whose names were on the list being capable of sitting in it. Its main function had come to be that of a final court of appeal. At the various sessions, which were regularly held at Paris, appeared the _baillis_ and seneschals, who were called upon to answer for the cases they had judged and also for their administration. The accounts were received by members of the parlement at the Temple, and this was the origin of the Cour or Chambre des Comptes. Nobles, commons and the Church in the 13th century. At the end of this period the nobility became an exclusive class. It became an established rule that a man had to be noble in order to be made a knight, and even in order to acquire a fief; but in this latter respect the king made exceptions in the case of _roturiers_, who were licensed to take up fiefs, subject to a payment known as the _droits de franc-fief_. The _roturiers_, or villeins who were not in a state of thraldom, were already a numerous class not only in the towns but in the country. The Church maintained her privileges; a few attempts only were made to restrain the abuse, not the extent, of her jurisdiction. This jurisdiction was, during the 12th century, to a certain extent regularized, the bishop nominating a special functionary to hold his court; this was the _officialis_ (Fr. _official_), whence the name of _officialite_ later applied in France to the ecclesiastical jurisdictions. On one point, however, her former rights were diminished. She preserved the right of freely acquiring personal and real property, but though she could still acquire feudal tenures she could not keep them; the customs decided that she must _vider les mains_, that is, alienate the property again within a year and a day. The reason for this new rule was that the Church, the ecclesiastical establishment, is a proprietor who does not die and in principle does not surrender her property; consequently, the lords had no longer the right of exacting the transfer duties on those tenures which she acquired. It was possible, however, to compromise and allow the Church to keep the tenure on condition of the consent not only of the lord directly concerned, but of all the higher lords up to the _capitalis dominus_; it goes without saying that this concession was only obtained by the payment of pecuniary compensations, the chief of which was the _droit d'amortissement_, paid to these different lords. In this period the form of the episcopal elections underwent a change, the electoral college coming to consist only of the canons composing the chapter of the cathedral church. But except for the official candidatures, which were abused by the kings and great lords, the elections were regular; the Pragmatic Sanction, attributed to Saint Louis, which implies the contrary, is nowadays considered apocryphal by the best critics. Changes in criminal law.