Throughout nearly all France, justice, which had been for eight centuries episcopal, became almost entirely civil; but the bishop still levied a part of the fines imposed, and when the citizens of a town or district were brought together to settle some grave dispute, it was the prelate of the diocese, or the dean of the chapter, or the precentor, who had the right of naming the day and the place of the meeting, which they had no power to prevent. Louis IX., great as was his piety, undertook the task of forming a lay magistracy capable of rendering justice. To avoid a conflict with the national clergy, he obtained from Innocent IV. a dispensation from the ordinary jurisdiction for the person of the King of France, for his consort, and his heir-presumptive. He solicited the intervention of the Pope to reform numerous abuses that had crept into the Church in France, especially in respect of the right of asylum, and the excessive immunities accorded to the ecclesiastical tribunals. Towards the end of the thirteenth century the jurisdiction of the clergy was, with the exception of the episcopal court, confined to the vassals of the bishops’ temporalities. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the episcopal power was engaged in a ceaseless struggle with a turbulent bourgeoisie (Fig. 235), whose spirit of opposition drove it into open and armed rebellion. In order to obviate this, and to order an effective resistance to the civil authority, itself overpowered by the populace, several diocesan chapters formed a league with the clergy and with the monks; but this did not bring them any increase of strength to combat the lay magistrates, because the bishop often deserted their cause or showed himself indifferent to it. Hence arose excommunications, imprisonments, proscriptions, and acts of seizure which only led to increased scandal. The schism which desolated the Christian world since the death of Gregory IX. (1378), the struggle for influence between the anti-pope Urban VI. and Pope Clement VII., were not calculated to allay the internal troubles of the Church.