen their lives, he and his brother Walter shared the duke of Buckingham’s rising. On its failure they fled into France to the earl of Richmond, beside whom Sir Edward fought at Bosworth. By a patent of the 26th of October 1485 he was created earl of Devon with remainder to the heirs male of his body, and by an act of 1485 he was restored to all honours lost in his attainder by the Yorkist parliament. He defended Exeter against Warbeck’s rebels and was a knight of the Garter in 1489, dying twenty years later, when the earldom became again forfeit by his son’s attainder. That son, William Courtenay, had drawn the jealousy of Henry VII. by a marriage with Catherine, sister of the queen and daughter of King Edward IV., the Yorkist sovereign whose hand had been so heavy on the Courtenays. After the queen’s death, Henry sent his wife’s brother-in-law to the Tower on a charge of corresponding with Edmund Pole, an attainder following. But on the accession of Henry VIII., the young king released his uncle, who although styled an earl was not fully restored in blood at his death in 1511. His son Henry Courtenay obtained from parliament in December 1512 a reversal of his father’s attainder, thus succeeding to the earldom of his grandfather. At the Field of Cloth of Gold he ran a course with the king of France. He was knight of the Garter and on the 15th of June 1525 had a patent as marquess of Exeter. Profiting by the suppression of the monasteries he increased his estate, his power being all but supreme in the west country. But Cromwell was his enemy and the royal strain in his blood was a dangerous thing. Involved in correspondence with Cardinal Pole, he was sent to the Tower with his wife and his young son, and on the 9th of December 1538 he was beheaded as a traitor. The misfortunes of the house were heavy upon the son, who at twelve years old was a prisoner for the sake of his high descent. His honours had been forfeited, and release did not come until the accession of Queen Mary, who took him into favour. Noailles the ambassador found him le plus beau et le plus agréable gentilhomme d’Angleterre, and he had some hopes of becoming king consort. The queen created him earl of Devonshire by a patent of the 3rd of September 1553 and in the next month he was restored in blood. But, disappointed in his hopes, he formed some wild plans for marrying the Lady Elizabeth and making her queen. He could raise Devon and Cornwall. Wyat did raise Kent, but the plot was soon crushed. The earl was sent back to the Tower and thence to Fotheringhay. At Easter of 1555 he was released on parole and exiled, dying suddenly at Padua in 1556. His co-heirs were the descendants of the four sisters of Earl Edward (d. 1519), the wives of four Cornish squires, and with him was extinguished, to the belief of all men, the Courtenays’ earldom of Devon. His heir male was Sir William Courtenay, his sixth cousin once removed, head of a knightly line of Courtenays whose seat was Powderham Castle, a line which, during the civil wars, stood for the White Rose. Sir William, who is said to have been killed at St Quintin in 1557, was succeeded by his son, another Sir William, one of the undertakers for the settling of Ireland, where the family obtained great estates. William Courtenay of Powderham, of whose marriage with the daughter of Sir William Waller (the parliament’s general) it is remarked that the years of bride and bridegroom added together were less than thirty when their first child was born, was created a baronet by writ of privy seal in February 1644, the patent being never enrolled. His great grandson, Sir William Courtenay, many years a member of parliament, was on the 6th of May 1762, ten days before his death, created Viscount Courtenay of Powderham Castle.

Since the death at Padua in 1556 of Edward, earl of Devon, that ancient title had been twice revived. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who was created earl of Devon in 1603, died without lawful issue in 1606. In 1618 Sir William Cavendish, son of the famous Bess of Hardwick, was given the same title, which is still among the peerage honours of the ducal house descending from him. For the Courtenays, who had without protest accepted a baronetcy and a viscounty, their earldom was dead. In the reign of William IV., the third and last Viscount Courtenay was living unmarried in Paris, an exile who for sufficient reasons was keeping out of the reach of the English criminal law. In the name of this man, his presumptive heir male, William Courtenay, clerk assistant of the parliament, succeeded in persuading the House of Lords that the Courtenay earldom under the patent of 1553 was still in existence, the plea being that the terms of the remainder—to him and his heirs male for ever—did not limit the succession to heirs male of the body of the grantee. Five other cases wherein the words de corpore suo had been omitted from the patent are known to peerage lawyers. In no case had a peerage before been claimed by collateral heirs male. “I have often rallied Brougham,” writes Lord Campbell, “upon his creating William Courtenay earl of Devon. He says he consulted Chief Justice Tenterden. But Tenterden knew nothing of peerage law.” After the death of the exile in 1835 the clerk of the parliament succeeded him as an earl by force of the House of Lords decision of the 15th of March 1831. His second son, the Rev. Henry Hugh Courtenay (1811-1904), succeeded, as 13th earl, a nephew whose extravagance had impoverished the estates. He in turn was followed, as 14th earl, by his grandson Charles Pepys Courtenay (b. 1870).

No other recognized branch of this house, once so widely spread in the western counties, is now among the landed houses of England. Among its cadets were many famous warriors, but three prelates must be reckoned as the most eminent of the Courtenays. William, a younger son of the match of Courtenay and Bohun, was bishop of Hereford in 1370, bishop of London in 1375 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1381. Proceeding against Wycliffe he opposed John of Gaunt, who, taunting him with his trust in his great kinsfolk, threatened to drag him out of St Paul’s by his hair, a threat which roused the angry Londoners in his defence. He died in 1396 and lies buried at the feet of the Black Prince in his cathedral of Canterbury. By his will he left his best mitre to his nephew Richard Courtenay—son and pupil, as he styles him—against the time he should be a bishop. This Richard, a friend of Henry V. when prince, and treasurer of his household, was bishop of Norwich in 1413. Twice chancellor of Oxford, he repelled Archbishop Arundel and all his train when that primate would have had a visitation of the university, although the claim of the university to independence was at last broken down. Tall of stature, eloquent and learned, he kept the favour of the king, who was with him when he died of dysentery in the host before Harfleur. Heir of this bishop was his nephew Sir Philip of Powderham, whose younger son Peter Courtenay was the third of the Courtenay prelates, being bishop of Exeter from 1478 to 1487, when he was translated to Winchester. Although of the Yorkist Courtenays, he was of Buckingham’s party and, being attainted by Richard III. for joining with certain of his kinsfolk in an attempt to raise the west, he escaped to Brittany, whence he returned with the first Tudor sovereign, who had him in high favour. A fourth prelate of this family was Henry Reginald Courtenay, who was bishop of Bristol 1794-1797 and bishop of Exeter from 1797 to his death in 1803.

