852 GAME LAWS. 
chapels wherein mass should be said every day.” * The hope 
of shortening the purgatorial term of the young persons, by the 
religious rites to be celebrated in the chapels, was doubtless 
the consideration which operated most powerfully on the mind 
of the king; and Europe lost a great example for the sake of 
a mass. 
The desolation and depopulation, resulting from the exten- 
sion of the forest and the enforcement of the game laws, ir. 
duced several of the French kings to consent to some relaxation 
of the severity of these latter. Francis I., however, revived 
their barbarous provisions, and, according to Bonnemére, even 
so good a monarch as Henry IV. re-enacted them, and “ signed 
the sentence of death upon peasants guilty of having defended 
their fields against devastation by wild beasts.” “A fine of 
twenty livres,’ he continues, “ was imposed on every one shoot- 
ing at pigeons, which, at that time, swooped down by thousands 
upon the new-sown fields and devoured the seed. But let us 
count even this a progress, for we have seen that the murder of 
a pigeon had been a capital crime.” + 
Not only were the slightest trespasses on the forest domain-—— 
the cutting of an oxgoad, for instance—severely punished, but 
game animals were still sacred when they had wandered from 
* GUILLAUME DE NANGIS, as quoted in the notes to JOINVILLE, Nouvelle 
Collection des Mémoires, ete., par Michaud et Poujoulat, premicre série, i., p. 
330. 
Persons acquainted with the character and influence of the medieval clergy 
will hardly need to be informed that the ten thousand livres never found 
their way to the royal exchequer. It was easy to prove to the simple-minded 
king that, as the profits of sin were a monopoly of the church, he ought not 
to derive advantage from the commission of a crime by one of his subjects; 
and the priests were cunning enough both to secure to themselves the amount 
of the fine, and to extort from Louis large additional grants to carry out the 
purposes to which they devoted the money. ‘‘ And though the king did take 
the moneys,’’ says the chronicler, ‘‘he put them not into his treasury, but 
turned them into good works; for he builded therewith the maison-Dieu of 
Pontoise, and endowed the same with rents and lands; also the schools and 
the dormitory of the friars preachers of Paris, and the monastery of the 
Minorite friars.” 
+ Listoire des Paysans, ii., p. 290. 
