law of 1807 on bankruptcy and insolvency was abrogated, and an entirely new law was promulgated, which now forms Book III of the Code de Commerce (Des Faillites et Banqueroutes). In France, the Tribunal of Commerce acts as a court of bankruptcy, and its judgment declares the insolvency (faillite). The same judgment names the "juge-com person can be heard against it. If the bankruptcy is decreed, the bankrupt's property is vested in an assignee. The bankrupt is allowed to retain his necessary household and kitchen furniture, and such other articles as the assignee shall think proper, with reference to the family, condition, and circumstances of the bankrupt, but the whole is not to exceed 300 dollars in value: the wearing-missaire," who is a member of the Triapparel of the bankrupt, his wife, and bunal, and discharges duties analogous to children, may also be retained by him in those formerly performed in England by addition. An appeal lies to the court from the old commissioners of bankruptcy: he the decision of the assignee in this mat- fixes the sum to be allowed to the trader ter. The bankrupt next petitions for a for support, conducts the examination full discharge from all his debts, and a into the affairs of the estate, directs the certificate thereof, and after seventy sale of property, &c. In some cases an days' public notice, and personal service appeal lies from his decisions to the Trior notice by letter to each creditor, the bunal of Commerce. The "syndics" act petition comes on for hearing. The as assignees, but are not selected from grounds for refusing the bankrupt his the body of creditors, and they are re discharge and certificate are the same munerated for their services at the disgenerally as those which disentitle a cretion of the Tribunal. As the expense bankrupt in this country to the favour of prosecuting fraudulent bankrupts, whet able consideration of the court-conceal- successful, is defrayed by the state, miment of property, fraudulent preference nutes, &c. of each case are made when of creditors, falsification of books, &c. ever required, for the use of the publie In cases of voluntary bankruptcy a pre-department which has cognizance of ference given to one creditor over another disentitles the bankrupt to his discharge, unless the same be assented to by a majority of those who have not been preferred. If at the hearing a majority pro secutions in bankruptcy; and the report which the syndics make to the "juge commissaire" on the state of the trader's affairs is always transmitted with ob servations to the “procureur du roi.” of the creditors in number and value file A trader may be declared insolvent at their written dissent to the allowance of the instance of one or more of his credithe bankrupt's certificate and discharge, tors; but if he ceases to fulfil his engage he may demand a trial by jury, or may ments he is required to make a declaration appeal to the next circuit court; and of insolvency before the Tribunal of Com upon a full hearing of the parties, and merce, accompanied by a statement of his proof that the bankrupt has conformed affairs. The Tribunal next appoints a to the bankrupt laws, the court is bound "juge-commissaire" for this particular to decree him his discharge and grant case, and also provisional syndies. A him a certificate. The discharge and "juge de paix" is then required to place certificate are equivalent to the certificate his seal on the effects, and the trader granted to bankrupts in England. In himself is taken to a debtors' prison, or case of a second bankruptcy the bank-placed in custody of an officer; though, rupt is not entitled to his discharge unless 75 per cent. has been paid on the debt of each creditor which shall have been allowed. Persons who work for wages are only entitled to wages to the extent of twenty-five dollars each out of a bankrupt's estate for labour done within six months next before the bankruptcy. France. In June, 1888, the French when a voluntary declaration of insol vency has been made, he is not deprived of his liberty. The last meeting of creditors is held for the purpose of hearing a report by the syndics of their proceedings, and of del berating on the concordat, which is in most respects equivalent to a certificate in the English bankrupt law, and must be signed at this meeting, at which the trader must be present. The syndics oppose or favour the concordat as the case may be. The concordat requires the consent of a majority of the creditors who also represent three-fourths of the whole debts that are proved. There can be no concordat in the case of fraudulent bankruptcy. The concordat is incomplete until it has received the sanction of the Tribunal of Commerce, acting upon the report of the juge-commissaire. This completion of the process is called the "homologation ;" and, after giving a statement to the trader, showing the result of their labours, in presence of the juge-commissaire, the functions of the syndics cease. The trader may be prosecuted for fraudulent bankruptcy after the homologation. The term "Banqueroute" is applied in the French code to insolvency