The parliaments stood in great awe of the bishops
Once set foot within the refuge, and the person of the criminal was sacred; but he had to beware of leaving it— one step outside the sanctuary, and he fell back into the waters. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado, kept close guard round the place of refuge, watching incessantly for their prey, like sharks about a vessel. Thus, men under sentence of death had been known to grow gray in a cloister, on the stairs of a palace, in the grounds of an abbey, under the porch of a church— in so far, the sanctuary itself was but a prison under another name.
It sometimes happened that a solemn decree of parliament would violate the sanctuary, and reconsign the condemned into the hands of the executioner; but this was of rare occurrence. The parliaments stood in great awe of the bishops, and if it did come to a brush between the two robes, the gown generally had the worst of it against the cassock. Occasionally, however, as in the case of the assassination of Petit-Jean, the executioner of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice would overleap the barriers of the Church, and pass on to the execution of its sentence. But, except armed with a decree of parliament, woe betide him who forcibly violated a place of sanctuary! We know what befell Robert de Clermont, Marshal of France, and Jean de Chalons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet it was only about a certain Perrin Marc, a money-changer’s assistant and a vile assassin; but the two marshals had forced the doors of the Church of Saint-Méry— therein lay the enormity of the transgression.
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