se. One of these, the lord of Gaure, went out of
church with five sergeants, and tried himself to arrest the most turbulent
of the band. But as he was seizing him by the body, one of his comrades
gave the lord a blow with a dagger, which cut off his nose, lips, and
part of his chin. This occurrence aroused the whole town. Toulouse had
been insulted in the person of its first magistrate, and claimed
vengeance. The author of the deed, named Aimeri de Berenger, was seized,
judged, condemned, and beheaded, and his body was suspended on the
_spikes_ of the Chateau Narbonnais.

[Illustration: Fig. 31.--Fellows of the University of Paris haranguing the
Emperor Charles IV. in 1377.--From a Miniature of the Manuscript of the
"Chroniques de St. Denis," No. 8395 (National Library of Paris).]

Toulouse had to pay dearly for the respect shown to its municipal dignity.
The parents of the student presented a petition to the King against the
city, for having dared to execute a noble and to hang his body on a
gibbet, in opposition to the sacred right which this noble had of
appealing to the judgment of his peers. The Parliament of Paris finally
decided the matter with the inflexible partiality to the rights of rank,
and confiscated all the goods of the inhabitants, forced the principal
magistrates to go on their knees before the house of Aimeri de Berenger,
and ask pardon; themselves to take down the body of the victim, and to
have it publicly and honourably buried in the burial-ground of the
Daurade. Such was the sentence and humiliation to which one of the first
towns of the south was subjected, for having practised immediate justice
on a noble, whilst it would certainly have suffered no vindication, if the
culprit condemned to death had belonged to the middle or lower orders.

We must nevertheless remember that heavy dues fell upon the privileged
class themselves to a certain degree, and that if they taxed their poor
vassals without mercy, they had in their turn often to reckon with their
superiors in the feudal hierarchy.

_Albere_, or right of shelter, was the principal charge imposed upon the
noble. When a great baron visited his lands, his tenants were not only
obliged to give him and his followers shelter, but also provisions and
food, the nature and quality of which were all arranged beforehand with
the most extraordinary minuteness. The lesser nobles took advantage
sometimes of the power they possessed to repurchase this obl