See charter, patent, close, fine and plea rolls, inquests post mortem and other records. G. E. C.’s Complete Peerage; Dictionary of National Biography; Notes and Queries, series viii. vol. 7; J. H. Round’s Peerage Studies; Calendars of State Papers; Machyn’s Diary (Camden Society); Chronicles of Capgrave, Wavrin, Adam of Usk, &c.

(O. Ba.)

COURTENAY, RICHARD (d. 1415), English prelate, was a son of Sir Philip Courtenay of Powderham Castle, near Exeter, and a grandson of Hugh Courtenay, earl of Devon (d. 1377). He was a nephew of William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, and a descendant of Edward I. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he entered the church, where his advance was rapid. He held several prebends, was dean of St Asaph and then dean of Wells, and became bishop of Norwich in 1413. As chancellor of the university of Oxford, an office to which he was elected in 1407 and again in 1410, Courtenay asserted the independence of the university against Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1411; but the archbishop, supported by Henry IV. and Pope John XXIII, eventually triumphed. Courtenay was a personal friend of Henry V. both before and after he came to the throne; and in 1413, immediately after Henry’s accession, he was made treasurer of the royal household. On two occasions he went on diplomatic errands to France, and he was also employed by Henry on public business at home. Having accompanied the king to Harfleur in August 1415, Courtenay was attacked by dysentery and died on the 15th of September 1415, his body being buried in Westminster Abbey.

Another member of this family, Peter Courtenay (d. 1492), a grandnephew of Richard, also attained high position in the English Church. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, Peter became dean of Windsor, then dean of Exeter; in 1478 bishop of Exeter; and in 1487 bishop of Winchester in succession to William of Waynflete. With Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and others he attempted to raise a rebellion against Richard III. in 1483, and fled to Brittany when this enterprise failed. Courtenay was restored to his dignities and estates in 1485 by Henry VII., whom he had accompanied to England, and he died on the 23rd of September 1492.

See J. H. Wylie, History of England under Henry IV. (London, 1884-1898).

COURTENAY, WILLIAM (c. 1342-1396), English prelate, was a younger son of Hugh Courtenay, earl of Devon (d. 1377), and through his mother Margaret, daughter of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, was a great-grandson of Edward I. Being a native of the west of England he was educated at Stapledon Hall, Oxford, and after graduating in law was chosen chancellor of the university in 1367. Courtenay’s ecclesiastical and political career began about the same time. Having been made prebendary of Exeter, of Wells and of York, he was consecrated bishop of Hereford in 1370, was translated to the see of London in 1375, and became archbishop of Canterbury in 1381, succeeding Simon of Sudbury in both these latter positions. As a politician the period of his activity coincides with the years of Edward III.’s dotage, and with practically the whole of Richard II.’s reign. From the first he ranged himself among the opponents of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; he was a firm upholder of the rights of the English Church, and was always eager to root out Lollardry. In 1373 he declared in convocation that he would not contribute to a subsidy until the evils from which the church suffered were removed; in 1375 he incurred the displeasure of the king by publishing a papal bull against the Florentines; and in 1377 his decided action during the quarrel between John of Gaunt and William of Wykeham ended in a temporary triumph for the bishop. Wycliffe was another cause of difference between Lancaster and Courtenay. In 1377 the reformer appeared before Archbishop Sudbury and Courtenay, when an altercation between the duke and the bishop led to the dispersal of the court, and during the ensuing riot Lancaster probably owed his safety to the good offices of his foe. Having meanwhile become archbishop of Canterbury Courtenay summoned a council, or synod, in London, which condemned the opinions of Wycliffe; he then attacked the Lollards at Oxford, and urged the bishops to imprison heretics. He was for a short time chancellor of England during 1381, and in January 1382 he officiated at the marriage of Richard II. with Anne of Bohemia, afterwards crowning the queen. In 1382 the archbishop’s visitation led to disputes with the bishops of Exeter and Salisbury, and Courtenay was only partially able to enforce the payment of a special tax to meet his expenses on this occasion. During his concluding years the archbishop appears to have upheld the papal authority in England, although not to the injury of the English Church. He protested against the confirmation of the statute of provisors in 1390, and he was successful in slightly modifying the statute of praemunire in 1393. Disliking the extravagance of Richard II. he publicly reproved the king, and after an angry scene the royal threats drove him for a time into Devonshire. In 1386 he was one of the commissioners appointed to reform the kingdom and the royal household, and in 1387 he arranged a peace between Richard and his enemies under Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester. Courtenay died at Maidstone on the 31st of July 1396, and was buried in Canterbury cathedral.

See W. F. Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. iv. (London, 1860-1876); and W. Stubbs, Constitutional History, vols. ii. and iii. (Oxford, 1895-1896).

COURTESY (O. Fr. curtesie, later courtoisie), manners or behaviour that suit a court, politeness, due consideration for others. A special application of the word is in the expression “by courtesy,” where something is granted out of favour and not of right, hence “courtesy” titles, i.e. those titles of rank which are given by custom to the eldest sons of dukes, marquesses and earls, usually the second title held by the father; to the younger sons and to the daughters of dukes and marquesses, viz. the prefix “lord” and “lady” with the Christian and surname. For “tenure by the courtesy” see [Curtesy]. Another form of the word, “curtsey” or “curtsy,” was early confined to the expression of courtesy or respect by a gesture or bow, now only of the reverence made by a woman, consisting in a bending of the knees accompanied by a lowering of the body.

COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN (1842-  ), English writer and historian of poetry, whose father was rector of South Malling, Essex, was born on the 17th of July 1842. From Harrow school he went to New College, Oxford; took first-classes in classical “moderations” and “greats”; and won the Newdigate prize for poetry (1864) and the Chancellor’s English essay (1868). He seemed destined for distinction as a poet, his volume of Ludibria Lunae (1869) being followed in 1870 by the remarkably fine Paradise of Birds. But a certain academic quality of mind seemed to check his output in verse and divert it into the field of criticism. Apart from many contributions to the higher journalism, his literary career is associated mainly with his continuation of the edition of Pope’s works, begun by Whitwell Elwin (1816-1900), which appeared in ten volumes from 1871-1889; his life of Addison (Men of Letters series, 1882); his Liberal Movement in English Literature (1885); and his tenure of the professorship of Poetry at Oxford (1895-1901), which resulted in his elaborate History of English Poetry (the first volume appearing in 1895), and his Life in Poetry (1901). He deals with the history of English poetry as a whole, and in its unity as a result of the national spirit and thought in succeeding ages, and attempts to bring the great poets into relation with this. In 1887 he was appointed a civil service commissioner, being first commissioner in 1892, and being made a C.B. He was made an honorary fellow of his old college at Oxford in 1896, and was given the honorary degrees of D.Litt. by Durham in 1895 and of LL.D. by Edinburgh University in 1898.

COURT LEET, an English petty criminal court for the punishment of small offences. It has been usual to make a distinction between court baron and court leet[1] as being separate courts, but in the early history of the court leet no such distinction can be drawn. At a very early time the lords of manors exercised or claimed certain jurisdictional franchises. Of these the most important was the “view of frankpledge” and its attendant police jurisdiction. Some time in the later middle ages the court baron when exercising these powers gained the name of leet, and, later, of “court leet.” The quo warranto proceedings of Edward I. established a sharp distinction between the court baron, exercising strictly manorial rights, and the court leet, depending for its jurisdiction upon royal franchise. The court leet was a court of record, and its duty was not only to view the pledges but to present by jury all crimes that might happen within the jurisdiction, and punish the same. The steward of the court acted as judge, presiding wholly in a judicial character, the ministerial acts being executed by the bailiff. The court leet began to decline in the 14th century, being superseded by the more modern courts of the justices, but in many cases courts leet were kept up until nearly the middle of the 19th century. Indeed, it cannot be said that they are now actually extinct, as many still survive for formal purposes, and by s. 40 of the Sheriffs Act 1887 they are expressly kept up.

[1] The history of the word “leet” is very obscure. It appears in Anglo-French documents as lete and in Anglo-Latin as leta. Professor W. W. Skeat has connected it with Old English láetan, to let, which is very doubtful, though this is the origin of the use of the word in such expressions as “two-” “three-way leet,” a place where cross-roads meet. The New English Dictionary suggests a connexion with “lathe,” a term which survives as a division of the county of Kent, containing several “hundreds.” This is of Old Norwegian origin, and seems to have meant “landed possessions.” There is also another Old Norwegian léith, a court or judicial assembly, and modern Danish has laegd, a division of the country for military purposes. J. H. Round (Feudal England, p. 101) points out that the Suffolk hundred was divided for assessment into equal blocks called “leets” (see further F. W. Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Selden Soc. Publications I. lxxiii-lxxvi). “Leet” is also used, chiefly in Scotland, for a list of persons nominated for election to an office. This is, apparently, a shortened form of the French élite, elected.

COURT-MARTIAL, a court for the trial of offences against military or naval discipline, or for the administration of martial law. In England courts-martial have inherited part of the jurisdiction of the old Curia militaris, or court of the chivalry, in which a single marshal and at one time the high constable proceeded “according to the customs and usages of that court, and, in cases omitted according to the civil law, secundum legem armorum” (Coke, 4 Ins. 17). The modern form of the courts was adopted by ordinance in the time of Charles I., when English soldiers were studying the “articles and military laws” of Gustavus Adolphus and the Dutch military code of Arnheim; it is first recognized by statute in the first Mutiny Act of 1689. The Mutiny Act (with various extensions and amendments) and the statutory articles of war continued to be the sources of military law which courts-martial administered until 1879, when they were codified in the Army Discipline and Regulation Act 1879, which was, in turn, superseded by the Army Act 1881. This act is re-enacted annually by the Army (Annual) Act. The constitution of courts-martial, their procedure, &c., are dealt with under [Military Law].

Naval Courts-Martial.—The administration of the barbarous naval law of England was long entrusted to the discretion of commanders acting under instructions from the lord high admiral, who was supreme over both the royal and merchant navy. It was the leaders of the Long Parliament who first secured something like a regular tribunal by passing in 1645 an ordinance and articles concerning martial law for the government of the navy. Under this ordinance Blake, Monk and Penn issued instructions for the holding general and ship courts-martial with written records, the one for captains and commanders, the other for subordinate officers and men. Of the latter the mate, gunner and boatswain were members, but the admirals reserved a control over the more serious sentences. Under an act of 1661 the high admiral again received power to issue commissions for holding courts-martial—a power which continues to be exercised by the board of admiralty. During the 18th century, under the auspices of Anson, the jurisdiction was greatly extended, and the Consolidation Act of 1749 was passed in which the penalty of death occurs as frequently as the curses in the commination service. The Naval Articles of War have always been statutory, and the whole system may now be said to rest on the Naval Discipline Act 1866, as amended by the act of 1884. The navy has its courts of inquiry for the confidential investigation of charges “derogatory to the character of an officer and a gentleman.” Under the act of 1866 a court-martial must consist of from five to nine officers of a certain rank, and must be held publicly on board of one of H.M. ships of war, and where at least two such ships are together. The rank of the president depends on that of the prisoner. A judge-advocate attends, and the procedure resembles that in military courts, except that the prisoner is not asked to plead, and the sentence, if not one of death, does not require the confirmation of the commander-in-chief abroad or of the admiralty at home. The court has a large and useful power of finding the prisoner guilty of a less serious offence than that charged, which might well be imitated in the ordinary criminal courts. The death sentence is always carried out by hanging at the yard-arm; Admiral Byng, however, was shot in 1757. The board of admiralty have, under the Naval Discipline Acts, a general power of suspending, annulling, and modifying sentences which are not capital. The jurisdiction extends to all persons belonging to the navy, to land forces and other passengers on board, shipwrecked crews, spies, persons borne on the books of H.M. ships in commission, and civilians on board who endeavour to seduce others from allegiance. The definition of the jurisdiction by locality includes harbours, havens or creeks, lakes or rivers, in or out of the United Kingdom; all places within the jurisdiction of the admiralty; all places on shore out of the United Kingdom; the dockyards, barracks, hospitals, &c., of the service wherever situated; all places on shore in or out of the United Kingdom for all offences punishable under the Articles of War except those specified in section 38 of the Naval Discipline Act 1860, which are punishable by ordinary law. The Royal Marines, while borne on the books of H.M. ships, are subject to the Naval Discipline Acts, and, by an order in council, 1882, when they are embarked on board ship for service on shore; otherwise they are under the Army Acts. By s. 179, sub.-sec. 7, of the Army Act, in the application of the act to the Royal Marines the admiralty is substituted for military authorities.

