VOLUME IX SLICE V "English History" (continued 3)

A great landmark in the constitutional history of England was reached when Langton assembled the leading barons, rehearsed to them the charter issued by Henry I. on his accession, and pointed out to them the rights Opposition of the barons. and liberties therein promised by the crown to the nation. For the future they agreed to take this document as their programme of demands. It was the first of the many occasions in English history when the demand for reform took the shape of a reference back to old precedents, and now (as on all subsequent occasions) the party which opposed the crown read back into the ancient grants which they quoted a good deal more than had been actually conceded in them. To Langton and the barons the charter of Henry I. seemed to cover all the customs and practices which had grown up under the rule of the bureaucracy which had served Henry II. and Richard I. A correct historical perspective could hardly be expected from men whose constitutional knowledge only ran back as far as the memory of themselves and their fathers. The Great Charter of 1215 was a commentary on, rather than a reproduction of, the old accession pledges of Henry I.

Meanwhile John, leaving his barons to discuss and formulate their grievances, pushed on with a great scheme of foreign alliances, by which he hoped to crush Philip of France, even though the aid of the feudal levies of England Alliance against France. was denied him. He leagued himself with his nephew the emperor Otto IV. (his sister’s son), and the counts of Flanders and Boulogne, with many other princes of the Netherlands. Their plan was that John should land in Poitou and distract the attention of the French by a raid up the Loire, while the emperor and his vassals should secretly mobilize a great army in Brabant and make a sudden dash at Paris. The scheme was not destitute of practical ability, and if it had been duly carried out would have placed France in such a crisis of danger as she has seldom known. It was not John’s fault that the campaign failed. He sent the earl of Salisbury with some of his mercenaries to join the confederates in Flanders, while he sailed with the main body of them to La Rochelle, whence he marched northward, devastating the land before him. Philip came out to meet him with the whole levy of France (April 1214), and Paris would have been left exposed if Otto and his Netherland vassals had struck promptly in. But the emperor was late, and by the time that he was approaching the French frontier Philip Augustus had discovered that John’s invasion was but a feint, executed by an army too weak to do much harm. Leaving a small containing force on the Loire in face of the English king, Philip hurried to the north with his main army, and on the 27th Battle of Bouvines. of July 1214 inflicted a crushing defeat on the emperor and his allies at Bouvines near Lille. This was the greatest victory of the French medieval monarchy. It broke up the Anglo-German alliance, and gave the conqueror undisturbed possession of all that he had won from the Angevin house and his other enemies.

Indirectly Bouvines was almost as important in the history of England as in that of France. John returned to England foiled, and in great anger; he resolved to give up the French war, secured a truce with King Philip by Magna Carta. abandoning his attempt to reconquer his lost lands on the Loire, and turned to attack the recalcitrant subjects who had refused to join him in his late campaign beyond the Channel. Matters soon came to a head: on hearing that the king was mobilizing his mercenary bands, the barons met at Bury St Edmunds, and leagued themselves by an oath to obtain from the king a confirmation of the charter of Henry I. (November 1214). At the New Year they sent him a formal ultimatum, to which he would not assent, though he opened up futile negotiation with them through the channel of the archbishop, who did not take an open part in the rising. At Easter, nothing having been yet obtained from the king, an army headed by five earls, forty barons, and Giles Braose, bishop of Hereford, mustered at Stamford and marched on London. Their captain was Robert FitzWalter, whom they had named “marshal of the army of God and Holy Church.” When they reached the capital its gates were thrown open to them, and the mayor and citizens adhered to their cause (May 17). The king, who had tried to turn them back by taking the cross and declaring himself a crusader, and by making loud appeals for the arbitration of the pope, was forced to retire to Windsor. He found that he had no supporters save a handful of courtiers and officials and the leaders of his mercenary bands; wherefore in despair he accepted the terms forced upon him by the insurgents. On the 15th of June 1215 he sealed at Runnymede, close to Windsor, the famous Magna Carta, in face of a vast assembly among which he had hardly a single friend. It is a long document of 63 clauses, in which Archbishop Langton and a committee of the barons had endeavoured to recapitulate all their grievances, and to obtain redress for them. Some of the clauses are unimportant concessions to individuals, or deal with matters of trifling importance—such as the celebrated weirs or “kiddles” on Thames and Medway, or the expulsion of the condottieri chiefs Gerard d’Athies and Engelhart de Cigogné. But many of them are matters of primary importance in the constitutional history of England. The Great Charter must not, however, be overrated as an expression of general constitutional rights; to a large extent it is a mere recapitulation of the claims of the baronage, and gives redress for their feudal grievances in the matters of aids, reliefs, wardships, &c., its object being the repression of arbitrary exactions by the king on his tenants-in-chief. One section, that which provides against the further encroachments of the king’s courts on the private manorial courts of the landowners, might even be regarded as retrograde in character from the point of view of administrative efficacy. But it is most noteworthy that the barons, while providing for the abolition of abuses which affect themselves, show an unselfish and patriotic spirit in laying down the rule that all the concessions which the king makes to them shall also be extended by themselves to their own sub-tenants. The clauses dealing with the general governance of the realm are also as enlightened as could be expected from the character of the committee which drafted the charter. There is to be no taxation without the consent of the Great Council of the Realm—which is to consist of all barons, who are to be summoned by individual units; and of all smaller tenants-in-chief, who are to be called not by separate letters, but by a general notice published by the sheriff. It has been pointed out that this provides no representation for sub-tenants or the rest of the nation, so that we are still far from the ideal of a representative parliament. John himself had gone a step farther on the road towards that ideal when in 1213 he had summoned four “discreet men” from every shire to a council at Oxford, which (as it appears) was never held. But this would seem to have been a vain bid for popularity with the middle classes, which had no result at the time, and the barons preferred to keep things in their own hands, and to abide by ancient precedents. It was to be some forty years later that the first appearance of elected shire representatives at the Great Council took place. In 1215 the control of the subjects over the crown in the matter of taxation is reserved entirely for the tenants-in-chief, great and small.

There is less qualified praise to be bestowed on the clauses of Magna Carta which deal with justice. The royal courts are no longer to attend the king’s person—a vexatious practice when sovereigns were always on the move, and litigants and witnesses had to follow them from manor to manor—but are to be fixed at Westminster. General rules of indisputable equity are fixed for the conduct of the courts—no man is to be tried or punished more than once for the same offence; no one is to be arrested and kept in prison without trial; all arrested persons are to be sent before the courts within a reasonable time, and to be tried by a jury of their peers. Fines imposed on unsuccessful litigants are to be calculated according to the measure of their offence, and are not to be arbitrary penalties raised or lowered at the king’s good pleasure according to the sum that he imagined that the offender could be induced to pay. No foreigners or other persons ignorant of the laws of England are to be entrusted with judicial or administrative offices.

There is only a single clause dealing with the grievances of the English Church, although Archbishop Langton had been the principal adviser in the drafting of the whole document. This clause, “that the English church shall be free,” was, however, sufficiently broad to cover all demands. The reason that Langton did not descend to details was that the king had already conceded the right of free canonical election and the other claims of the clerical order in a separate charter, so that there was no need to discuss them at length.

The special clauses for the benefit of the city of London were undoubtedly inserted as a tribute of gratitude on the part of the barons for the readiness which the citizens had shown in adhering to their cause. There are other sections for the benefit of the commons in general, such as that which gives merchants full right of leaving or entering the realm with their goods on payment of the fixed ancient custom dues. But these clauses are less numerous than might have been expected—the framers of the document were, after all, barons and not burghers.

The most surprising part of the Great Charter to modern eyes is its sixty-first paragraph, that which openly states doubts as to the king’s intention to abide by his promise, and appoints a committee of twenty-five guardians of the charter (twenty-four barons and the mayor of London), who are to coerce their master, by force of arms if necessary, to observe every one of its clauses. The twenty-five were to hear and decide upon any claims and complaints preferred against the king, and to keep up their numbers by co-optation, so that it would seem that the barons intended to keep a permanent watch upon the crown. The clause seems unnecessarily harsh and violent in its wording; but it must be remembered that John’s character was well known, and that it was useless to stand on forms of politeness when dealing with him. It seems certain that the drafters of the charter were honest in their intentions, and did not purpose to set up a feudal oligarchy in the place of a royal autocracy. They were only insisting on the maintenance of what they believed to be the ancient and laudable customs of the realm.

That the barons were right to suspect John is sufficiently shown by his subsequent conduct. His pretence of keeping his promise lasted less than two months; by August 1215 he was already secretly collecting money and hiring more mercenaries. He wrote to Rome to beg the pope to annul the charter, stating that all his troubles had come upon him in consequence of his dutiful conduct to the Holy See. He also stated that he had taken the cross as a crusader, but could not sail to Palestine as long as his subjects were putting him in restraint. Innocent III. at once took the hint; in September Archbishop Langton was suspended for disobedience to papal commands, and the charter was declared uncanonical, null and void. The “troublers of the king and kingdom” were declared excommunicate.

