In 1779 an obscure lawyer of Lucé complained in very bitter language, which already had a flavour of the revolution, that the curés and other great titheholders sold to the farmers, at an exorbitant price, the straw they had received in tithe, which was indispensable to the latter for making manure. Note (XI.)--Page 25, line 15. EXAMPLE OF THE MANNER IN WHICH THE CLERGY ALIENATED THE PEOPLE BY THE EXERCISE OF ITS PRIVILEGES. In 1780 the prior and the canons of the priory of Laval complained of an attempt to subject them to the payment of the tariff duties on articles of consumption, and on the materials needed for the repairs of their buildings. They pleaded that as the tariff duties represented the _taille_, and as they were exempt from the _taille_, they therefore owed nothing. The minister referred them to a decision at the election, with the right of appeal to the _Cour des Aides_. Note (XII.)--Page 25, line 23. FEUDAL RIGHTS POSSESSED BY PRIESTS.--ONE EXAMPLE FROM AMONGST A THOUSAND. _Abbey of Cherbourg_ (1753).--This abbey possessed at this period the seignorial rent-charges, payable in money or in kind in almost every parish round Cherbourg; one single village owed it three hundred and six bushels of wheat. It owned the barony of Ste. Geneviève, the barony and the seignorial mill of Bas-du-Roule, and the barony of Neuville-au-Plein, situated at a distance of at least ten leagues. It received moreover the tithes of twelve parishes in the peninsula, of which several were very distant from it. Note (XIII.)--Page 27, line 21. IRRITATION AMONG THE PEASANTS CAUSED BY FEUDAL RIGHTS, AND ESPECIALLY BY THE FEUDAL RIGHTS OF THE PRIESTS. The following letter was written shortly before the Revolution by a farmer to the Intendant himself. It cannot be quoted as an authority for the truth of the facts which it alleges, but it is a perfect indication of the state of feeling among the class to which its writer belonged. ‘Although we have few nobles in this part of the country,’ says he, ‘you must not suppose that the land is any the less burdened with rent-charges; far from it, almost all the fiefs belong to the cathedral, to the archbishopric, to the College of St. Martin, to the Benedictines of Noirmoutiers, of Saint Julien, and other ecclesiastics, who never suffer them to lapse from disuse, but perpetually hatch fresh ones out of musty old parchments which are manufactured God only knows how! ‘The whole country is infected with rent-charges. The greater part of the land owes annually a seventh of wheat per half acre, others owe wine; one has to send a quarter of his fruit to the seigneurie, another the fifth, &c., the tithe being always previously deducted; this man a twelfth, that a thirteenth. All these rights are so strange that I know them of all amounts, from a fourth to a fortieth of the fruit. ‘What is to be said of the dues payable in all kinds of grain, vegetables, money, poultry, labour, wood, fruit, candles?