the head of the Fehme as representative of the emperor. The organization then spread rapidly. Every free man born in lawful wedlock and not excommunicated nor an outlaw was eligible for membership. Princes and nobles were initiated; and in 1429 even the Emperor Sigismund himself became "a true and proper of the Holy Roman Empire." There is a manuscript in the Town Hall of the Westphalian town of Soest, which consists of an original Vehmic Court Regulation document, along with illustrations. By the middle of the 14th century these (Latin ), sworn associates of the Fehme, were scattered in thousands throughout the length and breadth of Germany, known to each other by secret signs and pass-words, and all of them pledged to serve the summons of the secret courts and to execute their judgment. Decline and dissolution of the Courts That an organization of this character should have outlived its usefulness and ushered in intolerable abuses, such as corruption was inevitable; from the mid-fifteenth century protests were raised against the enormities of the court. With the growing power of the territorial sovereigns and the gradual improvement of the ordinary process of justice, the functions of the Fehmic courts were superseded. By the action of the Emperor Maximilian and of other German princes they were, in the 16th century, once more restricted to Westphalia, and here, too, they were brought under the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, and finally confined to mere police duties. With these functions, however, but with the old forms long since robbed of their impressiveness, they survived into the 19th century. They were finally abolished by order of Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, in 1811. The last Freigraf died in 1835. Modern use of the term Following the abandonment of the Vehmic courts, the term acquired a connotation of mob rule and lynching. In Modern German, the spelling of Feme is most common. Other variant forms are: Fehme, Feime, Veme. The verb verfemen is in current use and means "to ostracise", i.e. by public opinion rather than formal legal proceeding. A noun derived from this is Verfemter "outlaw, ostracised person". In an 1856 lecture, philosopher Karl Marx used the Vehmic courts as a metaphor to describe his predictions of the working-class revolution that would sweep Europe. Within the politically heated turmoil of the early German Weimar Republic after World War I, the media frequently used the term