Langton departed at once to Rome, to endeavour to turn the heart of his former patron, a task in which he utterly failed. Many of the clergy who had hitherto supported the baronial cause drew back in dismay at the pope’s Civil War. attitude. But the laymen were resolute, and prepared for open war, which broke out in October 1215. The king, who had already gathered in many mercenaries, gained the first advantage by capturing Rochester Castle before the army of the barons was assembled. So formidable did he appear to them for the moment that they took the deplorable step of inviting the foreign foe to join in the struggle. Declaring John deposed because he had broken his oath to observe the charter, they offered the crown to Louis of France, the son of King Philip, because he had married John’s niece Blanche of Castile and could assert in her right a claim to the throne. This was a most unhappy inspiration, and drove into neutrality or even into the king’s camp many who had previously inclined to the party of reform. But John did his best to disgust his followers by adopting the policy of carrying out fierce and purposeless raids of devastation all through the countryside, while refusing to face his enemies in a pitched battle. He bore himself like a captain of banditti rather than a king in his own country. Presently, when the French prince came over with a considerable army to join the insurgent barons, he retired northward, leaving London and the home counties to his rival. In all the south country only Dover and Windsor castles held out for him. His sole success was that he raised the siege of Lincoln by driving off a detachment of the baronial army which was besieging it. Death of John. Soon after, while marching from Lynn towards Wisbeach, he was surprised by the tide in the fords of the Wash and lost part of his army and all his baggage and treasure. Next day he fell ill of rage and vexation of spirit, contracted a dysenteric ailment, and died a week later at Newark (Oct. 19, 1216). It was the best service that he could do his kingdom. Owing to the unwise and unpatriotic conduct of the barons in summoning over Louis of France to their aid, John had become in some sort the representative of national independence. Yet he was so frankly impossible as a ruler that, save the earls of Pembroke and Chester, all his English followers had left him, and he had no one to back him but the papal legate Gualo and a band of foreign mercenaries. When once he was dead, and his heritage fell to his nine-year-old son Henry III., whom none could make responsible for his father’s doings, the whole aspect of affairs was changed.

The aged William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, by far the most important and respectable personage who had adhered to John’s cause, assumed the position of regent. He at once offered in the name of the young king pardon and Henry III. oblivion of offences to all the insurgent barons. At the same time he reissued the Great Charter, containing all the important concessions which John had made at Runnymede, save that which gave the control of taxation to the tenants-in-chief. Despite this and certain other smaller omissions, it was a document which would satisfy most subjects of the crown, if only it were faithfully observed. The youth of the king and the good reputation of the earl marshal were a sufficient guarantee that, for some years at any rate, an honest attempt would be made to redeem the pledge. Very soon the barons began to return to their allegiance, or at least to slacken in their support of Louis, who had given much offence by his openly displayed distrust of his partisans and his undisguised preference for his French followers. The papal influence was at the same time employed in the cause of King Henry, and Philip of France was forced to abandon open support of his son, though he naturally continued to give him secret help and to send him succours of men and money.

The fortune of war, however, did not turn without a battle. At Lincoln, on the 20th of May 1217, the marshal completely defeated an Anglo-French army commanded by the count of Perche and the earls of Winchester and Hereford. Battle of Lincoln. The former was slain, the other two taken prisoners, with more than 300 knights and barons. This was the death-blow to the cause of Louis of France; when it was followed up by the defeat in the Dover Straits of a fleet which was bringing him reinforcements (Aug. 17), he despaired of success and asked for terms. By the treaty of Lambeth (Sept. 11, 1217) he secured an amnesty for all his followers and an indemnity of 10,000 marks for himself. Less than a month later he quitted England; the victorious royalists celebrated his departure by a second reissue of the Great Charter, which contained some new clauses favourable to the baronial interest.

After the departure of Prince Louis and his foreigners the earl marshal had to take up much the same task that had fallen to Henry II. in 1154. Now, as at the death of Stephen, the realm was full of “adulterine castles,” of bands of robbers who had cloaked their plundering under the pretence of loyal service to the king or the French prince, and of local magnates who had usurped the prerogatives of royalty, each in his own district. It was some years before peace and order were restored in the realm, and the aged Pembroke died in 1219 before his work was completed. After his decease the conduct of the government passed into the hands of the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, and the papal legate Pandulf, to whom the marshal had specially recommended the young king. Their worst enemies were those who during the civil war had been their best friends, the mercenary captains and upstart knights whom John had made sheriffs and castellans. From 1219 to 1224 de Burgh was constantly occupied in evicting the old loyalists from castles which they had seized or offices which they had disgraced. In several cases it was necessary to mobilize an army against a recalcitrant magnate. The most troublesome of them was Falkes de Breauté, the most famous of King John’s foreign condottieri, whose minions held Bedford castle against the justiciar and the whole shire levy of eastern England for nearly two months in 1224. The castle was taken and eighty men-at-arms hanged on its surrender, but Falkes escaped with his life and fled to France. It was not till this severe lesson had been inflicted on the faction of disorder that the pacification of England could be considered complete.

The fifty-six years’ reign of Henry III. forms one of the periods during which the mere chronicle of events may seem tedious and trivial, yet the movement of national life and constitutional progress was very important. Except during the stirring epoch 1258-1265 there was little that was dramatic or striking in the events of the reign. Yet the England of 1272 was widely different from the England of 1216. The futile and thriftless yet busy and self-important king was one of those sovereigns who irritate their subjects into opposition by injudicious activity. He was not a ruffian or a tyrant like his father, and had indeed not a few of the domestic virtues. But he was constitutionally incapable of keeping a promise or paying a debt. Not being strong-handed or capable, he could never face criticism nor suppress discontent by force, as a king of the type of Henry I. or Henry II. would have done. He generally gave way when pressed, without attempting an appeal to arms; he would then swear an oath to observe the Great Charter, and be detected in violating it again within a few months. His greatest fault in the eyes of his subjects was his love of foreigners; since John had lost Normandy the English baronage had become as national in spirit as the commons. The old Anglo-Norman houses had forgotten the tradition of their origin, and now formed but a small section of the aristocracy; the newer families, sprung from the officials of the first two Henries, had always been English in spirit. Unfortunately for himself the third Henry inherited the continental cosmopolitanism of his Angevin ancestors, and found himself confronted with a nation which was growing ever more and more insular in its ideals. He had all the ambitions of his grandfather Henry II.; his dreams were of shattering the newly-formed kingdom of France, the creation of Philip Augustus, and of recovering all the lost lands of his forefathers on the Seine and Loire. Occasionally his views grew yet wider—he would knit up alliances all over Christendom and dominate the West. Nothing could have been wilder and more unpractical than the scheme on which he set his heart in 1255-1257, a plan for conquering Naples and Sicily for his second son. Moreover it was a great hindrance to him that he was a consistent friend and supporter of the papacy. He had never forgotten the services of the legates Pandulf and Gualo to himself and his father, and was always ready to lend his aid to the political schemes of the popes, even when it was difficult to see that any English interests were involved in them. His designs, which were always shifting from point to point of the continent, did not appeal in the least to his subjects, who took little interest in Poitou or Touraine, and none whatever in Italy. After the troubled times which had lasted from 1214 to 1224 they desired nothing more than peace, quietness and good governance. They had no wish to furnish their master with taxation for French wars, or to follow his banner to distant Aquitaine. But most of all did they dislike his practice of flooding England with strangers from beyond seas, for whom offices and endowments had to be found. The moment that he had got rid of the honest and capable old justiciar Hubert de Burgh, who had pacified the country during his minority, and set the machinery of government once more in regular order, Henry gave himself over to fostering horde after horde of foreign favourites. There was first his Poitevin chancellor, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, with a numerous band of his relations and dependents. As a sample of the king’s methods it may be mentioned that he once made over nineteen of the thirty-five sheriffdoms, within a fortnight, to Peter of Rivaux, a nephew of the chancellor. Des Roches was driven from office after two years (1234), and his friends and relatives fell with him. But they were only the earliest of the king’s alien favourites; quite as greedy were the second family of his mother, Isabella of Angoulême, who after King John’s death had married her old betrothed, Hugh of Lusignan. Henry secured great English marriages for three of them, and made the fourth, Aymer, bishop of Winchester. Their kinsmen and dependents were equally welcomed. Even more numerous and no less expensive to the realm were the Provençal and Savoyard relatives of Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence. The king made one of her uncles, Boniface of Savoy, archbishop of Canterbury—it was three years before he deigned to come over to take up the post, and then he was discovered to be illiterate and unclerical in his habits, an unworthy successor for Langton and Edmund of Abingdon, the great primates who went before him. Peter of Savoy, another uncle, was perhaps the most shameless of all the beggars for the king’s bounty; not only was he made earl of Richmond, but his debts were repeatedly paid and great sums were given him to help his continental adventures.

King Henry’s personal rule lasted from 1232, the year in which he deprived Hubert de Burgh of his justiciarship and confiscated most of his lands, down to 1258. It was thriftless, arbitrary, and lacking in continuity of policy, yet not tyrannical or cruel. If he had been a worse man he would have been put under control long before by his irritated subjects. All through these twenty-six years he was being opposed and criticised by a party which embraced the wisest and most patriotic section of the baronage and the hierarchy. It numbered among its leaders the good archbishop, Edmund of Abingdon, and Robert Grosseteste, the active and learned bishop of Lincoln; it was not infrequently aided by the king’s brother Richard, earl of Cornwall, who did not share Henry’s blind admiration for his foreign relatives. But it only found its permanent guiding spirit somewhat late in the reign, when Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, became the habitual mouthpiece of the grievances of the nation. The great earl had, oddly enough, commenced his career as one of the king’s foreign favourites. Simon de Monfort. He was the grandson of Amicia, countess of Leicester, but his father, Simon the Elder, a magnate whose French interests were greater than his English, had adhered to the cause of Philip Augustus in the days of King John and the Leicester estates had been confiscated. Simon, reared as a Frenchman, came over in 1230 to petition for their restoration. He not only obtained it, but to the great indignation of the English baronage married the king’s sister Eleanor in 1238. For some time he was in high favour with his brother-in-law, and was looked upon by the English as no better than Aymer de Valence or Peter of Savoy. But he quarrelled with the fickle king, and adhered ere long to the party of opposition. A long experience of his character and actions convinced barons and commons alike that he was a just and sincere man, a friend of good governance, and an honest opponent of arbitrary and unconstitutional rule. He had become such a thorough Englishman in his views and prejudices, that by 1250 he was esteemed the natural exponent of all the wrongs of the realm. He was austere and religious; many of his closest friends were among the more saintly of the national clergy. By the end of his life the man who had started as the king’s unpopular minion was known as “Earl Simon the Righteous,” and had become the respected leader of the national opposition to his royal brother-in-law.

Though Henry’s taxes were vexatious and never-ending, though his subservience to the pope and his flighty interference in foreign politics were ever irritating the magnates and the people, and though outbreaks of turbulence Condition of England under Henry III. were not unknown during his long period of personal rule, it would yet be a mistake to regard the central years of the 13th century as an unprosperous period for England. Indeed it would be more correct to regard the period as one of steady national development in wealth, culture and unity. The towns were growing fast, and extending their municipal liberties; the necessities of John and the facile carelessness of Henry led to the grant of innumerable charters and privileges. As was to be seen again during the first period of the reign of Charles I., political irritation is not incompatible either with increasing material prosperity or with great intellectual development. The king’s futile activity led to ever more frequent gatherings of the Great Council, in which the theory of the constitution was gradually hammered out by countless debates between the sovereign and his subjects. Every time that Henry confirmed the Great Charter, the fact that England was already a limited monarchy became more evident. It is curious to find that—like his father John—he himself contributed unconsciously Beginnings of Parliament. to advances towards representative government. John’s writ of 1213, bidding “discreet men” from each shire to present themselves at Oxford, found its parallel in another writ of 1253 which bids four knightly delegates from each county to appear along with the tenants-in-chief, for the purpose of discussing the king’s needs. When county members begin to present themselves along with the barons at the national assembly, the conception of parliament is already reached. And indeed we may note that the precise word “parliament” first appears in the chroniclers and in official documents about the middle of Henry’s reign. By its end the term is universally acknowledged and employed.

We may discern during these same years a great intellectual activity. This was the time of rapid development in the universities, where not only were the scholastic philosophy and systematic theology eagerly studied, but figures Intellectual life. appear like that of the great Roger Bacon, a scientific researcher of the first rank, whose discoveries in optics and chemistry caused his contemporaries to suspect him of magical arts. His teaching at Oxford in 1250-1257 fell precisely into the years of the worst misgovernance of Henry III. It was the same with law, an essentially 13th-century study; it was just in this age that the conception of law as something not depending on the pleasure of the king, nor compiled from mere collected ancestral customs, but existing as a logical entity, became generally prevalent. The feeling is thoroughly well expressed by the partisan of Montfort who wrote in his jingling Latin verse:—

“Dicitur vulgariter ‘ut rex vult lex vadit’: Veritas vult aliter: nam lex stat, rex cadit.”

Law has become something greater than, and independent of, royal caprice. The great lawyers of the day, of whom Bracton is the most celebrated name, were spinning theories of its origin and development, studying Roman precedents, and turning the medley of half-understood Saxon and Norman customs into a system.

Intellectual growth was accompanied by great religious activity; it is no longer merely on the old questions of dispute between church and state that men were straining their minds. The reign of Henry III. saw the invasion Religious life: the friars. of England by the friars, originally the moral reformers of their day, who preached the superiority of the missionary life over the merely contemplative life of the old religious orders, and came, preaching holy poverty, to minister to souls neglected by worldly incumbents and political prelates (see Mendicant Movement). The mendicants, Dominican and Franciscan, took rapid root in England; the number of friaries erected in the reign of Henry III. is astounding. For two generations they seem to have absorbed into their ranks all the most active and energetic of those who felt a clerical vocation. It is most noteworthy that they were joined by thinkers such as Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Still more striking is the fact that the friars threw themselves energetically into the cause of political reform, and that several of their leading brothers were the close friends and counsellors of Simon de Montfort.

Architecture and art generally were making rapid strides during this stirring time. The lofty Early English style had now completely superseded the more heavy and sombre Norman, and it was precisely during the years Literature and art. of the maladministration of Henry III. that some of the most splendid of the English cathedrals, Salisbury (1220-1258) and Wells (1230-1239), were built. The king himself, when rearing the new Westminster Abbey over the grave of Edward the Confessor, spent for once some of his money on a worthy object. It may be noted that he showed a special reverence for the old English royal saint, and christened his eldest son after him; while his second bore the name of Edmund, the East Anglian martyr. These were the first occasions on which princes of the Angevin house received names that were not drawn from the common continental stock, but recalled the days before the Conquest. The reappearance of these old English names bears witness to the fact that the vernacular was reasserting itself. Though French was still the language of the court and of law, a new literature was already growing up in the native tongue, with such works as Layamon’s Brut and the Ormulum as its first fruits. Henry III. himself on rare occasions used English for a state document.

All these facts make it sufficiently clear that England was irritated rather than crushed by Henry’s irregular taxation and thriftless expenditure. The nation was growing and prospering, despite of its master’s maladministration of its resources. On several occasions when he endeavoured to commit parliaments to back his bills and endorse his policy, they refused to help him, and left him to face his debts as best he might. This was especially the case with the insane contract which he made with Pope Innocent IV. in 1254, when he bound the realm of England to find 140,000 marks to equip an army for the conquest of Naples and Sicily. Henry lacked the energy to attempt to take by force what he could not obtain by persuasion, and preferred to break his bargain with the pope rather than to risk the chance of civil war at home.

It was over this Sicilian scheme, the crowning folly of the king, that public opinion at last grew so hot that the intermittent criticism and grumbling of the baronage and the nation passed into vigorous and masterful action. At the “Mad Parliament,” which met at Oxford, 1258, the barons informed their master that his misgovernment had grown so hopeless that they were Public discontent. The Provisions of Oxford. resolved to put him under constitutional restraints. They appointed a committee of twenty-four, in which Simon de Montfort was the leading spirit, and entrusted it with the duty, not only of formulating lists of grievances, but of seeing that they were redressed. Henry found that he had practically no supporters save his unpopular foreign relatives and favourites, and yielded perforce. To keep him in bounds the celebrated “Provisions of Oxford” were framed. They provided that he was to do nothing without the consent of a permanent council of fifteen barons and bishops, and that all his finances were to be controlled by another committee of twenty-four persons. All aliens were to be expelled from the realm, and even the king’s household was to be “reformed” by his self-constituted guardians. The inevitable oath to observe honestly all the conditions of the Great Charter of 1215 was, as usual, extorted from him with special formalities. Though Montfort and the barons voiced the public discontent, the constitution which they thus imposed on the king had nothing popular about it. The royal functions of which Henry was stripped were to be exercised by a series of baronial committees. The arrangement was too cumbersome, for there was nothing which would be called a central executive; the three bodies (two of twenty-four members each, the third of fifteen) were interdependent, and none of them possessed efficient control over the others. It was small wonder that the constitution established by the Provisions of Oxford was found unworkable. They were not even popular—the small landholders and subtenants discovered that their interests had not been sufficiently regarded, and lent themselves to an agitation against the provisional government, which was got up by Edward, the king’s eldest son, who now appeared prominently in history for the first time. To conciliate them the barons allowed the “Provisions of Westminster” to be enacted in 1259, in which the power of feudal courts was considerably restricted, and many classes of suit were transferred to the royal tribunals, a sufficient proof that the king’s judges did not share in the odium which appertained to their master, and were regarded as honest and impartial.

The limited monarchy established by the Provisions of Oxford lasted only three years. Seeing the barons quarrelling among themselves, and Montfort accused of ambition and overweening masterfulness by many of his colleagues, the king took heart. Copying the example of his father in 1215, he obtained from the pope a bull, which declared the new constitution irregular and illegal, and absolved him from his oath to abide by it. He then began to recall his foreign friends and relatives, and to assemble mercenaries. De Montfort answered by raising an army, arresting prominent aliens, and seizing the lands which the king had given them. Henry thereupon, finding his forces too weak to face the earl, took refuge in the Tower of London and proposed an arbitration. He offered to submit his case to Louis IX., the saintly king of France, whose virtues were known and respected all over Europe, if the baronial party would do the same. An appeal to the pope they would have laughed to scorn; but the confidence felt in the probity of the French king was so great that Montfort advised his friends to accede to the proposal. This was an unwise step. Louis was a saint, but he was also an autocratic king, and had no knowledge of the constitutional customs of England. Having heard the claims of the king and the barons, he issued the mise of Amiens (Jan. 23, 1264), so called from the city at which he dated it, a document which stated that King Henry ought to abide by the terms of Magna Carta, to which he had so often given his assent, but that the Provisions of Oxford were wholly invalid and derogatory to the royal dignity. “We ordain,” he wrote, “that the king shall have full power and free jurisdiction over his realm, as in the days before the said Provisions.” The pope shortly afterwards confirmed the French king’s award.

Simon de Montfort and his friends were put in an awkward position by this decision, to which they had so unwisely committed themselves. But they did not hesitate to declare that they must repudiate the mise. Simon declared that it would be a worse perjury to abandon his oath to keep the Provisions of Oxford than his oath to abide by the French king’s award. He took arms again at the head of the Londoners and his personal adherents and allies. But many of the barons stood neutral, not seeing how they could refuse to accept the arbitration they had courted, while a number not inconsiderable joined the king, deciding that Leicester had passed the limits of reasonable loyalty, and that their first duty was to the crown.

Hence it came to pass that in the campaign of 1264 Simon was supported by a minority only of the baronial class, and the king’s army was the larger. The fortune of war inclined at first in favour of the royalists, who captured The barons’ war: battle of Lewes. Northampton and Nottingham. But when it came to open battle, the military skill of the earl sufficed to compensate for the inferiority of his numbers. At Lewes, on the 14th of May, he inflicted a crushing defeat on the king’s army. Henry himself, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and many hundreds of his chief supporters were taken prisoners. His son Prince Edward, who had been victorious on his own flank of the battle, and had not been caught in the rout, gave himself up next morning, wishing to share his father’s fate, and not to prolong a civil war which seemed to have become hopeless.

On the day that followed his victory Leicester extorted from the captive king the document called the “mise of Lewes,” in which Henry promised to abide by all the terms of the Provisions of Oxford, as well as to uphold the Montfort’s parliament. Great Charter and the old customs of the realm. Montfort was determined to put his master under political tutelage for the rest of his life. He summoned a parliament, in which four knights elected by each shire were present, to establish the new constitution. It appointed Simon, with his closest allies, the young earl of Gloucester and the bishop of Chichester, as electors who were to choose a privy council for the king and to fill up all offices of state. The king was to exercise no act of sovereignty save by the consent of the councillors, of whom three were to follow his person wherever he went. This was a far simpler constitution than that framed at Oxford in 1258, but it was even more liable to criticism. For if the “Provisions” had established a government by baronial committees, the parliament of 1264 created one which was a mere party administration. For the victorious faction, naturally but unwisely, took all power for themselves, and filled every sheriffdom, castellany and judicial office with their own firm friends. Simon’s care to commit the commons to his cause by summoning them to his parliament did not suffice to disguise the fact that the government which he had set up was not representative of the whole nation. He himself was too much like a dictator; even his own followers complained that he was over-masterful, and the most important of them, the young earl of Gloucester, was gradually estranged from him by finding his requests often refused and his aims crossed by the old earl’s action. The new government lasted less than two years, and was slowly losing prestige all the time. Its first failure was in the repression of the surviving royalists. Isolated castles in several districts held out in the king’s name, and the whole March of Wales was never properly subdued. When Simon turned the native Welsh prince Llewelyn against the marcher barons, he gave great offence; he was accused of sacrificing Englishmen to a foreign enemy. The new régime did not give England the peace which it had promised; its enemies maintained that it did not even give the good governance of which Simon had made so many promises. It certainly appears that some of his followers, and notably his three reckless sons, had given good cause for offence by high-handed and selfish acts. Much indignation was provoked by the sight of the king kept continually in ward by his privy councillors and treated with systematic neglect; but the treatment of his son was even more resented. Edward, though he had given little cause of offence, and had behaved admirably in refusing to continue the civil war, was deprived of his earldom of Chester, and put under the same restraint as his father. There was no good reason for treating him so harshly, and his state was much pitied.

Montfort attempted to strengthen his position, and to show his confidence in the commons, by summoning to his second and last parliament, that of 1265, a new element—two citizens from each city and two burgesses from each borough in the realm. It must be confessed that his object was probably not to introduce a great constitutional improvement, and to make parliament more representative, but rather to compensate for the great gaps upon the baronial benches by showing a multitude of lesser adherents, for the towns were his firm supporters. The actual proceedings of this particular assembly had no great importance.

Two months later Prince Edward escaped from his confinement, and fled to the earl of Gloucester, who now declared himself a royalist. They raised an army, which seized the fords of the Severn, in order to prevent de Montfort—who was then at Hereford with the captive king—from getting back to London or the Midlands. The earl, who could only raise a trifling force in the Marches, where the barons were all his enemies, failed in several attempts to force a passage eastward. But his friends raised a considerable host, which marched under his son Simon the Younger and the earl of Oxford, to fall on the rear of the royalists. Prince Edward now displayed skilful generalship—hastily turning backward he surprised and scattered the army of relief at Kenilworth (Aug. 1); he was then free to deal with the earl, who had at last succeeded in passing the Severn during Battle of Evesham. his absence. On the 4th of August he beset Montfort’s little force with five-fold numbers, and absolutely exterminated it at Evesham. Simon fought most gallantly, and was left dead on the field along with his eldest son Henry, his justiciar Hugh Despenser, and the flower of his party. The king fell into the hands of his son’s followers, and was once more free.

It might have been expected that the victorious party would now introduce a policy of reaction and autocratic government. But the king was old and broken by his late misfortunes: his son the prince was wise beyond his years, and Gloucester and many other of the present supporters of the crown had originally been friends of reform, and had not abandoned their old views. They had deserted Montfort because he was autocratic and masterful, not because they had altogether disapproved of his policy. Hence we find Gloucester insisting that the remnant of the vanquished party should not be subjected to over heavy punishment, and even making an armed demonstration, in the spring of 1267, to demand the re-enactment of the Provisions of Oxford. Ultimately the troubles of the realm were ended by the Dictum of Kenilworth (Oct. 31, 1266) and the Statute of Marlborough (Nov. 1267). The former allowed nearly all of Montfort’s faction to obtain amnesty and regain their estates on the payment of heavy fines; only Simon’s own Leicester estates and those of Ferrers, earl of Derby, were confiscated. The latter established a form of constitution in which many, if not all, of the innovations of the Provisions of Oxford were embodied. The only unsatisfactory part of the pacification was that Llewelyn of Wales, who had ravaged the whole March while he was Montfort’s ally, was allowed to keep a broad region (the greater part of the modern shire of Denbigh) which he had won back from its English holders. His power in a more indirect fashion extended itself over much of Mid-Wales. The line of the March was distinctly moved backward by the treaty of 1267.

King Henry survived his restoration to nominal, if not to actual, authority for seven years. He was now too feeble to indulge in any of his former freaks of foreign policy, and allowed the realm to be governed under his son’s Death of Henry III. eye by veteran bureaucrats, who kept to the old customs of the land. Everything settled down so peacefully that when the prince took the cross, and went off to the Crusades in 1270, no trouble followed. Edward was still absent in Palestine when his father died, on the 16th of November 1272. For the first time in English history there was no form of election of the new king, whose accession was quietly acknowledged by the officials and the nation. It was nearly two years after his father’s death that he reached England, yet absolutely no trouble had occurred during his absence. He had taken advantage of his leisurely journey home to pacify the turbulent Gascony, and to visit Paris and make a treaty with King Philip III. by which the frontiers of his duchy of Aquitaine were rectified, to some slight extent, in his favour. He, of course, did homage for the holding, as his father had done before him.

The reign which began with this unwonted quietness was perhaps the most important epoch of all English medieval history in the way of the definition and settlement of the constitution. Edward I. was a remarkable figure, Edward I. by far the ablest of all the kings of the house of Plantagenet. He understood the problem that was before him, the construction of a working constitution from the old ancestral customs of the English monarchy plus the newer ideas that had been embodied in the Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the scanty legislation of Simon de Montfort. Edward loved royal power, but he was wise in his generation, and saw that he could best secure the loyalty of his subjects by assenting to so many of the new constitutional restraints as were compatible with his own practical control of the policy of the realm. He was prepared to refer all important matters to his parliament, and (as we shall see) he improved the shape of that body by reintroducing into it the borough members who had appeared for the first time in Montfort’s assembly of 1265. He would have liked to make parliament, no doubt, a mere meeting for the voting of taxation with the smallest possible friction. But he fully realized that this dream was impossible, and was wise enough to give way, whenever opposition grew too strong and bitter. He had not fought through the civil wars of 1263-66 without learning his lesson. There was a point beyond which it was unwise to provoke the baronage or the commons, and, unlike his flighty and thriftless father, he knew where that point came. The constitutional quarrels of his reign were conducted with decency and order, because the king knew his own limitations, and because his subjects trusted to his wisdom and moderation in times of crisis. Edward indeed was a man worthy of respect, if not of affection. His private life was grave and seemly, his court did not sin by luxury or extravagance. His chosen ministers were wise and experienced officials, whom no man could call favourites or accuse of maladministration. He was sincerely religious, self-restrained and courteous, though occasionally, under provocation, he could burst out into a royal rage. He was a good master and a firm friend. Moreover, he had a genuine regard for the sanctity of a promise, the one thing in which his father had been most wanting. It is true that sometimes he kept his oaths or carried out his pledges with the literal punctuality of a lawyer, rather than with the chivalrous generosity of a knight. But at any rate he always endeavoured to discharge an obligation, even if he sometimes interpreted it by the strict letter of the law and not with liberality. A conscientious man according to his lights, he took as his device the motto Pactum serva, “keep troth,” which was afterwards inscribed on his tomb, and did his best to live up to it. Naturally he expected the same accuracy from other men, and when he did not meet it he could be harsh and unrelenting in the punishment that he inflicted. To sum up his character it must be added that he was a very great soldier. The headlong courage which he showed at Lewes, his first battle, was soon tempered by caution, and already in 1265 he had shown that he could plan a campaign with skill. In his later military career he was the first general who showed on a large scale how the national English weapon, the bow, could win fights when properly combined with the charge of the mailed cavalry. He inaugurated the tactics by which his grandson and great-grandson were to win epoch-making victories abroad.

Edward’s reign lasted for thirty-five years, and was equally important in constitutional development and in imperial policy. The first period of it, 1272-1290, may be defined as mainly notable for his great series of legislative enactments and his conquest of Wales. The second, 1290-1307, contains his long and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to incorporate Scotland into his realm, and his quarrels with his parliament.

The changes made by Edward in constitutional law by his great series of statutes commenced very soon after his return to his kingdom in 1274. We may trace in all of them the same purpose of strengthening the power of the crown Constitutional changes. Statutes of Westminster and Gloucester. by judicious and orderly definition of its privileges. The great enactments start with the First Statute of Westminster (1275), a measure directed to the improvement of administrative details, which was accompanied by a grant to the king of a permanent customs-revenue on imports and exports, which soon became more valuable to the royal exchequer than the old feudal taxes on land. In 1278 followed the Statute of Gloucester, an act empowering the king to make inquiry as to the right by which old royal estates, or exceptional franchises which infringed on the royal prerogative of justice or taxation, had passed into the hands of their present owners. This inquest was made by the writ Quo Warranto, by which each landholder was invited to show the charter or warrant in which his claims rested. The baronage were angry and suspicious, for many of their customary rights rested on immemorial and unchartered antiquity, while others were usurpations from the weakness of John or Henry III. They showed signs of an intention to make open resistance; but to their surprise the king contented himself with making complete lists of all franchises then existing, and did no more; this being his method of preventing the growth of any further trespasses on his prerogative.

Edward’s next move was against clerical encroachments. In 1279 he compelled Archbishop Peckham to withdraw some legislation made in a synod called without the royal permission—a breach of one of the three great canons Statute of Mortmain. of William the Conqueror. Then he took the offensive himself, by persuading his parliament to pass the Statute of Mortmain (de religiosis). This was an act to prevent the further accumulation of landed property in the “dead hand” of religious persons and communities. The more land the church acquired, the less feudal taxation came into the royal exchequer. For undying corporations paid the king neither “reliefs” (death duties) nor fees on wardship and marriage, and their property would never escheat to the crown for want of an heir. The Statute of Mortmain forbade any man to alienate land to the church without royal licence. It was very acceptable to the baronage, who had suffered, on a smaller scale, the same grievance as the king, for when their subtenants transferred estates to the church, they (like their masters) suffered a permanent loss of feudal revenue. A distinct check in the hitherto steady growth of clerical endowments began from this time, though licences in mortmain were by no means impossible to obtain.

The great group of statutes that date from Edward’s earlier years ends with the legislative enactments of 1285, the Second Statute of Westminster and the Statute of Winchester. The former contains the clause De Donis Conditionalibus, Second Statute of Westminster. a notable landmark in the history of English law, since it favoured the system of entailing estates. Hitherto life-owners of land, holding as subtenants, had possessed large powers of alienating it, to the detriment of their superior lords, who would otherwise have recovered it, when their vassals died heirless, as an “escheat.” This custom was primarily harmful to the king—the greatest territorial magnate and the one most prone to distribute rewards in land to his servants. But it was also prejudicial to all tenants-in-chief. By De Donis the tenant for life was prevented from selling his estate, which could only pass to his lawful heir; if he had none, it fell back to his feudal superior. Five years later this legislation was supplemented by the statute Quia Emptores, equally beneficial to king and barons, which provided that subtenants should not be allowed to make over land to other persons, retaining the nominal possession and feudal rights over it, but should be compelled to sell it out and out, so that their successor in title stood to the overlord exactly as the seller had done. Hitherto they had been wont to dispose of the whole or parts of their estates while maintaining their feudal rights over it, so that the ultimate landlord could not deal directly with the new occupant, whose reliefs, wardship, &c., fell to the intermediate holder who had sold away the land. The main result of this was that, when a baron parted with any one of his estates, the acquirer became a tenant-in-chief directly dependent on the king, instead of being left a vassal of the person who had passed over the land to him. Subinfeudation came to a complete stop, and whenever great family estates broke up the king obtained new tenants-in-chief. The number of persons holding immediately of the crown began at once to multiply by leaps and bounds. As the process of the partition of lands continued, the fractions grew smaller and smaller, and many of the tenants-in-chief were ere long very small and unimportant persons. These, of course, would not form part of the baronial interest, and could not be distinguished from any other subjects of the crown.

The Statute of Winchester, the other great legislative act of 1285, was mainly concerned with the keeping of the peace of the realm. It revised the arming and organization of the Statute of Winchester. national militia, the lineal descendent of the old fyrd, and provided a useful police force for the repression of disorder and robbery by the reorganization of watch and ward. This was, of course, one more device for strengthening the power of the crown.

In the intervals of the legislation which formed the main feature of the first half of his reign, Edward was often distracted by external matters. He was, on the whole, on very good terms with his first cousin, Philip III. of France; Welsh wars. the trouble did not come from this direction, though there was the usual crop of feudal rebellions in Gascony. Nor did Edward’s relations with the more remote states of the continent lead to any important results, though he had many treaties and alliances in hand. It was with Wales that his most troublesome relations occurred. Llewelyn-ap-Gruffydd, the old ally of de Montfort, had come with profit out of the civil wars of 1263-66, and having won much land and more influence during the evil days of Henry III., was reluctant to see that his time of prosperity had come to an end, now that a king of a very different character sat on the English throne.

Friction had begun the moment that Edward returned to his kingdom from the crusade. Llewelyn would not deign to appear before him to render the customary homage due from Wales to the English crown, but sent a series of futile excuses lasting over three years. In 1277, however, the king grew tired of waiting, invaded the principality and drove his recalcitrant vassal up into the fastnesses of Snowdon, where famine compelled him to surrender as winter was beginning. Llewelyn was pardoned, but deprived of all the lands he had gained during the days of the civil war, and restricted to his old North Welsh dominions. He remained quiescent for five years, but busied himself in knitting up secret alliances with the Welsh of the South, who were resenting the introduction of English laws and customs by the strong-handed king. In 1282 there was a sudden and well-planned rising, which extended from the gates of Chester to those of Carmarthen; several castles were captured by the insurgents, and Edward had to come to the rescue of the lords-marchers at the head of a very large army. After much checkered fighting Llewelyn was slain at the skirmish of Orewyn Bridge near Builth on the 11th of December 1282. On his death the southern rebels submitted, but David his brother continued the struggle for three months longer in the Snowdon district, till his last bands were scattered and he himself taken prisoner. Edward Conquest of Wales. beheaded him at Shrewsbury as a traitor, having the excuse that David had submitted once before, had been endowed with lands in the Marches, and had nevertheless joined his brother in rebellion. After this the king abode for more than a year in Wales, organizing the newly conquered principality into a group of counties, and founding many castles, with dependent towns, within its limits. The “statute of Wales,” issued at Rhuddlan in 1284, provided for the introduction of English law into the country, though a certain amount of Celtic customs was allowed to survive. For the next two centuries and a half the lands west of Dee and Wye were divided between the new counties, forming the “principality” of Wales, and the “marches” where the old feudal franchises continued, till the marcher-lordships gradually fell by forfeiture or marriage to the crown. Edward’s grip on the land was strong, and it had need to be so, for in 1287 and 1294-1295 there were desperate and widespread revolts, which were only checked by the existence of the new castles, and subdued by the concentration of large royal armies. In 1301 the king’s eldest surviving son Edward, who had been born at Carnarvon in 1284, was created “prince of Wales,” and invested with the principality, which henceforth became the regular appanage of the heirs of the English crown. This device was apparently intended to soothe Welsh national pride, by reviving in form, if not in reality, the separate existence of the old Cymric state. For four generations the land was comparatively quiet, but the great rebellion of Owen Glendower in the reign of Henry IV. was to show how far the spirit of particularism was from extinction.

