The son and successor of Philippe Auguste, Louis VIII, being found guilty of having continued to claim the English crown when the pope had taken it from him (after having freely given it him), was compelled to expiate this rebellion by consenting to pay the pope a tenth of his income for two years, and to present himself barefooted and with a rod at the door of Notre Dame, Paris, there to be flogged by the canons. Report says that he was flogged on the backs of his chaplains. Henry IV also was whipped, in 1595, but this was on the backs of his ambassadors, Cardinals du Perron and d’Ossat. This vicarious flagellation was not exceptional. In the last century but one there could always be found, and almost anywhere, some worthy capuchin who was willing to make his buttocks responsible for the sins of the whole parish, and who, proportionate to the payment received, would flog himself—or at least give out that he had done so. From thence comes the famous Spanish saying: _yo soy el culo del fray_: which in the interpretation may be rendered: I feel as sore and rum as the friar’s bum. This symbolic application is met with again in the ceremony of absolution for excommunicated persons. The pleader (if a man), had to present himself before the church door with bared shoulders, and before the bishop or priest who was presiding at the ceremony. Kneeling, and bare headed, he had to humbly beg for the absolution of his sin; and then the priest, having made him swear to obey the commandments of the church, would sit down and, taking a whip or rod, would recite a long psalm and, at each verse, he would strike the petitioner. The ceremonial was somewhat more solemn for those who had been excommunicated with anathema, or for those who had been excommunicated for grave sins or serious crimes. Illustrious personages, among others William, Duke of Aquitaine: Raymond, Count of Toulouse: Foulques, Count of Anjou, etc., submitted to this humiliating penitence. The last named had married the widow of Alain de Bretagne and had had her son, the heir to the estate, drowned in a bath. In reparation for this crime he went to Jerusalem, accompanied by two servants, one of whom led him by a rope which was fastened round his neck like a victim for the gallows, dragging him thus to the Holy Sepulchre, while the other continually flogged him with a bundle of rods. A rarely consulted source of documentation is the collection of letters of remission. Among other prerogatives, the French kings enjoyed the right of pardon. They exercised this right by divers acts, known under different names: letters of grace, of remission, of abolition, of pardon, repeal of bans, and so on.