Authorities.—Simmons, On the Constitution and Practice of Courts-Martial; Clode, Military and Martial Law; Stephens, Gifford and Smith, Manual of Naval Law and Court-Martial Procedure. The earlier writers on courts-martial are Adye (1796), M’Arthur (1813), Maltby (1813, Boston), James (1820), D’Aguilar (1843), and Hough, Precedents in Military Law (1855).

COURTNEY, LEONARD HENRY COURTNEY, Baron (1832-  ), English politician and man of letters, eldest son of J. S. Courtney, a banker, was born at Penzance on the 6th of July 1832. At Cambridge, Leonard Courtney was second wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman, and was elected a fellow of his college, St John’s. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1858, was professor of political economy at University College from 1872 to 1875, and in December 1876, after a previous unsuccessful attempt, was elected to parliament for Liskeard in the Liberal interest. He continued to represent the borough, and the district into which it was merged by the Reform Act of 1885, until 1900, when his attitude towards the South African War—he was one of the foremost of the so-called “Pro-Boer” party—compelled his retirement. Until 1885 he was a devoted adherent of Mr Gladstone, particularly in finance and foreign affairs. In 1880 he was under-secretary of state for the home department, in 1881 for the colonies, and in 1882 secretary to the treasury; but he was always a stubborn fighter for principle, and upon finding that the government’s Reform Bill in 1884 contained no recognition of the scheme for proportional representation, to which he was deeply committed, he resigned office. He refused to support Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill in 1885, and was one of those who chiefly contributed to its rejection, and whose reputation for unbending integrity and intellectual eminence gave solidity to the Liberal Unionist party. In 1886 he was elected chairman of committees in the House of Commons, and his efficiency in this office seemed to mark him out for the speakership in 1895. A Liberal Unionist, however, could only be elected by Conservative votes, and he had made himself objectionable to a large section of the party by his independent attitude on various questions, on which his Liberalism outweighed his party loyalty. He would in any case have been incapacitated by an affection of the eyesight, which for a while threatened to withdraw him from public life altogether. After 1895 Mr Courtney’s divergences from the Unionist party on questions other than Irish politics became gradually more marked. He became known in the House of Commons principally for his candid criticism of the measures introduced by his nominal leaders, and he was rather to be ranked among the Opposition than as a Ministerialist; and when the crisis with the Transvaal came in 1899, Mr Courtney’s views, which remained substantially what they were when he supported the settlement after Majuba in 1881, had plainly become incompatible with his position even as a nominal follower of Lord Salisbury and Mr Chamberlain. He gradually reverted to formal membership of the Liberal party, and in January 1906 unsuccessfully contested a division of Edinburgh as a supporter of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman at the general election. Among the birthday honours of 1906 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Courtney of Penwith (Cornwall). Lord Courtney, who in 1883 married Miss Catherine Potter (an elder sister of Mrs Sidney Webb), was a prominent supporter of the women’s movement. In earlier years he was a regular contributor to The Times, and he wrote numerous essays in the principal reviews on political and economic subjects. In 1901 he published a book on The Working Constitution of the United Kingdom.

Two of his brothers, John Mortimer Courtney (b. 1838), and William Prideaux Courtney (b. 1845), also attained public distinction, the former in the government service in Canada (from 1869, retiring in 1906), rising to be deputy-minister of finance, and the latter in the British civil service (1865-1892), and as a prominent man of letters and bibliographer.

COURTOIS, JACQUES (1621-1676) and GUILLAUME (1628-1679). The two French painters who bore these names are also called by the Italian equivalents Giacomo (or Jacopo) Cortese and Guglielmo Cortese. Each of the brothers is likewise named, from his native province, Le Bourguignon, or Il Borgognone.

Jacques Courtois was born at St Hippolyte, near Besançon, in 1621. His father was a painter, and with him Jacques remained studying up to the age of fifteen. Towards 1637 he came to Italy, was hospitably received at Milan by a Burgundian gentleman, and entered, and for three years remained in, the French military service. The sight of some battle-pictures revived his taste for fine art. He went to Bologna, and studied under the friendly tutelage of Guido; thence he proceeded to Rome, where he painted, in the Cistercian monastery, the “Miracle of the Loaves.” Here he took a house and after a while entered upon his own characteristic style of art, that of battle-painting, in which he has been accounted to excel all other old masters; his merits were cordially recognized by the celebrated Cerquozzi, named Michelangelo delle Battaglie. He soon rose from penury to ease, and married a painter’s beautiful daughter, Maria Vagini; she died after seven years of wedded life. Prince Matthias of Tuscany employed Courtois on some striking works in his villa, Lappeggio, representing with much historical accuracy the prince’s military exploits. In Venice also the artist executed for the senator Sagredo some remarkable battle-pieces. In Florence he entered the Society of Jesus, taking the habit in Rome in 1655; it was calumniously rumoured that he adopted this course in order to escape punishment for having poisoned his wife. As a Jesuit father, Courtois painted many works in churches and monasteries of the society. He lived piously in Rome, and died there of apoplexy on the 20th of May 1676 (some accounts say 1670 or 1671). His battle-pieces have movement and fire, warm colouring (now too often blackened), and great command of the brush,—those of moderate dimensions are the more esteemed. They are slight in execution, and tell out best from a distance. Courtois etched with skill twelve battle-subjects of his own composition. The Dantzig painter named in Italy Pandolfo Reschi was his pupil.

Guillaume Courtois, born likewise at St Hippolyte, came to Italy with his brother. He went at once to Rome, and entered the school of Pietro da Cortona. He studied also the Bolognese painters and Giovanni Barbieri, and formed for himself a style with very little express mannerism, partly resembling that of Maratta. He painted the “Battle of Joshua” in the Quirinal Gallery, the “Crucifixion of St Andrew” in the church of that saint on Monte Cavallo, various works for the Jesuits, some also in co-operation with his brother. His last production was Christ admonishing Martha. His draughtsmanship is better than that of Jacques, whom he did not, however, rival in spirit, colour or composition. He also executed some etchings. Guillaume Courtois died of gout on the 15th of June 1679.

