The condition of the Church changed greatly during this period. The jurisdiction of the _officialités_ was very much reduced, even over the clergy. They ceased to be competent to judge actions concerning the possession of real property, in which the clergy were defendants. In criminal law the theory of the _cas privilégié_, which appears in the 14th century, enabled the royal judges to take action against and judge the clergy for all serious crimes, though without the power of inflicting any penalties but arbitrary fines, the ecclesiastical judge remaining competent, in accordance with the privileges of clergy, to try the offender for the same crime as what was technically called a _délit commun_. The development of jurisprudence gradually removed from the _officialités_ causes of a purely secular character in which laymen only were concerned, such as wills and contracts; and in matrimonial cases their jurisdiction was limited to those in which the _foedus matrimonii_ was in question. For the acquisition of real property by ecclesiastical establishments the consent of the king to the amortizement was always necessary, even in the case of allodial lands; and if it was a case of feudal tenures the king and the direct overlords alone kept their rights, the intermediate lords being left out of the question.
As regards the conferring of ecclesiastical benefices, from the 14th century onwards the papacy encroached more and more upon the rights of the bishops, in whose gift the inferior benefices generally were, and of the electors, who usually conferred the superior benefices; at the same time it exacted from newly appointed incumbents heavy dues, which were included under the generic name of annates (q.v.). During the Great Schism of the Western Church, these abuses became more and more crying, until by a series of edicts, promulgated with the consent and advice of the parlement and the clergy, the Gallican Church was restored to the possession of its former liberties, under the royal authority. Thus France was ready to accept the decrees of reform issued by the council of Basel (q.v.), which she did, with a few modifications, in the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII., adopted after a solemn assembly of the clergy and nobles at Bourges and registered by the parlement of Paris in 1438. It suppressed the annates and most of the means by which the popes disposed of the inferior benefices: the reservations and the _gratiae expectativae_. For the choice of bishops and abbots, it restored election by the chapters and convents. The Pragmatic Sanction, however, was never recognized by the papacy, nor was it consistently and strictly applied by the royal power. The transformation of the civil and criminal law under the influence of Roman and canon law had become more and more marked. The production of the _coutumiers_, or _livres de pratiques_, also continued. The chief of them were: in the 14th century, the _Stylus Vetus Curiae Parlamenti_ of Guillaume de Breuil; the _Très ancienne coutume de Bretagne_; the _Grand Coutumier de France_, or _Coutumier de Charles VI._; the _Somme rural_ of Boutillier; in the 15th century, for Auvergne, the _Practica forensis_ of Masuer. Charles VII., in an article of the Grand Ordonnance of Montil-les-Tours (1453), ordered the general customs to be officially recorded under the supervision of the crown. It was an enormous work, which would almost have transformed them into written laws; but up to the 16th century little recording was done, the procedure established by the Ordonnance for the purpose not being very suitable.
