Note 890 — XXI. RESULTS.

There is a tradition that the Abbey of Montariol lost its sovereignty over the inhabitants of the village of that name in consequence of a revolt caused by the monks exacting this feudal right in all its odious cynicism, in place of receiving a payment in commutation as was frequently done. A lively controversy has arisen over the exactness of this tradition, and the Abbé Marcellin, in his edition of Le Bret’s Histoire de Montauban seems to me to have successfully proved its falsity. He admits, however, that in his researches on the subject he has found one case in which an ecclesiastic undertook to enforce his rights to the letter; and the President Boyer, writing in the sixteenth century (Decisiones, No. 17 Decis. 297) asserts that he had seen the proceedings of a lawsuit in which “Rector seu curatus parochialis prætendebat ex consuetudine primam habere sponsæ cognitionem” (Eschbach, Introduction a l’Étude du Droit, § 174). In some remote portions of France the tribute was still exacted “en nature” by temporal seigneurs as late as the sixteenth century, as appears from documents printed by MM. Mazure et Hatoulet (Fors de Béarn, p. 172). Velly (Hist. de France, Paris, 1770, T. III. p. 325) quotes from Laurière a document of 1507 which, in recounting the privileges of the barony of Saint-Martin states that the Comte d’Eu has the “droit de prélibation” there, and Boutaric (Droits Seigneuriaux, Toulouse, 1775, p. 650) remarks that he has met nobles who pretended to possess the right, but that it had been abolished by the courts. In 1854 M. Bouthors, in his “Coutumes locales du bailliage d’Amiens,” chanced to allude to a custom by which the episcopal officers until 1607 exacted a tribute from newly married couples for permission to pass together the first three nights after the wedding—a custom growing out of the old droit de marquette. This aroused the ire of the faithful, and M. Louis Veuillot wrote a treatise in which he emphatically denied that such a right had ever existed, and a lively controversy arose on the subject. M. Lagréze (Hist. du Droit dans les Pyrénées, Paris, 1867, p. 390) has examined the matter thoroughly and the proof which he accumulates of the existence of the right is indisputable, though he denies that it was ever claimed by ecclesiastics.