a mill on the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an
oven.[41] In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was
secularised, the abbot was patron of twenty-nine priories, three
vicarates and thirty-five parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some
of the old building has been incorporated in the existing
Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. The Gothic Priory chapel, with its
fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a machinery-room, and the
refectory, one of the most precious and beautiful creations attributed
to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.

[Footnote 41: The possession of an oven was a lucrative monopoly in
mediaeval times. The writer has visited a village in South Italy where
this curious privilege is still possessed by the parish priest, who
levies a small indemnity of a few loaves, made specially of larger
size, for each use of the oven.]

Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a
depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became
king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and
dishonour his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and
brigandage. Early in his career he followed the evil counsels of his
provost Etienne, and purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St.
Germain des Pres to pay for his dissolute pleasures. "As the
sacrilegious pair," says the chronicler, "drew near the relics,
Etienne was smitten with blindness and the terrified Philip fled."

Philip after a reign void of honour or profit to France left his son
Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to little
more than a baronage over a few _comtes_, whose cities of Paris,
Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by
insolent and rebellious vassals. Many of the great seigneurs were but
freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and lawlessness of these
and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail on merchants and
travellers, made commerce almost impossible. Corruption, too, had
invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the thrones of bishops, and
a dual effort was made by king and Church to remedy the evils of the
times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the
Church might be purged of wolves in sheep's clothing: the Capetian
monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent
and powerful vassals to law and obedience.

In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop