Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/562

 422 General History of Europe they called it. The Church still continued to collect the tithes from the people, and its vast possessions made it very independent. A great part of the enormous income of the Church went to the higher clergy the bishops, archbishops, and abbots. Since these were appointed by the king, often from among his courtiers, they tended to neglect their duties as officers of the Church and to become little more than "great lords with a hundred thousand francs income." But while they were spend- ing their time at Versailles the real work was performed and well performed by the lower clergy, who often received scarcely enough to keep soul and body together. This explains why, when the Revolution began, the parish priests sided with the people instead of with their ecclesiastical superiors. 735. The Privileges of the Nobility. The privileges of the nobles, like those of the clergy, had originated in the medieval conditions described in an earlier chapter ( 701 ff.). While serf- dom had largely disappeared in France long before the eighteenth century, and the peasants were generally free men who owned or rented their land, the lords still enjoyed, as we have seen, the right to collect a variety of time-honored dues from the inhabitants living within the limits of the former manors ( 405 ff.). The nobles, too, had the exclusive privilege of hunting, which was deemed an aristocratic pastime. The game which they pre- served for their amusement often did great damage to the crops of the peasants, who were forbidden to interfere with hares and deer. Many of the manors had great pigeon houses, built in the form of a tower, in which there were one or two thousand nests. No wonder the peasants detested these, for they were not permitted to protect themselves against the innumerable pigeons and their progeny, which spread over the fields devouring newly sown seed. The higher offices in the army were reserved for the nobles, as well as the easiest and most lucrative places in the Church and in the king's palace. 736. The Third Estate. Everybody who did not belong to either the clergy or the nobility was regarded as being of the Third Estate. The Third Estate was therefore really the nation