Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the _Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France,_ seven, at the least, are great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances, and abuses of the feudal system.

Many other of St.Louis's legislative and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes of the _Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois,_ or in similar collections, and the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still remaining unpublished in various archives.

As for the large collection of legislative enactments known by the name of _Etailissements de Saint Louis,_ it is probably a lawyer's work, posterior, in great part at least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of law of St.Louis's date and collected by his order, although the paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and as if it had been dictated by him.
Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the _Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France,_ as having originated with St.Louis.

Its object is, first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules, internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict "the exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the Church of our kingdom." The authenticity of this act, vigorously maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his _Defense de la Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682,_ chap.ix.

t.xliii.