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    ambiguity and inconsistency ; but some processes took place before the king , and others before the seigneur , or lord of the district . These judges had a power of punishment , the dreadful abuses and oppression of which were but too well known and felt at the time , though too little remembered in ours . They , as well as the

    seneschals and bailies , who ranked a degree higher than the judge appointed by the feudal tyrants , were entitled to decide in civil cases , subject , however , to appeal to one of the thirteen parliaments of the kingdom ; which , composed solely of judges and public officers of rank , in the appointment of whom the people had no share , were still more unlike what Englishmen conceive

    parliaments ought to be , than those which the alterations occasioned b y the lapse of ages , and the still more innovating and pestilential miasmata of corruption and undue influence , so justly deprived of the confidence , and subjected to reproach and detestation in their own country . The dispensation of justice ( as it was called ) in manorial courts , comprised every species of

    despotism ; the districts indeterminate , appeals endless , litigations multiplied , chicanery triumphant , expenses enormous , and ruin the final lot of most of the suitors . The judges are represented to have been ignorant pretenders , who held their courts in cabarets ( pot-houses ) , and who were the tools of the seigneurs * . In most of the provinces the people were bound to grind their

    corn and to press their grapes at the mill and the press of the lord only , and to bake their bread at no oven but his . Thus , besides the other hardships , vexations , and oppressions , the bread was often spoilt , and the wine more especially , since , in Champaigne , the grapes which , when pressed immediately , would make white wine , often made red wine only , in consequence of waiting

    for the press , which often happened . Amongst other services , almost without end , by which the peasants were tortured in Brittany , there was one called * Silence des Grenouilles , ' which required , that when the lady of the chateau lay in , the people should beat the waters day and night in marshy districts , to keep the frogs silent , that she might not be disturbed f . The administration of justice throughout , says Arthur Young , was partial , venal ,

    infamous ; the conduct of the parliaments profligate and atrocious . In almost every cause which came before them , interest was openly made with the judges ; and woe betided the man who , with a cause to support , had no means of conciliating favour , either b y the beauty of a handsome wife , or by some other method J . These monstrous defects , anomalies , and abuses , had not failed to excite the attention , and to rouse the indignation of some of the most eminent lawyers of France , early in the eighteenth

    cen-* See the representations made to government on this subject about the period of the revolution , by the states of Rennes , Nivernois , and by the tiers etats of Clerroont , Auxerre , Van nee , &c &c . t Youngs Travel * in France , 4 to Edit ., p . 537 , f Idem . No . 73 . C

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    Notices of France . 17

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  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 17, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/17/