three years. Accordingly in the accounts of the royal procureurs des encours of Carcassonne we constantly find the confiscations in Albi shared with the bishop. Although between St. John's day 1322 and 1323 this share in money amounted only to one hundred and sixty livres, there were times when it was much greater. About the year 1300 Bishop Bernard de Castanet generously gave to the Dominican Church of Albi his portion of the estates of two citizens, Guillem Aymeric and Jean de Castanet, condemned after death, which amounted to more than one thousand livres. It can readily be imagined that this arrangement with the crown gave rise to constant quarrels. In vain Philippe le Bel, in 1307, ordered the observance of the agreement with restitution for any infractions. In 1316 we find the bishop claiming properties which had not been sold within the three years, and Arnaud Assalit, the procureur, arguing that he had been prevented from effecting sales by just and legitimate causes, when the seneschal, Aymeric de Croso, decided that the impediments had been legitimate, and that the rights of the king were not forfeited.[1]
These were not the only questions arising from this wholesale spoliation which afforded an ample harvest to the legal profession. A suit brought by the bishops of Kodez for some lands held by the crown as heretic confiscations dragged on for thirty years until it reached the Parlement of Paris, which cooUy annulled all the proceedings on the ground that those who had acted for the crown had lacked the requisite authority. Almost equally protracted and confused was a suit between Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Yendome, and the king over the lands of Jean Baudier and Raymond Calverie. The confiscations occurred in 1300 ; in 1327 the suit was still pursuing its weary way, to be finally compromised in 1335.[2]
All prelates were not as rapacious as those of Albi, one of whom we find still, in 1328, complaining of the evasions resorted to by the victims to save a fragment of their property for their
- ↑ A. Molinier (Vaissette, td. Privat, VII. 284-94; VIII. 919).— ColL Doat, XXXIV. 131, 135, 189 ; XXXV. 93.— Urbani PP. IV. Epist. 62 (Martene Thesaur. II. 94).— Bern. Guidon. Hist. Conv. Albiens.— Vaissette, III. Pr. 467, 500.— Arch, de rinq. de Carcass. (Doat, XXXI. 143, 146).
- ↑ C. Molinier, L'Inquisition dans le midi de la France, p. 101. — Les Olim, III. 1126-9, 1440-2. See also I. 920.