COURTRAI (Flemish, Kortryk), an important and once famous town of West Flanders, Belgium, situated on the Lys. Pop. (1904) 34,564. It is now best known for its fine linen, which ranks with that of Larne. The lace factories are also important and employ 5000 hands. But considerable as is the prosperity of modern Courtrai it is but a shadow of what it was in the middle ages during the halcyon period of the Flemish communes. Then Courtrai had a population of 200,000, now it is little over a sixth of that number. On the 11th of July 1302 the great battle of Courtrai (see [Infantry]) was fought outside its walls, when the French army, under the count of Artois, was vanquished by the allied burghers of Bruges, Ypres and Courtrai with tremendous loss. As many as 700 pairs of golden spurs were collected on the field from the bodies of French knights and hung up as an offering in an abbey church of the town, which has long disappeared. There are still, however, some interesting remains of Courtrai’s former grandeur. Perhaps the Pont de Broel, with its towers at either end of the bridge, is as characteristic and complete as any monument of ancient Flanders that has come down to modern times. The hôtel de ville, which dated from the earlier half of the 16th century, was restored in 1846, and since then statues have also been added to represent those that formerly ornamented the façade. Two richly and elaborately carved chimney-pieces in the hôtel de ville merit special notice. The one in the council chamber upstairs dates from 1527 and gives an allegorical representation of the Virtues and the Vices. The other, three-quarters of a century later, contains an heraldic representation of the noble families of the town. The church of St Martin dates from the 15th century, but was practically destroyed in 1862 by a fire caused by lightning. It has been restored. The most important building at Courtrai is the church of Notre Dame, which was begun by Count Baldwin IX. in 1191 and finished in 1211. The portal and the choir were reconstructed in the 18th century. In the chapel behind the choir is hung one of Van Dyck’s masterpieces, “The Erection of the Cross.” The chapel of the counts attached to the church dates from 1373, and contained mural paintings of the counts and countesses of Flanders down to the merging of the title in the house of Burgundy. Most if not all of these had become obliterated, but they have now been carefully restored. With questionable judgment portraits have been added of the subsequent holders of the title down to the emperor Francis II. (I. of Austria), the last representative of the houses of Flanders and Burgundy to rule in the Netherlands. Courtrai celebrated the 600th anniversary of the battle mentioned above by erecting a monument on the field in 1902, and also by fêtes and historical processions that continued for a fortnight.

Courtrai, the Cortracum of the Romans, ranked as a town from the 7th century onwards. It was destroyed by the Normans, but was rebuilt in the 10th century by Baldwin III. of Flanders, who endowed it with market rights and laid the foundation of its industrial importance by inviting the settlement of foreign weavers. The town was once more burnt, in 1382, by the French after the battle of Roosebeke, but was rebuilt in 1385 by Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

COURVOISIER, JEAN JOSEPH ANTOINE (1775-1835), French magistrate and politician, was born at Besançon on the 30th of November 1775. During the revolutionary period he left the country and served in the army of the émigrés and later in that of Austria. In 1801, under the Consulate, he returned to France and established himself as an advocate at Besançon, being appointed conseiller-auditeur to the court of appeal there in 1808. At the Restoration he was made advocate-general by Louis XVIII., resigned and left France during the Hundred Days, and was reappointed after the second Restoration in 1815. In 1817, after the modification of the constitution by the ordonnance of the 5th of September, he was returned to the chamber of deputies, where he attached himself to the left centre and supported the moderate policy of Richelieu and Decazes. He was an eloquent speaker, and master of many subjects; and his proved royalism made it impossible for the ultra-Royalists to discredit him, much as they resented his consistent opposition to their short-sighted violence. After the revolt at Lyons in 1817 he was nominated procureur-général of the city, and by his sense and moderation did much to restore order and confidence. He was again a member of the chamber from 1819 to 1824, and vigorously opposed the exceptional legislation which the second administration of Richelieu passed under the influence of the ultra-Royalists. In 1824 he failed to secure re-election, and occupied himself with his judicial duties until his nomination as councillor of state in 1827. On the 8th of August 1829 he accepted the offer of the portfolio of justice in the Polignac ministry, but resigned on the 19th of May 1830, when he realized that the government intended to abrogate the Charter and the inevitable revolution that would follow. During the trial of the ex-ministers, in December, he was summoned as a witness, and paid a tribute to the character of his former colleagues which, under the circumstances, argued no little courage. He refused to take office under Louis Philippe, and retired into private life, dying on the 18th of September 1835.

COUSCOUS, or Kous-kous (an Arabic word derived from kaskasa, to pound), a dish common among the inhabitants of North Africa, made of flour rubbed together and steamed over a stew of mutton, fowl, &c., with which it is eaten.

COUSIN, JEAN (1500-1590), French painter, was born at Soucy, near Sens, and began as a glass-painter, his windows in the Sainte Chapelle at Vincennes being considered the finest in France. As a painter of subject pictures he is ranked as the founder of the French school, as having first departed from the practice of portraits. His “Last Judgment,” influenced by Parmigiano, is in the Louvre, and a “Descent from the Cross” (1523) in the museum at Mainz is attributed to him. He was known also as a sculptor, and an engraver, both in etching and on wood, his wood-cuts for Jean le Clerc’s Bible (1596) and other books being his best-known work. He also wrote a Livre de perspective (1560), and a Livre de portraiture (1571).

See Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Étude sur J. Cousin (1872), and Recueil des œuvres choisies de J. Cousin (1873).

