[Illustration: THE CRYING EVIL. WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE CARRYING THE CHURCH AND THE STATE. Reproduction of one of many contemporary engravings issued to excite the people against the clergy and nobility.] This functionary had been established by Philippe-Auguste for the double purpose of policing these offenders, and of forming a body-guard of resolute men for the monarch himself. "The ribauds were armed with maces, and watched night and day over the person of the king, who feared the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain and the bravoes of Richard of England. The _roi des ribauds_ was an important personage, in the enjoyment of very considerable prerogatives and privileges. He mounted guard at the sovereign's door, and saw that no one entered without authority. He was the judge for crimes committed within the enclosure of the royal residence, and carried out himself the sentences which he pronounced; he was thus at once judge and executioner. We find him in the exercise of his office as late as the fifteenth century." Under Saint Louis, there was further legislation against these women, _les ribaudes_, and renewal of the edicts forbidding any citizen to let his house to them under penalty of confiscation. Thus early do we find in use one of the least ineffective of modern measures for correcting this evil. This king, who had a weakness for cruel and excessive punishments, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) his sanctity, also commanded that these disturbers of public morals should be stripped of all their property, wherever found, and imprisoned at hard labor. This being found impracticable, he modified his ordinance, and directed that they should be restricted to certain streets, that they should not be allowed to wear embroideries, or silver or other ornaments appertaining to honest women. Three of these streets being in turn denied them under Charles VI, in 1387, the proprietors appealed to Parliament, which by a decree restored to them the Rue de Baillehoé. In 1367, in 1379, in 1386, and in 1395, there were further ordinances forbidding them numerous other streets; in 1446, the week before Ascension, proclamation was made by the public crier of the furs, silver girdles, reversed collars, and other articles of feminine adornment which were forbidden them. There were at this date between five and six thousand of them in Paris, and all classes of society, ecclesiastics, monks, magistrates, openly paraded their immoral mode of life. The very churches and bath-houses were used as rendezvous. Henry VI, King of England and France, had, in 1424, forbidden the sergeants and the archers of the municipality to confiscate to their own use the girdles, jewelry, or vestments of the _fillettes et femmes amoureuses ou dissolues_, but this regulation seems to have been no better enforced than all the others.