Some two years after his long sojourn in Wales Edward made an even longer stay in a more remote corner of his dominions. Gascony being, as usual, out of hand, he crossed to Bordeaux in 1286, and abode in Guienne for no less than three years, reducing the duchy to such order as it had never known before, settling all disputed border questions with the new king of France, Philip IV., founding many new towns, and issuing many useful statutes and ordinances. He returned suddenly in 1289, called home by complaints that reached him as to the administration of justice by his officials, who were slighting the authority of his cousin Edmund of Cornwall, whom he had left behind as regent. He dismissed almost the whole bench of judges, and made other changes among his ministers. At the same time he fell fiercely upon the great lords of the Welsh Marches, who had been indulging in private wars; when they returned to their evil practice he imprisoned the chief offenders, the earls of Hereford and Gloucester, forfeited their estates, and only gave them back when they had paid vast fines (1291). Another Expulsion of the Jews. act of this period was Edward’s celebrated expulsion of the Jews from England (1290). This was the continuation of a policy which he had already carried out in Guienne. It would seem that his reasons were partly religious, but partly economic. No earlier king could have afforded to drive forth a race who had been so useful to the crown as bankers and money-lenders; but by the end of the 13th century the financial monopoly of the Jews had been broken by the great Italian banking firms, whom Edward had been already employing during his Welsh wars. Finding them no less accommodating than their rivals, he gratified the prejudices of his subjects and himself by forcing the Hebrews to quit England. The Italians in a few years became as unpopular as their predecessors in the trade of usury, their practices being the same, if their creed was not.

Meanwhile in the same year that saw the expulsion of the Jews, King Edward’s good fortune began to wane, with the rise of the Scottish question, which was to overshadow the latter half of his reign. Alexander III., the last Edward I. and Scotland. male in direct descent of the old Scottish royal house, had died in 1286. His heiress was his only living descendant, a little girl, the child of his deceased daughter Margaret and Eric, king of Norway. After much discussion, for both the Scottish nobles and the Norse king were somewhat suspicious, Edward had succeeded in obtaining from them a promise that the young queen should marry his heir, Edward of Carnarvon. This wedlock would have led to a permanent union of the English and Scottish crowns, but not to an absorption of the lesser in the greater state, for the rights of Scotland were carefully guarded in the marriage-treaty. But the scheme was wrecked by the premature death of the bride, who expired by the way, while being brought over from Norway to her own kingdom, owing to privations and fatigue suffered on a tempestuous voyage.

She had no near relatives, and more than a dozen Scottish or Anglo-Scottish nobles, distantly related to the royal line, put in a claim to the crown, or at least to a part of the royal heritage. The board of six regents, who had been ruling Scotland for the young queen, seeing their own power at an end and civil war likely to break out, begged Edward of England to arbitrate between the claimants. The history of the next twenty years turned on the legal point whether the arbitrator acted—as he himself contended—in the capacity of suzerain, or—as the Scots maintained—in that of a neighbour of acknowledged wisdom and repute, invited to settle a domestic problem. This question of the relations between the English and the Scottish crowns had been raised a dozen times between the days of Edward the Elder and those of Henry III. There was no denying the fact that the northern kings had repeatedly done homage to their greater neighbours. But, save during the years when William the Lion, after his captivity, had owned himself the vassal of Henry II. for all his dominions, there was considerable uncertainty as to the exact scope of the allegiance which had been demanded and given. And William’s complete submission had apparently been cancelled, when Richard I. sold him in 1190 a release from the terms of the treaty of Falaise. Since that date Alexander II. and Alexander III. had repeatedly owned themselves vassals to the English crown, and had even sat in English parliaments. But it was possible for patriotic Scots to contend that they had done so only in their capacity as English barons—for they held much land south of Tweed—and to point to the similarity of their position to that of the English king when he did homage for his duchy of Guienne at Paris, without thereby admitting any suzerainty of the French crown over England or Ireland. On the last occasion when Alexander III. had owned himself the vassal of Edward I., there had been considerable fencing on both sides as to the form of the oath, and, as neither sovereign at the moment had wished to push matters to a rupture, the words used had been intentionally vague, and both parties had kept their private interpretations to themselves. But now, when Edward met the Scottish magnates, who had asked for his services as arbitrator, he demanded that they should acknowledge that he was acting as suzerain and overlord of the whole kingdom of Scotland. After some delay, and with manifest reluctance, the Scots complied; their hand was forced by the fact that most of the claimants to the crown had hastened to make the acknowledgment, each hoping thereby to prejudice the English king in his own favour.

This submission having been made, Edward acted with honesty and fairness, handing over the adjudication to a body of eighty Scottish and twenty-four English barons, knights and bishops. These commissioners, after ample discussion and taking of evidence, adjudged the crown to John Baliol, the grandson of the eldest daughter of Earl David, younger brother of William the Lion. They ruled out the claim of Robert Bruce, the son of David’s second daughter, who had raised the plea that his descent was superior because he was a generation nearer than Baliol to their common ancestor. This theory of affinity had been well known in the 12th century, and had been urged in favour of King John when he was contending with his nephew Arthur. But by 1291 it had gone out of favour, and the Scottish barons had no hesitation in declaring Baliol their rightful king. Edward at once gave him seizin of Scotland, and handed over to him the royal castles, which had been placed in his hands as a pledge during the arbitration. In return Baliol did him homage as overlord of the whole kingdom of Scotland.

This, unfortunately, turned out to be the beginning, not the end, of troubles. Edward was determined to exact all the ordinary feudal rights of an overlord—whatever might have been the former relations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Scots, on the other hand, were resolved not to allow of the introduction of usages which had not prevailed in earlier times, and to keep the tie as vague and loose as possible. Before Baliol had been many months on the throne there was grave friction on the question of legal appeals. Scottish litigants defeated in the local courts began to appeal to the courts of Westminster, just as Gascon litigants were wont to appeal from Bordeaux to Paris. King John and his baronage, relying on the fact that such evocation of cases to a superior court had never before been known, refused to allow that it was valid. King Edward insisted that by common feudal usage it was perfectly regular, and announced his intention of permitting it. Grave friction had already begun when external events precipitated an open rupture between the king of England and his new vassal.

Philip III. of France, who had always pursued a friendly policy with his cousin of England, had died in 1285, and had been succeeded by his son Philip IV., a prince of a very different type, the most able and unscrupulous of Edward I. and Philip IV. all the dynasty of Capet. In 1294 he played a most dishonourable trick upon King Edward. There had been some irregular and piratical fighting at sea between English and Norman sailors, in which the latter had been worsted. When called to account for the doings of his subjects, as well as for certain disputes in Gascony, the English king promised redress, and, on the suggestion of Philip, surrendered, as a formal act of apology, the six chief fortresses of Guienne, which were to be restored when reparation had been made. Having garrisoned the places, Philip suddenly changed his line, refused to continue the negotiations, and declared the whole duchy forfeited. Edward was forced into war, after having been tricked out of his strongholds. Just after his first succours had sailed for the Gironde, the great Welsh rebellion of 1294 broke out, and the king was compelled to turn aside to repress it. This he accomplished in the next spring, but meanwhile hardly a foothold remained to him in Gascony. He was then preparing to cross the Channel in person, when Scottish affairs began to become threatening. King John declared himself unable to restrain the indignation of his subjects at the attempt to enforce English suzerainty over Scotland, and in July 1295 leagued himself with Philip of France, and expelled from his realm the chief supporters of the English alliance. Finding himself involved in two wars at once, Edward made an earnest appeal to his subjects to rise to the occasion and “because that which The “model parliament” of 1295. touches all should be approved of all” summoned the celebrated “model parliament” of November 1295, which exactly copied in its constitution Montfort’s parliament of 1265, members from all cities and boroughs being summoned along with the knights of the shires, and the inferior clergy being also represented by their proctors. This system henceforth became the normal one, and the English parliament assumed its regular form, though the differentiation of the two houses was not fully completed till the next century. Edward was voted liberal grants by the laity, though the clergy gave less than he had hoped; but enough money was obtained to fit out two armies, one destined for the invasion of Scotland, the other for that of Gascony.

The French expedition, which was led by the king’s brother Edmund, earl of Lancaster, failed to recover Gascony, and came to an ignominious end. But Edward’s own army achieved complete success in Scotland. Berwick was Invasion of Scotland. stormed, the Scottish army was routed at Dunbar (April 27), Edinburgh and Stirling were easily captured, and at last John Baliol, deserted by most of his adherents, surrendered at Brechin. Edward pursued his triumphant march as far as Aberdeen and Elgin, without meeting further resistance. He then summoned a parliament at Berwick, and announced to the assembled Scots that he had determined to depose King John, and to assume the crown himself. The ease with which he had subdued the realm misled him; he fancied that the slack resistance, which was mainly due to the incapacity and unpopularity of Baliol, implied the indifference of the Scots to the idea of annexation. The alacrity with which the greater part of the baronage flocked in to do him homage confirmed him in the mistaken notion. He appointed John, earl Warenne, lieutenant of the realm, with Hugh Cressingham, an English clerk, as treasurer, but left nearly all the minor offices in Scottish hands, and announced that Scottish law should be administered. He then returned to England, and began to make preparations for a great expedition to France in 1297.

