Sometimes, in late medieval and early France, a gathering termed an 'Estates General' was called. This was a representative body designed to rubber-stamp the decisions of the king. It was not a parliament as the English would understand it, and it often didn't do what the monarch was hoping for, and by the late eighteenth century had fallen out of royal favor. This 'Estates General' divided the representatives who came to it into three, and this division was often applied to French society as a whole. The First Estate was comprised of the clergy, the Second Estate the nobility, and the Third Estate everyone else.
