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* COURT. 1715 he convoked the first Synod of the Desert. In 1724 further fury was hurled at the Protes- tants in a decree which assumed that there were no Protestants in France, and prohibited the most secret exercise of the Refonned religion. A price was set ou Court's head, and in 1729 he tied to Lausanne. There, after great exertion, he founded a college for the education of the clergj-, of which, during the remaining thirty years of his life, he was the chief director. This college sent forth all the pastors of the Reformed Church of France until the close of the eigh- teenth century. He died at Lausanne, June 13, 1700. Court intended to write a history of Protestantism, and made extensive collections for the purpose; but he did not live to do the work. He 'rote, however. An Historical Memorial of the Most Remarkable Proceedings Against the Protestants in France from 17^-51 (Eng. trans., London, 1732) : Histoire des troubles des Cc- vcnnes ou de la guerre dee Camisards (1700; new ed., Alais, 1819, 3 vols.). Consult his Auto- biography, ed. by E. Ungues (Toulouse, 1885) ; his Letters, froni 1739, ed. by C.'Dardier (Paris, 1885, 1891) ; E. Hugues, Antoine Court (Paris, 1872) ; id., Les st/nodcs du desert (3 vols., Paris, 1885-80) ; and H. M. Baird, The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Kantes (New York, 1895). His only son, Antoine Court de GfiBELiN (born at Nlmes .January 25, 1725, died in Paris May 10, 1784), who took the name of his grandmother, was a literary man of recog- nized rank, and rendered excellent sei-'ice, first as his father's amanuensis and assistant and afterwards as a scholar at the capital. He is remembered in connection with the famous case of Jean Calas (q.v.) by his work Les Tou- lousaines, ou left res historiques et apologetiques en faveur de la religion r^formce (Lausanne, 1763). COURTAT, koor'ta', Louis ( 1847— ). A French painter. He was born in Paris and studied there under Cabanel. He has exhibited frequently at the Salon, and his "Leda" (1874) was bought by the French Government for the Luxembourg. COURT BARON (Lat.' Curia Baronis). The domestic court of the lord of a manor. Such courts were incident to every manor, barony, or lordship of land, in the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, and in subsequent ages came to be regarded as the characteristic and essential quajity of a manor, insomuch that Coke declares that '"a court baron is the chief prop md pillar of a manor, which no sooner faileth, but the manor faileth to the ground." Being of customary origin, and custom being a mat- ter of immemorial usage, no new courts baron, and consequently no new manors, can be created, and it is asserted by Blackstone that all manors existing in his time "must have existed as early as King Edward the First." However this may be, the manorial courts of which we have any knowledge are of gi-eat antiquity, though those that remain have by successive acts of Parlia- ment and social changes been reduced to mere shadows of their former authority and impor- tance, most of them having to-day only a nomi- nal existence. The court baron was and is the court of the freeholders of the manor, as distinguished from the villeins and copyholders. The lord, or his 508 COURT FOOL. steward, is the presiding officer of the court, which is composed of those freehold tenants of the manor who owe, as one of the services or incidents of their tenure, the service of 'suit,' or attendance, at the court. While the judicial functions of the court varied considerably, ac- cording to the customs of the manor, in general it e.Kercised an ordinary jurisdiction in civil suits among the tenants of the manor, deter- mined proprietary rights to land, regulated rights of common, sanctioned grants of the waste, etc. Until the reform of legal pro- cedure in England in 1833, the great proprietary action for the recovery of land, known as the 'writ of right,' was properly instituted in the court baron, though the great authority of the regular tribun.als of the kingdom had long since brought safer and more convenient processes within the reach of persons asserting claims to land. Many of the' manorial courts have died out from the lack of a competent number of 'suitors,' i.e. freemen subject to do suit at court. A species of court baron existed in the manors created by royal patent in the Province of New York in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were modeled after the historic courts baron of the mother country, and for a time en- joyed considerable authority. They were abol- ished with the manors to which they were in- cident in the revolutionary legislation of 1787. Consult: Bolton, History of the Several Towns, Manors, and •Patents of the County of West- chester, Xcw York : Digby, Histoni of the Law of Real Property (5th ed., Oxford, 1898) ; Pollock and Maitland, Histori/ of Enalish Law (2d ed., London, 1899); Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts (Selden Society, 1889), In- troduction : Gurdon, History. . . of Court Baron and Court Leet (London, 1731). See Court Leet; Custom.rt Law; SLvnor. COURT BEGGAR, The. A play by Richard Brome (1032). COURTENAY, kert'na, Edward Henrt (1803-53). An American mathematician, bom iu Maryland. He graduated in 1821 at the United States Military Academy, where until 1824 he was an assistant professor. In 1829-34 he was professor of natural and experimental philosophy there, in 1834-30, professor of mathe- matics at the LTniversity of Pennsylvania, and in 1842-53 professor of mathematics at the Uni- versity of Virginia. He was an engineer in the construction, in 1837-41, of Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, and in 1841-42 was chief en- gineer of the dry-dock work in the Brooklyn Navy-yard. He translated and edited the Ele- mentary Treatise on Meclianics of Boucharlat (1833), and prepared a Treatise on the Differ- ential and Integral Calculus, and the Calculus of Variations (1855). COURTESY. See Curtest. COURTESY TITLES. See Title.? of Honor. COURT TOOL. From very ancient times there existed a class of persons whose business it was to while away the time of the noble and the Avealthy, particularly at table, by jests and witty sayings. The custom is so old that it is mentioned in the great Sanskrit epic Ramayana (q.v.). Plutarch speaks of a jester owned by the King of Persia. Philip of Macedon, Attiln. Harun-al-Rasehid. and even Montezimia employed them. Only with the Middle Ages,- however, did