The relation of the Inquisition to confiscation varied essentially with time and place. In France the principle derived from the Roman law was generally recognized, that the title to property devolved to the fisc as soon as the crime had been committed. There was therefore nothing for the inquisitor to do with regard to it. He simply ascertained and announced the guilt of the accused and left the State to take action. Thus Gui Foucoix treats the subject as one wholly outside of the functions of the inquisitor, who at most can only advise the secular ruler or intercede for mercy ; while he holds that those only are legally exempt from forfeiture who come forward spontaneously and confess before any evidence has been taken against them. In accordance with this, there is, as a rule, no allusion to confiscation in the sentences of the French Inquisition, though in one or two instances chance has preserved for us, in the accounts of the procureurs des encours, or royal stewards of the confiscations, evidence that estates were sold and covered into the fisc in cases in which the forfeiture is not specified in the sentence. In condemnations of absentees and of the dead, confiscation is occasionally declared, as though in these the State might need some guidance, but even here the practice is not uniform. In a sentence issued by Guillem Arnaud and Etienne de S. Thibery, November 24, 1241, on two absentees, their estates are adjudged to whom it may concern. In the Register of Bernard de Caux (1246-1248), in thirty-two cases of contumacious absentees confiscation is included in the sentence, and in nine similar ones it is omitted, as well as in one hundred and fifty-nine condemnations to prison in which it was undoubtedly operative. In the Inquisition of Carcassonne, a sentence of December 12, 1328, on five deceased persons, who would have been imprisoned had they lived, ends with "et eonsequenter hona ipsorum dicimus confuscajda" while a previous sentence, February 24, 1325, identical in character, on four defunct culprits, has no such corollary appended. In fact, strictly speaking, it was recognized that the in-
crime, it descended to the heirs (Feudor. Lib. i. Tit. xxiii.-iv.). In Navarre, confiscation formed part of the penalties of suicide, murder, treason, and even of blows or wounds inflicted where the queen or royal children were dwelling. There is a case in which confiscation was enforced on a man because he struck another at Olite, which was within a league of Tafalla, where the queen chanced to be staying at the time (G. B. de Lagrèze, La Navarre Française II. 335).
