The chief nobles of France in early mediaeval times had regarded such titles as ‘Mayor of the Palace’, ‘Seneschal’, ‘Chamberlain’, ‘Butler’, &c., as bestowing both hereditary glory and also political power. With the passing of years some of the titles vanished, while under Philip Augustus and his grandson Louis IX those that remained passed to ‘new’ men of humbler rank, who bore them merely while they retained the office, or else, shorn of any political power, continued as honours of the court and ballroom. In effect the royal household, once a kind of general servant ‘doing a bit of everything inadequately’ as in the days of Charlemagne, had now developed into two distinct bodies, each with their separate sphere of work: the great nobles surrounding their sovereign with the dignity and ceremonial in which the Middle Ages rejoiced, the trained officials advising him and carrying out his will. [Sidenote: French Communes] In his attitude to the large towns, except on his own crown lands where like other landowners he hesitated to encourage independence, Philip II showed himself sympathetic to the attempts of citizens to throw off the yoke of neighbouring barons, bishops, and abbots. Many of the towns had formed ‘communes’, that is, corporations something like a modern trade union, but these, though destined to play a large part in French history, were as yet only in their infancy. They had their origin sometimes in a revolutionary outburst against oppression, but often in a real effort on the part of leading townsmen to organize the civil life on profitable lines by means of ‘guilds’, or associations of merchants and traders with special privileges and laws. Some of the privileges at which these city corporations aimed were the right to collect their own taxes, to hold their own law-courts for deciding purely local disputes, and to protect their trade against fraud, tyranny, and competition from outside. It all sounds natural enough to modern ears, but it awoke profound indignation in a French writer of the twelfth century. ‘The word “commune”, he says, ‘is new and detestable, for this is what it implies; that those who owe taxes shall pay the rent that is due to their lord but once in the year only, and if they commit a crime against him they shall find pardon when they have made amends according to a fixed tariff of justice.’ Except within his own demesnes Phillip II readily granted charters confirming the ‘communes’ in their coveted rights, and he also founded ‘new’ towns under royal protection, offering there upon certain conditions a refuge to escaped serfs able to pay the necessary taxes. [Sidenote: Achievements of Philip II]