COUSIN, VICTOR (1792-1867), French philosopher, the son of a watchmaker, was born in Paris, in the Quartier St Antoine, on the 28th of November 1792. At the age of ten he was sent to the grammar school of the Quartier St Antoine, the Lycée Charlemagne. Here he studied until he was eighteen. The lycée had a connexion with the university, and when Cousin left the secondary school he was “crowned” in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for the Latin oration delivered by him there, in the general concourse of his school competitors. The classical training of the lycée strongly disposed him to literature. He was already known among his compeers for his knowledge of Greek. From the lycée he passed to the Normal School of Paris, where Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy. In the second preface to the Fragmens philosophiques, in which he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life, Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory of the day in 1811, when he heard Laromiguière for the first time. “That day decided my whole life. Laromiguière taught the philosophy of Locke and Condillac, happily modified on some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual bonhomie which penetrated and subdued.” Cousin was set forthwith to lecture on philosophy, and he speedily obtained the position of master of conferences (maître de conférences) in the school. The second great philosophical impulse of his life was the teaching of Royer-Collard. This teacher, as he tells us, “by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy.” In 1815-1816 Cousin attained the position of suppléant (assistant) to Royer-Collard in the history of modern philosophy chair of the faculty of letters. There was still another thinker who influenced him at this early period,—Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequalled psychological observer of his time in France.

These men strongly influenced both the method and the matter of Cousin’s philosophical thought. To Laromiguière he attributes the lesson of decomposing thought, even though the reduction of it to sensation was inadequate. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. De Biran made a special study of the phenomena of the will. He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the fact of voluntary activity, that activity in which our personality is truly revealed. It was through this “triple discipline,” as he calls it, that Cousin’s philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he entered on the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters.[1] He then took up the study of German, worked at Kant and Jacobi, and sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Schelling, by which he was at first greatly attracted. The influence of Schelling may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. He sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason. In 1817 he went to Germany, and met Hegel at Heidelberg. In this year appeared Hegel’s Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, of which Cousin had one of the earliest copies. He thought Hegel not particularly amiable, but the two became friends. The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.

The political troubles of France interfered for a time with his career. In the events of 1814-1815 he took the royalist side. He at first adopted the views of the party known as doctrinaire, of which Royer-Collard was the philosophical Political troubles. chief. He seems then to have gone farther than his party, and even to have approached the extreme Left. Then came a reaction against liberalism, and in 1821-1822 Cousin was deprived of his offices alike in the faculty of letters and in the Normal School. The Normal School itself was swept away, and Cousin shared at the hands of a narrow and illiberal government the fate of Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history. This enforced abandonment of public teaching was not wholly an evil. He set out for Germany with a view to further philosophical study. While at Berlin in 1824-1825 he was thrown into prison, either on some ill-defined political charge at the instance of the French police, or on account of certain incautious expressions which he had let fall in conversation. Liberated after six months, he continued under the suspicion of the French government for three years. It was during this period, however, that he thought out and developed what is distinctive in his philosophical doctrine. His eclecticism, his ontology and his philosophy of history were declared in principle and in most of their salient details in the Fragmens philosophiques (Paris, 1826). The preface to the Fragmens philosophiques. second edition (1833) and the Avertissement to the third (1838) aimed at a vindication of his principles against contemporary criticism. Even the best of his later books, the Philosophie écossaise (4th ed., 1863), the Du vrai, du beau, et du bien (12th ed., 1872; Eng. trans., 3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1854), and the Philosophie de Locke (4th ed., 1861) were simply matured revisions of his lectures during the period from 1815 to 1820. The lectures on Locke were first sketched in 1819, and fully developed in the course of 1829.

During the seven years of enforced abandonment of teaching he produced, besides the Fragmens, the edition of the works of Proclus (6 vols., 1820-1827), and the works of Descartes (11 vols., 1826). He also commenced his Translation of Plato (13 vols.), which occupied his leisure time from 1825 to 1840.

We see in the Fragmens very distinctly the fusion of the different philosophical influences by which his opinions were finally matured. For Cousin was as eclectic in thought and habit of mind as he was in philosophical principle and system. It is with the publication of the Fragmens of 1826 that the first great widening of his reputation is associated. In 1827 followed the Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie.

In 1828 M. de Vatimesnil, minister of public instruction in Martignac’s ministry, recalled Cousin and Guizot to their professorial positions in the university. The three years which followed were the period of Cousin’s Career as a lecturer. greatest triumph as a lecturer. His return to the chair was the symbol of the triumph of constitutional ideas and was greeted with enthusiasm. The hall of the Sorbonne was crowded as the hall of no philosophical teacher in Paris had been since the days of Abelard. The lecturer had a singular power of identifying himself for the time with the system which he expounded and the historical character he portrayed. Clear and comprehensive in the grasp of the general outlines of his subject, he was methodical and vivid in the representation of details. In exposition he had the rare art of unfolding and aggrandizing. There was a rich, deep-toned, resonant eloquence mingled with the speculative exposition; his style of expression was clear, elegant and forcible, abounding in happy turns and striking antitheses. To this was joined a singular power of rhetorical climax. His philosophy exhibited in a striking manner the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and its logical need of grouping details round central principles.

There was withal a moral elevation in his spiritual philosophy which came home to the hearts of his hearers, and seemed to afford a ground for higher development in national literature and art, and even in politics, than the traditional philosophy of France had appeared capable of yielding. His lectures produced more ardent disciples, imbued at least with his spirit, than those of any other professor of philosophy in France during the 18th century. Tested by the power and effect of his teaching influence, Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi, Schelling and Dugald Stewart have united the gifts of speculative, expository and imaginative power. Tested even by the strength of the reaction which his writings have in some cases occasioned, his influence is hardly less remarkable. The taste for philosophy—especially its history—was revived in France to an extent unknown since the 17th century.

Among the men who were influenced by Cousin we may note T. S. Jouffroy, J. P. Damiron, Garnier, J. Barthélemy St Hilaire, F. Ravaisson-Mollien, Rémusat, Jules Simon and A. Franck. Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow-students Disciples and followers. and then disciples. Jouffroy, however, always kept firm to the early—the French and Scottish—impulses of Cousin’s teaching. Cousin continued to lecture regularly for two years and a half after his return to the chair. Sympathizing with the revolution of July, he was at once recognized by the new government as a friend of national liberty. Writing in June 1833 he explains both his philosophical and his political position:—

“I had the advantage of holding united against me for many years both the sensational and the theological school. In 1830 both schools descended into the arena of politics. The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order the better to reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy. On the other hand, he who combated any exclusive principle in science was bound to reject also any exclusive principle in the state, and to defend representative government.”

