364 JOLNVILLE'S MEMOIRS OF SAINT LOUIS IX. [ντ. i. silent, and your causes shall be despatched one after another." Then, oftentimes, he called to him the lord Peter de Fontaines, and the lord Geoffroy de Villette,* and said to them, " Despatch these causes ;" and whenever he heard any thing that could be amended in the speeches of those who pleaded for others, he most graciously corrected them himself. I have likewise seen this good king ofttimes come to the garden of Paris, dressed in a coat of camlet, a surcoat of tyretaine,t without sleeves, and a mantle of black sendal, and have carpets spread for us to sit round him, and hear and discuss the complaints of his people with the same diligence as in the wood of Vincennee. I remember all the prelates of Fran ceJ once assembled at Paris, to speak with the good St. Louis, and to make him a request ; which, when he was told, he went to the palace to hear what they had to say. The meeting being full, it was the bishop Guy d'Auseure, son to the lord William de Melot, who addressed the king, by the unanimous assent of the other prelates, as follows :—"Sire, know that all these prelates, who * This lord was bailiff of Tours in the year 1261, as we learn from a list of the bailiffs of France at Candlemas in that year, and which is in the Chambre des Comptes at Paris. In another of the year 1268, he is mentioned as having been sent ambassador to the republic of Venice. t Tyretaine, tireteine,—a woollen stuff used m the present times, that took its name from the town of Tyre. t This assembly of the prelates of France was induced, according to the lord de Joinville, to remonstrate with the king on the contempt in which the heretics, that is to say, the Albigeois, held the excommunications of the bishops, and to request that they should be compelled to undergo absolution and return by this means to an union with the church under the penalty of seizure and confiscation of their goods, imploring, to effectuate this, the aid and support of the royal authority. The assembly must have been held between the year 1247, when Guy de Mello, bishop of Auxerre, the president of the meeting, took possession of the episcopal throne, and the year 1270, which waa the year of his death. Thus we cannot refer to this assembly the ordinance of St. Louis, which he issued on the same subject in the yesr 1228, and which is to be found in the register of the Trésor des Chartes, Nos. 10, 26, and 27, from which I should be inclined to believe, that the bishops only required in this assembly that this ordinance should be put into execution. The chronicle of the abbots of Castres, published by Dom Lucd'Achcry (in the 7th volume of his Spicilegium), reports some verses which shew that the bishops and other ecclesiastics forced by imprisonment such as were excommunicated to resort to absolution ; but as temporal punishments concerned the secular arm, the royal judges always opposed this mode of punishment, and maintained that it belonged to their sole jurisdiction.