Private courts, however, were limited in their power.  They were neither absolutely independent, nor supreme and without appeal.  All conducted their business much in the same way as the high, middle, and lower courts of the Middle Ages; and above all these authorities towered the King’s jurisdiction.  The usurpation of ecclesiastical bishops and abbots—­who, having become temporal lords, assumed a domestic jurisdiction—­was curtailed by the authority of the counts, and they were even more obliged to give way before that of the missi dominici, or the official delegates of the monarch.  Charles the Bald, notwithstanding his enormous concessions to feudalism and to the Church, never gave up his right of final appeal.

During the whole of the Merovingian epoch, the mahl (mallus), the general and regular assembly of the nation, was held in the month of March.  Persons of every class met there clad in armour; political, commercial, and judicial interests were discussed under the presidency of the monarch; but this did not prevent other special assemblies of the King’s court (curia regalis) being held on urgent occasions.  This court formed a parliament (parlamentum), which at first was exclusively military, but from the time of Clovis was composed of Franks, Burgundians, Gallo-Romans, as well as of feudal lords and ecclesiastics.  As, by degrees, the feudal System became organized, the convocation of national assemblies became more necessary, and the administration of justice more complicated.  Charlemagne decided that two mahls should be held annually, one in the month of May, the other in the autumn, and, in addition, that in each county two annual plaids should meet independently of any special mahls and plaids which it should please him to convoke.  In 788, the emperor found it necessary to call three general plaids, and, besides these, he was pleased to summon his great vassals, both clerical and lay, to the four principal feasts of the year.  It may be asserted that the idea of royalty being the central authority in matters of common law dates from the reign of Charlemagne (Fig. 297).

The authority of royalty based on law took such deep root from that time forth, that it maintained itself erect, notwithstanding the weakness of the successors of the great Charles, and the repeated infractions of it by the Church and the great vassals of the crown (Fig. 298).

[Illustration:  Fig. 298.—­Carlovingian King in his Palace personifying Wisdom appealing to the whole Human Race.—­After a Miniature in a Manuscript of the Ninth Century in the Burgundian Library of Brussels, from a Drawing by Count Horace de Vielcastel.]