The government was not slow to do him honour. He was induced by the ministry of which his friend Guizot was the head to become a member of the council of public instruction and counsellor of state, and in 1832 he was made a peer of France. He ceased to lecture, but retained the title of professor of philosophy. Finally, he accepted the position of minister of public instruction in 1840 under Thiers. He was besides director of the Normal School and virtual head of the university, and from 1840 a member of the Institute (Academy of the Moral and Political Sciences). His character and his official position at this period gave him great power in the university and in the educational arrangements of the country. In fact, during the seventeen and a half years of the reign of Louis Philippe, Cousin mainly moulded the philosophical and even the literary tendencies of the cultivated class in France.

But the most important work he accomplished during this period was the organization of primary instruction. It was to the efforts of Cousin that France owed her advance, in primary education, between 1830 and 1848. Prussia Relation to primary education in France. and Saxony had set the national example, and France was guided into it by Cousin. Forgetful of national calamity and of personal wrong, he looked to Prussia as affording the best example of an organized system of national education; and he was persuaded that “to carry back the education of Prussia into France afforded a nobler (if a bloodless) triumph than the trophies of Austerlitz and Jena.” In the summer of 1831, commissioned by the government, he visited Frankfort and Saxony, and spent some time in Berlin. The result was a series of reports to the minister, afterwards published as Rapport sur l’état de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne et particulièrement en Prusse. (Compare also De l’instruction publique en Hollande, 1837.) His views were readily accepted on his return to France, and soon afterwards through his influence there was passed the law of primary instruction. (See his Exposé des motifs et projet de loi sur l’instruction primaire, présentés à la chambre des députés, séance du 2 janvier 1833.)

In the words of the Edinburgh Review (July 1833), these documents “mark an epoch in the progress of national education, and are directly conducive to results important not only to France but to Europe.” The Report was translated into English by Mrs Sarah Austin in 1834. The translation was frequently reprinted in the United States of America. The legislatures of New Jersey and Massachusetts distributed it in the schools at the expense of the states. Cousin remarks that, among all the literary distinctions which he had received, “None has touched me more than the title of foreign member of the American Institute for Education.” To the enlightened views of the ministries of Guizot and Thiers under the citizen-king, and to the zeal and ability of Cousin in the work of organization, France owes what is best in her system of primary education,—a national interest which had been neglected under the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration (see Exposé, p. 17). In the first two years of the reign of Louis Philippe more was done for the education of the people than had been either sought or accomplished in all the history of France. In defence of university studies he stood manfully forth in the chamber of peers in 1844, against the clerical party on the one hand and the levelling or Philistine party on the other. His speeches on this occasion were published in a tractate Défense de l’université et de la philosophie (1844 and 1845).

This period of official life from 1830 to 1848 was spent, so far as philosophical study was concerned, in revising his former lectures and writings, in maturing them for publication or reissue, and in research into certain periods of the Philosophical writings. history of philosophy. In 1835 appeared De la Métaphysique d’Aristote, suivi d’un essai de traduction des deux premiers livres; in 1836, Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l’année 1818, and Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard. This Cours de philosophie appeared later in 1854 as Du vrai, du beau, et du bien. From 1825 to 1840 appeared Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie, in 1829 Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie de Tennemann, translated from the German. In 1840-1841 we have Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale au XVIIIe siècle (5 vols.). In 1841 appeared his edition of the Œuvres philosophiques de Maine-de-Biran; in 1842, Leçons de philosophie sur Kant (Eng. trans. A. G. Henderson, 1854), and in the same year Des Pensées de Pascal. The Nouveaux fragments were gathered together and republished in 1847. Later, in 1859, appeared Petri Abaelardi Opera.

During this period Cousin seems to have turned with fresh interest to those literary studies which he had abandoned for speculation under the influence of Laromiguière and Royer-Collard. To this renewed interest we owe his studies of men Literary studies. and women of note in France in the 17th century. As the results of his work in this line, we have, besides the Des Pensêes de Pascal, 1842, Études sur les femmes et la société du XVIIe siècle, 1853. He has sketched Jacqueline Pascal (1844), Madame de Longueville (1853), the marquise de Sablé (1854), the duchesse de Chevreuse (1856), Madame de Hautefort (1856).

When the reign of Louis Philippe came to a close through the opposition of his ministry, with Guizot at its head, to the demand for electoral reform and through the policy of the Spanish marriages, Cousin, who was opposed to the government on these points, lent his sympathy to Cavaignac and the Provisional government. He published a pamphlet entitled Justice et charité, the purport of which showed the moderation of his political views. It was markedly anti-socialistic. But from this period he passed almost entirely from public life, and ceased to wield the personal influence which he had done during the preceding years. After the coup d’état of the 2nd of December, he was deprived of his position as permanent member of the superior council of public instruction. From Napoleon and the Empire he stood aloof. A decree of 1852 placed him along with Guizot and Villemain in the rank of honorary professors. His sympathies were apparently with the monarchy, under certain constitutional safeguards. Speaking in 1853 of the political issues of the spiritual philosophy which he had taught during his lifetime, he says,—“It conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls, which in our time can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy.”[2]

During the last years of his life he occupied a suite of rooms in the Sorbonne, where he lived simply and unostentatiously. The chief feature of the rooms was his noble library, the cherished collection of a lifetime. He died at Cannes on the 13th of January 1867, in his sixty-fifth year. In the front of the Sorbonne, below the lecture rooms of the faculty of letters, a tablet records an extract from his will, in which he bequeaths his noble and cherished library to the halls of his professorial work and triumphs.

Philosophy.—There are three distinctive points in Cousin’s philosophy. These are his method, the results of his method, and the application of the method and its results to history,—especially to the history of philosophy. It is usual to speak of his philosophy as eclecticism. It is eclectic only in a secondary and subordinate sense. All eclecticism that is not self-condemned and inoperative implies a system of doctrine as its basis,—in fact, a criterion of truth. Otherwise, as Cousin himself remarks, it is simply a blind and useless syncretism. And Cousin saw and proclaimed from an early period in his philosophical teaching the necessity of a system on which to base his eclecticism. This is indeed advanced as an illustration or confirmation of the truth of his system,—as a proof that the facts of history correspond to his analysis of consciousness. These three points—the method, the results, and the philosophy of history—are with him intimately connected; they are developments in a natural order of sequence. They become in practice Psychology, Ontology and Eclecticism in history.

