btained justice and the maintenance of their franchises against
the officers of the king. The collection of kingly ordinances at this
time abounds with instances of the kind. These judges, besides, these
bailiffs, these provosts, these seneschals, and all these officers of the
king or of the great suzerains, formed before long a numerous and
powerful class. Now the majority amongst them were burghers, and their
number and their power were turned to the advantage of burgherdom, and
led day by day to its further extension and importance. Of all the
original sources of the third estate, this it is, perhaps, which has
contributed most to bring about the social preponderance of that order.
Just when burgherdom, but lately formed, was losing in many of the
communes a portion of its local liberties, at that same moment it was
seizing by the hand of Parliaments, provosts, judges, and administrators
of all kinds, a large share of central power. It was through burghers
admitted into the king's service and acting as administrators or judges
in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked
and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated
burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more
credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of
the state.

Philip the Handsome, that ambitious and despotic prince, was under no
delusion when in 1302, 1308, and 1314, on convoking the first states-
general of France, he summoned thither "the deputies of the good towns."
He did not yet give them the name of third estate; but he was perfectly
aware that he was thus summoning to his aid against Boniface VIII. and
the Templars and the Flemings a class already invested throughout the
country with great influence and ready to lend him efficient support.
His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he
summoned to the states-general "the commonalties and good towns of the
kingdom "to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the
succession to the throne, "or to advise as to the means of establishing a
uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;" he was perfectly aware that
the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the
accomplishment of acts so grave. And the three estates played the
prelude to the formation, painful and slow as it was, of constitutional
monarchy, when, in 1338, under Philip of Valois, the