which is clearly traceable to imprudence or extravagance, and the bankrupt is liable to prosecution. The Code de Commerce declares that any trader against whom the following circumstances are proved is guilty of Simple bankruptcy : -If his personal or household expenses have been excessive; if large sums have been lost in gambling, stock-jobbing, or mercantile speculations; if, in order to avoid bankruptcy, goods have been purchased with a view of selling them below the market price; or if money has been borrowed at excessive interest; or if, after being insolvent, some of the creditors have been favoured at the expense of the rest. In the following cases also the trader is declared a Simple bankrupt :-1. If he has contracted, without value received, greater obligations on account of another person than his means or prospects rendered prudent. 2. A bankruptcy for a second time, without having satisfied the obligations of a preceding concordat. 3. If the trader has failed to make a voluntary declaration of insolvency within three days of the cessation of his payments, or if the declaration of insolvency contained fraudulent statements. 4. If he failed to appear at the meeting of the syndics. 5. If he has kept bad books, although without fraudulent intent. It is fraudulent bankruptcy when an insolvent has secreted his books, con cealed his property, made over or misrepresented the amount of his capital, or made himself debtor for sums which he did not owe. A fraudulent bankrupt who flees to England may be surrendered under the CONVENTION TREATY. It has been decided by the French_tribunals that a certificate obtained in England by an English trader who flees to France does not free him from the demands of a French creditor who has not been a party to it. BANNERET, an English name of dignity, now nearly if not entirely extinct. It denoted a degree which was above that expressed by the word miles or knight, and below that expressed by the word baro or baron. Milles, speaking of English dignities, says that the banneret was the last among the greatest and the first of the second rank. Many writs of the early kings of England run to the earls, barons, bannerets, and knights. When the order of baronet was instituted, an order with which we must be careful not to confound the banneret, precedence was given to the baronet above all bannerets, except those who were made in the field, under the banner, the king being present. This clause in the baronet's patent brings before us one mode in which the banneret was created. He was a knight so created in the field, and it is believed that this honour was conferred usually as a reward for some particular service. Thus, in the fifteenth of King Edward III., John de Copeland was made a banneret for his service in taking David Bruce, king of Scotland, at the battle of Durham. John Chandos, a name which continually oc curs in the history of the wars of the Black Prince, and who performed many signal acts of valour, was created a ban neret by the Black Prince and Don Pedro of Castile. It is in the reign of Edward III. that we hear most of the dignity of banneret. Reginald de Cobham and William de la Pole were by him created bannerets. In this last instance the creation was not in the field, nor for military services, for De la Pole was a merchant of Hull, and his services consisted in supplying the king with money have represented the banneret as having been so called as being a knight entitled to bear a hanner in the field; or, in other words, a knight whose quota of men to be furnished to the king's army for the lands he held of him were of that num tuted of itself a body of men sufficient to have their own leader. In England it is believed there were few tenants bringing any considerable number of men who were not of the rank of the barones. BANNS OF MARRIAGE. [MAR RIAGE.] for his continental expeditions. We have therefore here an instance of a second mode by which a banneret might be created, that is, by patent-grant from the king. Milles mentions a third mode, which prevails also on the Continent. When the king intended to create a ban-ber (it is uncertain what) which constineret, the person about to receive the dignity presented the sovereign with a swallow-tailed banner rolled round the staff; the king unrolled it, and, cutting off the ends, delivered it a bannière quarrée to the new banneret, who was thenceforth entitled to use the banner of higher dignity. Sometimes the grant of the dignity was followed by the grant of means by which to support it. This was the case with some of those above mentioned. De la Pole received a munificent gift, the manor of Burstwick in Holderness, and 500 marks annual fee, issuing out of the port of Hull. (Dugdale's Baronage. vol. ii. p. 183.) The rank of the banneret is well understood, but what particular privilege he enjoyed above other knights is not now known. It was a personal honour; and yet in De la Pole's patent it is expressed that the grant was made to him to enable him and his heirs the better to support his dignity. But the patent was perhaps irregular, as it seems to have been