First, as to method. On no point has Cousin more strongly insisted than the importance of method in philosophy. That which he adopts, and the necessity of which he so strongly proclaims, is the ordinary one of observation, Method. analysis and induction. This observational method Cousin regards as that of the 18th century,—the method which Descartes began and abandoned, and which Locke and Condillac applied, though imperfectly, and which Reid and Kant used with more success, yet not completely. He insists that this is the true method of philosophy as applied to consciousness, in which alone the facts of experience appear. But the proper condition of the application of the method is that it shall not through prejudice of system omit a single fact of consciousness. If the authority of consciousness is good in one instance, it is good in all. If not to be trusted in one, it is not to be trusted in any. Previous systems have erred in not presenting the facts of consciousness, i.e. consciousness itself, in their totality. The observational method applied to consciousness gives us the science of psychology. This is the basis and the only proper basis of ontology or metaphysics—the science of being—and of the philosophy of history. To the observation of consciousness Cousin adds induction as the complement of his method, by which he means inference as to reality necessitated by the data of consciousness, and regulated by certain laws found in consciousness, viz. those of reason. By his method of observation and induction as thus explained, his philosophy will be found to be marked off very clearly, on the one hand from the deductive construction of notions of an absolute system, as represented either by Schelling or Hegel, which Cousin regards as based simply on hypothesis and abstraction, illegitimately obtained; and on the other, from that of Kant, and in a sense, of Sir W. Hamilton, both of which in the view of Cousin are limited to psychology, and merely relative or phenomenal knowledge, and issue in scepticism so far as the great realities of ontology are concerned. What Cousin finds psychologically in the individual consciousness, he finds also spontaneously expressed in the common sense or universal experience of humanity. In fact, it is with him the function of philosophy to classify and explain universal convictions and beliefs; but common-sense is not with him philosophy, nor is it the instrument of philosophy; it is simply the material on which the philosophical method works, and in harmony with which its results must ultimately be found.

The three great results of psychological observation Results. are Sensibility, Activity or Liberty, and Reason.

These three facts are different in character, but are not found apart in consciousness. Sensations, or the facts of the sensibility, are necessary; we do not impute them to ourselves. The facts of reason are also necessary, and reason is not less independent of the will than the sensibility. Voluntary facts alone are marked in the eyes of consciousness with the characters of imputability and personality. The will alone is the person or Me. The me is the centre of the intellectual sphere without which consciousness is impossible. We find ourselves in a strange world, between two orders of phenomena which do not belong to us, which we apprehend only on the condition of our distinguishing ourselves from them. Further, we apprehend by means of a light which does not come from ourselves. All light comes from the reason, and it is the reason which apprehends both itself and the sensibility which envelops it, and the will which it obliges but does not constrain. Consciousness, then, is composed of these three integrant and inseparable elements. But Reason is the immediate ground of knowledge and of consciousness itself.

But there is a peculiarity in Cousin’s doctrine of activity or freedom, and in his doctrine of reason, which enters deeply into his system. This is the element of spontaneity in volition and in reason. This is the heart of what is Spontaneity in will. new alike in his doctrine of knowledge and being. Liberty or freedom is a generic term which means a cause or being endowed with self-activity. This is to itself and its own development its own ultimate cause. Free-will is so, although it is preceded by deliberation and determination, i.e. reflection, for we are always conscious that even after determination we are free to will or not to will. But there is a primary kind of volition which has not reflection for its condition, which is yet free and spontaneous. We must have willed thus spontaneously first, otherwise we could not know, before our reflective volition, that we could will and act. Spontaneous volition is free as reflective, but it is the prior act of the two. This view of liberty of will is the only one in accordance with the facts of humanity; it excludes reflective volition, and explains the enthusiasm of the poet and the artist in the act of creation; it explains also the ordinary actions of mankind, which are done as a rule spontaneously and not after reflective deliberation.

But it is in his doctrine of the Reason that the distinctive principle of the philosophy of Cousin lies. The reason given to us by psychological observation, the reason of our consciousness, is impersonal in its nature. We do not make it; its character Impersonality of reason. is precisely the opposite of individuality; it is universal and necessary. The recognition of universal and necessary principles in knowledge is the essential point in psychology; it ought to be put first and emphasized to the last that these exist, and that they are wholly impersonal or absolute. The number of these principles, their enumeration and classification, is an important point, but it is secondary to that of the recognition of their true nature. This was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of consciousness. And how is this impersonality or absoluteness of the conditions of knowledge to be established? The answer is in substance that Kant went wrong in putting necessity first as the criterion of those laws. This brought them within the sphere of reflection, and gave as their guarantee the impossibility of thinking them reversed; and led to their being regarded as wholly relative to human intelligence, restricted to the sphere of the phenomenal, incapable of revealing to us substantial reality—necessary, yet subjective. But this test of necessity is a wholly secondary one; these laws are not thus guaranteed to us; they are each and all given to us, given to our consciousness, in an act of spontaneous apperception or apprehension, immediately, instantaneously, in a sphere above the reflective consciousness, yet within the reach of knowledge. And “all subjectivity with all reflection expires in the spontaneity of apperception. The reason becomes subjective by relation to the voluntary and free self; but in itself it is impersonal; it belongs not to this or to that self in humanity; it belongs not even to humanity. We may say with truth that nature and humanity belong to it, for without its laws both would perish.”

But what is the number of those laws? Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classification and may be legitimately reduced. According to Laws of reason. Cousin, there are but two primary laws of thought, that of causality and that of substance. From these flow naturally all the others. In the order of nature, that of substance is the first and causality second. In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.

These principles of reason, cause and substance, given thus psychologically, enable us to pass beyond the limits of the relative and subjective to objective and absolute reality,—enable us, in a word, to pass from psychology, or the science of knowledge, to ontology or the science of being. These laws are inextricably mixed in consciousness with the data of volition and sensation, with free activity and fatal action or impression, and they guide us in rising to a personal being, a self or free cause, and to an impersonal reality, a not-me—nature, the world of force—lying out of us, and modifying us. As I refer to myself the act of attention and volition, so I cannot but refer the sensation to some cause, necessarily other than myself, that is, to an external cause, whose existence is as certain for me as my own existence, since the phenomenon which suggests it to me is as certain as the phenomenon which had suggested my reality, and both are given in each other. I thus reach an objective impersonal world of forces which corresponds to the variety of my sensations. The relation of these forces or causes to each other is the order of the universe.