But the kingship did not alone accomplish this great work. At the very time that the communes were perishing and the kingship was growing, a new power, a new social element, the Third Estate, was springing up in France; and it was called to take a far more important place in the history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to acquire during their short and incoherent existence.
It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it seems that we ought to expect to meet with it. The question was, therefore, submitted to a learned member of the _Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres,_ M. Littre, in fact, whose _Dictionnaire etymologique de la Langur Francaise_ is consulted with respect by the whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the _Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques_ but lately assigned the first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.
M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, “I do not find, in my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century. I quote these two instances of it: ‘As to the third order called third estate . . .’ (_La Noue, Discours,_ p. 541); and ‘clerks and deputies for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).’ (_Coustumier general,_ t. i. p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have--
‘_Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again? In good old ways the Three Estates restrain._’
“At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word status, ‘_Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum, nobilium et universitatum comitatum._’ According to these documents, I think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three orders _tres status_, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that they began to speak in French of the _tiers estat_ (third estate). But I cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by the documents I consulted for my dictionary.”