surrendered. No catalogue has been formed of persons admitted into this order, and it is presumed that they were few. The institution of the order of baronets probably contributed greatly to the abolition of the banneret. The knights of the Order of the Bath in modern times approach nearest to the bannerets of former days. In the civil wars, Captain John Smith, who rescued the king's standard at the battle of Edgehill, is said to have been created a banneret. When King George III. intended to proceed to the Nore, in 1797, to visit Lord Duncan's fleet, it was rumoured that he designed to create several of the officers bannerets. The weather was unfavourable and the king returned without reaching the fleet; but the dignity which he conferred on Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) Trollope, in whose vessel he sailed, was understood to be that of a knight banneret. The French antiquaries since Pasquier BAR (in French, Barreau) is a term applied, in a court of justice, to an enclosure made by a strong partition of timber, three or four feet high, with the view of preventing the persons engaged in the business of the court from being incommoded by the crowd. It has been sup posed to be from the circumstance of the counsel standing there to plead in the causes before the court, that those lawyers who have been called to the bar, or admitted to plead, are termed barristers, and that the body collectively is denominated the bar, but these terms are more probably to be traced to the arrangements in the Inns of Court. [BARRISTER; INNS OF COURT.] Prisoners are also placed for trial at the same place; and hence the practice aros of addressing them as the "prisoners at the bar." The term bar is similarly applied in the houses of parliament to the breast-high partition which divides from the body of the respective houses a space near the door, beyond which none but the members and clerks are admitted. To these bars witnesses and persons who have been ordered into custody for breaches of privilege are brought; and counsel stand there when admitted to plead before the respective houses. The Commons go to the bar of the House of Lords to hear the king's speech at the opening and close of a session. A trial at bar is one which takes place before all the judges at the bar of the court in which the action is brought. BARBARIAN. The Greek term BáoBapos (barbaros) appears originally to have been applied to language, signifying a mode of speech which was unintelli The barbers of London were first incorporated by King Edward IV. in 1461, and at that time were the only persons who exercised surgery; but afterwards others, assuming the practice of that art, formed themselves into a voluntary asso gible to the Greeks; and it was perhaps an imitative word intended to represent a confused and indistinct sound. (Iliad, ii. 867; and Strabo, cited and illustrated in the Philological Museum, vol. i. p. 611.) Barbaros, it will be observed, is formed by a repetition of the same syllable, bar-ciation, which they called the Company bar-os. Afterwards, however, when all the races and states of Greek origin obtained a common name, it obtained a general negative sense, and expressed all persons who were not Greeks. (Thucydides, i. 3.) At the same time as the Greeks made much greater advances in civilization, and were much superior in natural capacity to their neighbours, the word barbarus obtained an accessary sense of inferiority both in cultivation and in native faculty, and thus implied something more than the term evós, or foreigner. At first the Romans were included among the barbarians; then barbari signified all who were not Romans or Greeks. In the middle ages, after the fall of the Western empire, it was applied to the Teutonic races who overran the countries of western Europe, who did not consider it as a term of reproach, since they adopted it themselves, and used it in their own codes of law as an appellation of the Germans as opposed to the Romans. At a later period it was applied to the Moors, and thus an extensive tract on the north of Africa obtained the name of Barbary. Barbarian, in modern languages, means a person in a low state of civilization, without any reference to the place of his birth, so that the native of any country might be said to be in a state of barharism. The word has thus entirely lost its primitive and proper meaning of nonGrecian, or non-Roman, and is used exclusively in that which was once its accessary and subordinate sense of rude and uncivilized. BARBER-SURGEONS. In former times, both in this and other countries, the art of surgery and the art of shaving went hand in hand. As to the barbierschirurgiens in France, see the Diction.des Origines, tom. i. p. 189. They were se parated from the barbiers-perruquiers in the time of Louis XIV., and made a distinct corporation. of Surgeons of London. These two companies were, by an act of parliament passed in the 32 Henry VIII. c. 41, united and made one body corporate, by the name of the Barbers and Surgeons of London. This act however at once united and separated the two crafts. The barbers were not