His plan was something more ambitious than a mere attempt to recover Bordeaux; succours were to go to Gascony, but he himself and the main army were to invade France from the north with the aid of the count of Flanders. Much Disputes with the clergy and baronage. money was, of course, needed for the double expedition, and in raising it Edward became involved in two desperate constitutional disputes. Though the barons and the commons voted a liberal grant at the parliament of Bury (Nov. 1296) the clergy would give nothing. This was owing to a bull—the celebrated Clericis Laicos, recently issued by the arrogant and contentious pope Boniface VIII., which forbade the clergy to submit to any taxation by secular princes. Robert Winchelsea, the archbishop of Canterbury, an enthusiastic exponent of clerical rights and grievances, declared himself in conscience bound to obey the pontiff, and persuaded the representatives of the Church in the parliament to refuse supplies. The king, indignant that an attempt should be made to exempt the vast ecclesiastical lands from taxation at a time of national crisis, sequestrated the estates of the see of Canterbury, and copied John’s conduct in 1208 by outlawing the whole body of the clergy. Winchelsea in return excommunicated all those who refused to recognize the authority of the pope’s bull.

Scarcely was this quarrel developed when Edward found himself involved in an equally hot dispute with the commons and the baronage. In his eagerness to collect the sinews of war he had issued orders for the levy of a heavy customs duty on wool, the main export of the land, and in some cases laid hands on the wool itself, which lay ready for shipping, though this had not been granted him by the late parliament. The “maltolt”—or illegal tax—as his subjects called it, provoked the anger of the whole body of merchants in England. At the same time the barons, headed by the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, raised the old grievance about feudal service beyond seas, which had been so prominent in the time of King John. Norfolk, who had been designated to lead the expedition to Guienne; declared that though he was ready to follow his master to Flanders in his capacity of marshal, he would not be drafted off to Gascony against his own will. Hereford and a number of other barons gave him hearty support.

Harassed by these domestic troubles, the king could not carry out his intention of sailing for Flanders in the spring, and spent the greater part of the campaigning season in wrangles with his subjects. He was obliged to come to a compromise. If the clergy would give him a voluntary gift, which was in no way to be considered a tax, he agreed to inlaw them. They did so, and even Winchelsea, after a time, was reconciled to his master. As to the barons, the king took the important constitutional step of conceding that he would not ask them to serve abroad as a feudal obligation, but would pay them for their services, if they would oblige him by joining his banner. Even then Norfolk and Hereford refused to sail; but the greater part of the minor magnates consented to serve as stipendiaries. The commons were conciliated by a promise that the wool which the royal officers had seized should be paid for, when a balance was forthcoming in the exchequer.

By these means Edward succeeded at last in collecting a considerable army, and sailed for Flanders at the end of August. But he was hardly gone when dreadful news reached him from Scotland. An insurrection, to which no Insurrection in Scotland. Wallace. great importance was attached at first, had broken out in the summer. Its first leader was none of the great barons, but a Renfrewshire knight, Sir William Wallace; but ere long more important persons, including Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick (grandson of Robert Bruce of Annandale, one of the competitors for the crown of Scotland), and the bishop of Glasgow, were found to be in communication with the rebels. Earl Warenne, the king’s lieutenant in Scotland, mustered his forces to put down the rising. On the 11th of September 1297 he attempted to force the passage of the Forth at Stirling Bridge, and was completely beaten by Wallace, who allowed half the English army to pass the river and then descended upon it and annihilated it, while Warenne looked on helplessly from the other bank. Almost the whole of Scotland rose in arms on hearing of this victory, but the barons showed less zeal than the commons, owing to their jealousy of Wallace. Warenne retired to Berwick and besought his master for aid.

Edward, who was just commencing an autumn campaign in Flanders which was to lead to no results, sent home orders to summon a parliament, which should raise men and money for the Scottish war. It was called, and made a liberal grant for that purpose, but Archbishop Winchelsea and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford took advantage of their master’s needs, and of his absence, to assert themselves. Taking up the position of defenders of the constitution, they induced the parliament to couple its grants of money with the condition that the king should not only confirm Magna Carta—as had been so often done before—but give a specific promise that no “maltolts,” or other taxes not legally granted him, should be raised for the future. Edward received the petition at Ghent, and made the required The “Confirmatio Cartarum.” oath. The document to which he gave his assent, the Confirmatio Cartarum (less accurately called the statute De Tallagio non concedendo) marked a distinct advance beyond the theories of Magna Carta; for the latter had been drawn up before England possessed a parliament, and had placed the control of taxation in the hands of the old feudal council of tenants-in-chief, while the Confirmatio gave it to the assembly, far more national and representative, which had now superseded the Great Council as the mouthpiece of the whole people of the realm.

The Scottish revolt had become so formidable that Edward was compelled to abandon his unfruitful Flemish campaign; he patched up an unsatisfactory truce with the king of France, which left four-fifths of his lost Gascon lands in the power of the enemy, and returned to England in the spring of 1298. In July he invaded Scotland at the head of a formidable army of 15,000 men, and on the 22nd of that month brought Wallace to action on the moors above Falkirk. The steady Scottish infantry held their own for some time against the charge of the English men-at-arms. But when Edward brought forward his archers to aid his cavalry, as William I. had done at Hastings, Wallace’s columns broke up, and a dreadful slaughter followed. The impression made on the Scots was so great that for some years they refused to engage in another pitched battle. But the immediate consequences were not all that might have been expected. Edward was able to occupy many towns and castles, but the broken bands of the insurgents lurked in the hills and forests, and the countryside as a whole remained unsubdued. Wallace went to France to seek aid from King Philip, and his place was taken by John Comyn, lord of Badenoch, a nephew of Baliol, who was a more acceptable leader to the Scottish nobles than the vanquished knight of Falkirk. Edward was detained in the south for a year, partly by negotiations with France, partly by a renewed quarrel with his parliament, and during his absence Comyn recovered Stirling and most of the other places which had received English garrisons. It was not till 1300 that the king was able to resume the invasion of Scotland, with an army raised by grants of money that he had only bought by humiliating concessions to the will of his parliament, formulated in the Articuli super cartas which were drawn up in the March of that year. Even then he only succeeded in recovering some border holds, and the succeeding campaign of 1301 only took him as far as Linlithgow. But in the following year his position was suddenly changed by unexpected events abroad; the king of France became involved in a desperate quarrel with the pope, and at the same moment his army received a crushing defeat before Courtrai at the hands of the Flemings. To free himself for these new struggles Philip made up his mind to conclude peace with England, even at the cost of sacrificing his conquests in Gascony. Bordeaux had already revolted from him, and he gave up the rest of his ill-gotten gains of 1294 by the treaty of Paris (May 20, 1303).

Now that he had only a single war upon his hands Edward’s position was entirely changed. There was no more need to conciliate the magnates nor the parliament. His displeasure fell mainly on the archbishop and the earl Edward again invades Scotland, 1303. of Norfolk, who had so long led the opposition. Winchelsea was put in disgrace, and ultimately exiled. Norfolk, who was childless, was forced to sign a grant by which his lands went to the king after his death—a harsh and illegal proceeding, for he had collateral heirs. But the Scots, as was natural, bore the brunt of the king’s wrath. In June 1303, a month after the peace of Paris, he advanced from Roxburgh, determined to make a systematic conquest of the realm, and not to return till it was ended. He kept up his campaign throughout the winter, reduced every fortress that held out, and carried his arms as far as Aberdeen and Elgin. In February 1304 the regent Comyn and most of the Scottish baronage submitted, on the promise that they should retain their lands on doing homage. Wallace, who had returned from France, kept up a guerilla warfare in the hills for a year more, but was captured in July 1305, and sent to London to be executed as a traitor. Even before his capture it seemed that Scotland was thoroughly tamed, and was destined to share the fate of Wales.

Edward’s arrangements for the administration of the conquered kingdom were wise and liberal, if only the national spirit of the Scots could have tolerated them. The Scottish parliament was to continue, though representatives from beyond Tweed were also to be sent to the English parliament. The sheriffdoms and most of the ministerial posts were left in the hands of Scots, though the supreme executive authority was put in the hands of John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, the king’s nephew. The land seemed for a time to be settling down, and indeed the baronage were to such a large extent English in both blood and feeling, that there was no insuperable difficulty in conciliating them. A considerable fraction of them adhered consistently to the English cause from this time forth, and ultimately lost their lands for refusing to follow the rest of the nation in the next insurrection.

But the delusion that Scotland had been finally subdued was to last only for a year, although in 1305 Edward seemed to have accomplished his task, and stood triumphant, with the northern realm at his feet, his domestic foes humbled, and France and the papacy defeated. His last short interval of peaceful rule was distinguished by the passing of the Statute of Trailbaston in the parliament of 1305. This was a measure for the repression of local riots, empowering justices in every shire to suppress clubmen (trailbastons), gangs of marauders who had been rendering the roads unsafe.

