Louis VIII did not live long enough to put his plan into execution; and Louis IX, a boy of twelve at the time of his accession, though accepting later the provision made for his younger brothers in his father’s will, was enabled, partly by the administrative ability of his mother and guardian, Queen Blanche, partly by his own personality, to maintain his supremacy undiminished. On one occasion his brother, the Count of Anjou, had imprisoned a knight, in anger that the man should have dared to appeal to the king’s court against a judicial decision he himself had given. ‘I will have but one king in France,’ exclaimed Louis when he heard, and ordered the knight to be released and that both he and the count should bring their case to Paris for royal judgement. Heavy penalties were also inflicted by Louis on any promoters of private warfare, while the baronage was restricted in its right to coin money. At this time eighty nobles besides the King are said to have possessed their own mints. Louis, who knew the feudal coinage was freely debased, forbade its circulation except in the province where it had been minted; while his own money, which was of far higher value, was made current everywhere. Men and women naturally prefer good coins to bad in exchange for merchandise; and so the King hoped that the debased money, when restricted in use, would gradually be driven out of existence. If Louis believed in his rights as an absolute king, he had an equally high conception of the duties that such rights involved. ‘Make thyself beloved by thy people,’ he said to his son, ‘for I would rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and governed my subjects well and equitably than that thou shouldst govern them badly.’ Royal justice, like the coinage, must be superior to any other justice; and so the chroniclers tell us that Louis selected as his bailiffs and seneschals those who were ‘loyal and wise, of upright conduct and good reputation, above all, men with clean hands’. Knowing the ease with which even well-meaning officials could be corrupted by money and honours, he ordered his deputies neither to receive nor give presents, while he warned his judges always to lean rather to the side of the poor than of the rich in a case of law until evidence revealed the truth. Philip Augustus had followed justice because he believed that it paid, and his subjects had feared and respected him. His grandson, with his keen sense of honour, shrank from injustice as something unclean; and we are told that the people ‘loved him as men love God and the Saints’.