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 free throw counts one point; one scored while the ball is in play counts two. Hacking, striking, holding and kicking are foul, but a player may interfere with an opponent who has the ball so long as he uses one arm only and does not hold. A player must throw the ball from where he gets it, no running with it being allowed excepting when continuously bounding it on the floor. Basket-ball is an extremely fast game and admits of a high degree of combination or team-play. The principal qualifications of a good player are quickness of movement and of judgment, coolness, endurance, accuracy and self-control. Good dodging, throwing, passing and team-play are the important requisites of the game, which is looked upon as excellent winter training for outdoor games. Basket-ball, with somewhat modified rules, is extremely popular with young women.

 BASNAGE, JACQUES (1653–1723), French Protestant divine, was the eldest son of the eminent lawyer Henri Basnage, sieur de Franquenay (1615–1695), and was born at Rouen in Normandy in 1653. He studied classical languages at Saumur and afterwards theology at Geneva. He was pastor at Rouen (his native place) from 1676 till 1685, when, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, he obtained leave of the king to retire to Holland. He settled at Rotterdam as a minister pensionary till 1691, when he was chosen pastor of the Walloon church. In 1709 the grand pensionary A. Heinsius (1641–1720) secured his election as one of the pastors of the Walloon church at the Hague, intending to employ him mainly in civil affairs. Accordingly he was engaged in a secret negotiation with Marshal d’Uxelles, plenipotentiary of France at the congress of Utrecht—a service which he executed with so much success that he was entrusted with several important commissions, all of which he discharged with great ability. In 1716 Dubois, who was at the Hague at the instance of the regent Orleans, for the purpose of negotiating the Triple Alliance between France, Great Britain and Holland, sought the advice of Basnage, who, in spite of the fact that he had failed to receive permission to return to France on a short visit the year before, did his best to further the negotiations. The French government also turned to him for help in view of the threatened rising in the Cevennes. Basnage had welcomed the revival of the Protestant church due to the zeal of Antoine Court; but he assured the regent that no danger of active resistance was to be feared from it, and, true to the principles of Calvin, he denounced the rebellion of the (q.v.) in his Instructions pastorales aux Réformés de France sur l’obéissance due aux souverains (Paris, 1720), which was printed by order of the court and scattered broadcast in the south of France. Basnage died on the 22nd of September 1723.

Basnage was a good preacher and a prolific writer. His works include several dogmatic and polemical treatises, but the most important are the historical. Of these may be mentioned Histoire de la religion des églises réformées (Rotterdam, 1690), the Histoire de l’église depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent (ib. 1699)—both of them written from the point of view of Protestant polemics—and, of greater scientific value, the Histoire des Juifs (Rotterdam, 1706, Eng. trans. 1708) and the Antiquités judaiques ou remarques critiques sur la république des Hébreux (1713). He also wrote short explanatory introductions and notes to a collection of copper-plate engravings, much valued by connoisseurs, called Histoires du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament, représentées par des figures gravées en taille-douce par R. de Hooge (Amsterdam, 1704).

 BASOCHE, or, with the analogous forms , and ; from the Lat. basilica, in the sense of law courts, a French gild of clerks, from among whom legal representatives (procureurs) were recruited. This gild was very ancient, even older than the gild of the procureurs, with which it was often at variance. It dated, no doubt, from the time when the profession of procureur (procurator, advocate or legal representative) was still free in the sense that persons rendering that service to others when so permitted by the law were not yet public and ministerial officers. For this purpose there was established near each important juridical centre a group of clerks, that is to say, of men skilled in law (or reputed to be so), who at first would probably fill indifferently the rôles of representative or advocate. Such was the origin of the Basoche of the parlement of Paris; which naturally formed itself into a gild, like other professions and trades in the middle ages. But this organization eventually became disintegrated, dividing up into more specialized bodies: that of the advocates, whose history then begins; and that of legal representatives, whose profession was regularized in 1344, and speedily became a saleable charge. The remnant of the original clerks constituted the new Basoche, which thenceforward consisted only of those who worked as clerks for the procureurs, the richer ones among them aspiring themselves to attain the position of procureur. They all, however, retained some traces of their original conditions. “They are admitted,” writes an 18th-century author, “to plead before M. le lieutenant civil sur les réferés and before M. le juge auditeur; so that the procureurs of these days are but the former clerks of the Basoche, admitted to officiate in important cases in preference to other clerks and to their exclusion.” From its ancient past the Basoche had also preserved certain picturesque forms and names. It was called the “kingdom of the Basoche,” and for a long time its chief, elected each year in general assembly, bore the title of “king.” This he had to give up towards the end of the 16th century, by order, it is said, of Henry III., and was thenceforth called the “chancellor.” The Basoche had besides its maîtres des requêtes, a grand court-crier, a referendary, an advocate-general, a procureur-général, a chaplain, &c. In early days, and until the first half of the 16th century, it was organized in companies in a military manner and held periodical reviews or parades (montres), sometimes taking up arms in the king’s service in time of war. Of this there survived later only an annual cavalcade, when the members of the Basoche went to the royal forest of Bondy to cut the maypole, which they afterwards set up in the court-yard of the Palais. We hear also of satirical and literary entertainments given by clerks of the Palais de Justice, and of the moralities played by them in public, which form an important element in the history of the national theatre; but at the end of the 16th century these performances were restricted to the great hall of the Palais.

To the last the Basoche retained two principal prerogatives. (1) In order to be recognized as a qualified procureur it was necessary to have gone through one’s “stage” in the Basoche, to have been entered by name for ten years on its register. It was not sufficient to have been merely clerk to a procureur during the period and to have been registered at his office. This rule was the occasion of frequent conflicts during the 17th and 18th centuries between the members of the Basoche and the procureurs, and on the whole, despite certain decisions favouring the latter, the parlement maintained the rights of the Basoche. Opinion was favourable to it because the certificats de complaisance issued by the procureurs were dreaded. These certificats held good, moreover, in places where there was no Basoche. (2) The Basoche had judiciary powers recognized by the law. It had disciplinary jurisdiction over its members and decided personal actions in civil law brought by one clerk against another or by an outsider against a clerk. The judgment, at any rate if delivered by a maître des requêtes, was authoritative, and could only be contested by a civil petition before the ancient council of the Basoche. The Châtelet of Paris had its special basoche, which claimed to be older even than that of the Palais de Justice, and there was contention between them as to certain rights. The clerks of the procureurs at the cour des comptes of Paris had their own Basoche of great antiquity, called the “empire de Galilée.” The Basoche of the Palais de Justice had in its ancient days the right to create provostships in localities within the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris, and thus there sprang up a certain number of local basoches. Others were independent in origin; among such being the “regency” of Rouen and the Basoche of the parlement of Toulouse.