In the first month of 1306, however, the weary Scottish war broke out again, with the appearance of a new insurgent chief. Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick, grandson of the claimant to the throne of 1292, had hitherto pursued a shifty Robert Bruce. policy, wavering between submission and opposition to the English invader. He had been in arms more than once, but had finally adhered to the pacification of 1304, and was now entirely trusted by the king. But he was secretly plotting rebellion, disgusted (as it would seem) that Edward had not transferred the crown of Scotland to the line of Bruce when the house of Baliol was found wanting. Though he found himself certain of a considerable amount of support, he yet could see that there would be no general rising in his favour, for many of the magnates refused to help in making king a baron whom they regarded as no more important than one of themselves. But the insurrection was precipitated by an unpremeditated outrage. Bruce was conferring at Dumfries with John Comyn, the late regent, whom he was endeavouring to tempt into his plots, on the 10th of January 1306. An angry altercation followed, for Comyn would have nothing to do with the scheme, and Bruce and his followers finally slew him before the altar of a church into which he had fled. After this crime, which combined the disgrace of sacrilege with that of murder under tryst, Bruce was forced to take arms at once, though his preparations were incomplete. He raised his banner, and was hastily crowned at Scone on the 25th of March; by that time the rising had burst out in many shires of Scotland, but it was neither unanimous nor complete. Edward by no means despaired of crushing it, and had raised a large army, when he was smitten with an illness which prevented him from crossing the border. But his troops, under Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, pressed north, and surprised and routed Bruce at Methven near Perth. The pretender’s brother Nigel and many of his chief supporters were taken prisoners, and he himself escaped with a handful of followers and took refuge in the Western islands. Edward ordered young Nigel Bruce and many other captives to be executed; for he was provoked to great wrath by the rebellion of a magnate who had given him every assurance of loyalty. He intended to follow de Valence to Scotland, and to complete the suppression of the rising in person. But this proved beyond his strength; he struggled as far as the border in July, but could not shake off his disease, and was forced to linger, a broken invalid, in the neighbourhood of Carlisle for many months. Meanwhile his lieutenants failed to follow up with energy the victory gained at Methven, and in the next spring Bruce reappeared in the Lowlands, gathered new levies, and inflicted a defeat on de Valence at Loudoun Hill. Roused to anger King Edward rose from his bed, mounted his horse, and started for Scotland. But after struggling on for a few miles he fell by the way, and died at Burgh-on-Sands, just inside the English border, on the 7th of July 1307.

Despite the chequered fortunes of his later years the reign of Edward had been a time of progress and prosperity for England. He had given his realm good and strong governance; according to his lights he had striven to keep faith Character of Edward I.’s rule. and to observe his coronation oath. He had on more than one occasion quarrelled with his subjects, but matters had never been pushed to an open rupture. The king knew how to yield, and even opponents like Winchelsea and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford respected him too much to drive him to an extremity. The nation, however much it might murmur, would never have been willing to rebel against a sovereign whose only fault was that he occasionally pressed his prerogative too far. Edward’s rule was seldom or never oppressive, the seizure of the merchants’ wool in 1297 was the only one of his acts which caused really fierce and widespread indignation. For his other arbitrary proceedings he had some show of legal justification in every case. It would have been absurd to declare that his rule was tyrannical or his policy disastrous. The realm was on the whole contented and even flourishing. Population was steadily increasing, and with it commerce; the intellectual activity which had marked the reign of Henry III. was still alive; architecture, religious and military, was in its prime. He was himself a great builder, and many of the perfected castles of that concentric style, which later ages have called the “Edwardian type,” were of his own planning. In ecclesiastical architecture his reign represents the early flower of the “Decorated” order, perhaps the most beautiful of all the developments of English art. In many respects the reign may be regarded as the culmination and crowning point of the middle ages. It certainly gave a promise of greatness and steady progress which the 14th century was far from justifying.

With the great king’s death a sudden change for the worse was at once visible. The individual character of the reigning king was still the main factor in political history, and Edward II. was in every respect a contrast to his Edward II. father. He was incorrigibly frivolous, idle and apathetic; his father had given him much stern schooling, but this seems only to have inspired him with a deeply rooted dislike for official work of any kind. He has been well described as “the first king since the Conquest who was not a man of business.” Even Stephen and Henry III. had been active and bustling princes, though their actions were misguided and inconsequent. But Edward II. hated all kingly duties; he detested war, but he detested even more the routine work of administration. He was most at his ease in low company, his favourite diversion was gambling, his best trait a love for farming and the mechanical arts of the smith and the gardener.

His first acts on coming to the throne caused patriotic Englishmen to despair. His father, on his death-bed, had made him swear to conduct the Scottish expedition to its end. But he marched no further than Dumfries, and then Piers Gaveston. turned back, on the vain pretext that he must conduct his parent’s funeral in person. Leaving Bruce to gather fresh strength and to commence the tedious process of reducing the numerous English garrisons in Scotland, he betook himself to London, and was not seen on the border again for more than three years. He then dismissed all his father’s old ministers, and replaced them by creatures of his own, for the most part persons of complete incompetence. But his most offensive act was to promote to the position of chief councillor of the crown, and disperser of the royal favours, a clever but vain and ostentatious Gascon knight, one Piers Gaveston, who had been the companion of his boyhood, and had been banished by Edward I. for encouraging him in his follies and frivolity. Piers was given the royal title of earl of Cornwall, and married to the king’s niece; when Edward went over to France to do homage for Gascony, he even made his friend regent during his absence, in preference to any of his kinsmen. It was his regular habit to refer those who came to him on matters of state to “his good brother Piers,” and to refuse to discuss them in person.

It was of course impossible that the nation or the baronage should accept such a preposterous régime, and Edward was soon involved in a lively struggle with his subjects. Of the leaders of opposition in his father’s reign both Baronial opposition. Hereford and Norfolk were now dead. But Archbishop Winchelsea had returned from exile in a belligerent mood, and the place of Norfolk and Hereford was taken by an ambitious prince of the royal house, Thomas, earl of Lancaster, the son of the younger brother of Edward I. Thomas was selfish and incompetent, but violent and self-assertive, and for some years was able to pose successfully as a patriot simply because he set himself to oppose every act of the unpopular king. He had several powerful baronial allies—the earls of Warwick, Pembroke and Warenne, with Humphrey Bohun of Hereford, who had succeeded to his father’s politics, though he had married the king’s own sister.

The annals of the early years of Edward II. are mainly filled by contemporary chroniclers with details of the miserable strife between the king and his barons on the question of Gaveston’s unconstitutional position. But the really Progress of Bruce in Scotland. important feature of the time was the gradual reconquest of Scotland by Robert Bruce, during the continuance of the domestic strife in England. Edward I. had laid such a firm grip on the northern realm that it required many years to undo his work. A very large proportion of the Scottish nobility regarded Bruce as a usurper who had opened his career with murder and sacrilege, and either openly opposed him or denied him help. His resources were small, and it was only by constant effort, often chequered by failures, that he gradually fought down his local adversaries, and reduced the English garrisons one by one. Dumbarton and Linlithgow were only mastered in 1312. Perth did not finally fall into his hands till 1313; Edinburgh, Roxburgh and Stirling were still holding out in 1314. During all this time the English king only once went north of the Border—in 1311—and then with a very small army, for Lancaster and his friends had refused to join his banner. Yet even under such conditions Bruce had to retire to the mountains, and to allow the invaders to range unopposed through Lothian and Fife, and even beyond the Tay. With ordinary capacity and perseverance Edward II. might have mastered his enemy; indeed the Comyns and Umfravilles and other loyalist barons of Scotland would have carried out the business for him, if only he had given them adequate support. But he spent what small energy he possessed in a wretched strife of chicanery and broken promises with Thomas of Lancaster and his party, dismissing and recalling Gaveston according to the exigencies of the moment, while he let the Scottish war shift for itself. It must be confessed that the conduct of his adversaries was almost as contemptible and unpatriotic. They refused to aid in the war, as if it was the king’s private affair and not that of the nation. And repeatedly, when they had Edward at their mercy and might have dictated what terms they pleased to him, they failed to rise to the situation. This was especially the case in 1311, when the king had completely submitted in face of their armed demonstrations. Instead of introducing any general scheme of reform they contented themselves with The “Lords Ordainers.” putting him under the tutelage of twenty-one “lords ordainers,” a baronial committee like that which had been appointed by the Provisions of Oxford, fifty years back. Edward was not to levy an army, appoint an official, raise a tax, or quit the realm without their leave. He had also to swear an obedience to a long string of constitutional limitations of his power, and to promise to remove many practical grievances of administration. But there were two great faults in the proceedings of Thomas of Lancaster and his friends. The first was that they ignored the rights of the commons—save indeed that they got their ordinances confirmed by parliament—and put all power into the hands of a council which represented nothing but the baronial interest. The second, and more fatal, was that this council of “ordainers,” when installed in office, showed energy in nothing save in persecuting the friends of Edward and Gaveston; it neglected the general welfare of the realm, and in particular made no effort whatever to end the Scottish war. It was clearly their duty either to make peace with Robert Bruce, or to exert themselves to crush him; but they would do neither.