to practise surgery further than drawing of teeth; and the surgeons were strictly prohibited from exercising "the feat or craft of barbery or shaving." The surgeons were allowed yearly to take, at their discretion, the bodies of four persons after execution for felony, "for their further and better knowledge, instruction, insight, learning, and experience in the said science or faculty of surgery;" and they were moreover ordered to have " an open sign on the street-side where they should fortune to dwell, that all the king's liege people there passing might know at all times whither to resort for remedies in time of their necessity." Four governors or masters, two of them surgeons, the other two barbers, were to be elected from the body, who were to see that the respective members of the two crafts exercised their callings in the city agreeably to the spirit of the act. The privileges of this Company were confirmed in various subsequent charters, the last bearing date the 15th of April, 5th Charles I. By the year 1745 it was discovered that the two arts which the Company professed were foreign to and independent of each other. The barbers and the surgeons were accordingly separated by act of parliament, 18th Geo. II., and made two distinct corporations. (Pennant's London, p. 255; Stat. of the Realm, vol. i. p. 794; Edmondson's Compl. Body of Heraldry; Strype's edit. of Stow's Survey of London, b. v. ch. 12.) BARKERS. [AUCTION.] BARON, BARONY. Sir Henry Spelman (Glossarium, 1626, voce Baro) regards the word Baron as a corruption of the Latin vir: but it is a distinct Latin | But the word had acquired a restricted sense before its introduction into England, and probably it would not be easy to find any use of it in English affairs in which it denoted the whole male population, but rather some particular class, and that an eminent class. Of these by far the most important is the class of persons who held lands of a superior by military and other honourable services, and who were bound to attendance in the courts of that superior to do homage, and to assist in the various business transacted there. The proper designation of these persons was the Barons. A few instances selected from many will be sufficient to prove this point. Spelman quotes from the Book of Ramsey a writ of King Henry I., in which he speaks of the Barons of the honour of Ramsey. In the earliest of the Pipe Rolls in the Exchequer, which has been shown by its late editor to belong to the thirty-first year of King Henry I., there is mention of the barons of Blithe, meaning the great tenants of the lord of that honour, now call the honour of Tickhill. Selden (Titles of Honour, 4to. edit. p. 275) quotes a charter of William, Earl of Gloucester, in the time of Henry II., which is addressed "Dapifero suo et omnibus baronibus suis et hominibus Francis et Anglis," meaning the persons who held lands of him. The court itself in which these tenants had to perform their ser vices is called to this day the Court Baron, more correctly the court of the Barons, the Curia Baronum. What these barons were to the earls, and other eminent persons whose lands they held, that the earls and those eminent persons were to the king: that is, as the earls and bishops, and other great landowners, to use a modern expression, had beneath them a number of persons holding portions of their lands for certain services to be rendered in the field or in the court, so the lands which those earls and great people possessed were held by them of the king, to whom they had in return certain services to perform of pre cisely the same kind with those which they exacted from their tenants; and as those tenants were barons to them, so were they barons to the king. But, in asmuch as these persons were, both in property and in dignity, superior to the persons who were only barons to them, the term became almost exclusively, in com mon language, applied to them; and when we read of the barons in the early his tory of the Norman kings of England, we are to understand the persons who held lands immediately of the king, and had certain services to perform in return Few things are of more importance to those who would understand the early history and institutions of England, than to obtain a clear idea of what is mean! by the word baron, as it appears in the writers on the affairs of the first two cen turies and a half after the Conquest. They were the tenants in chief of the crown But to make this more intelligible, we may observe that, after the Conquest there was an actual or a fictitious assump tion of absolute property in the whole territory of England by the king. The few exceptions in peculiar circumstances need not here be noticed. The king, thus in possession, granted out the greatest portion of the soil within a few years after the death of Harold and his own es tablishment on the throne. The persons to whom he made these grants were, 1. The great ecclesiastics, the prelates, and the members of the monastic institutions, whom probably, in most instances, be only allowed to retain, under a different species of tenure, what had been settled |