III. THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY (1199-1337)

Accession of John.

Richard's queen, Berengaria of Navarre, had borne him no children. At

the moment of his premature death his nearest kinsmen were his worthless

brother John, and the boy Arthur of Brittany, the heir of Geoffrey, the

third son of Henry II. On his death-bed the king had designated John as

his successor, holding apparently that a bad ruler who was at least a

grown man was preferable to a child. John's claim prevailed both in

Normandy and in England, though in each, as we are told, there were

those who considered it a doubtful point whether an elder brother's son

had not a better right than a younger brother. But the ministers

recognized John, and the baronage and nation acquiesced, though with

little enthusiasm. In the lands farther south, however, matters went

otherwise. The dowager duchess Constance of Brittany raised her son's

claim, and sent an army into Anjou, and all down the Loire many of the

nobles adhered to his cause. The king of France announced that he should

support them, and allowed Arthur to do him homage for Anjou, Maine and

Touraine. There would have been trouble in Aquitaine also, if the aged

Queen Eleanor had not asserted her own primary and indefeasible right to

her ancestral duchy, and then declared that she transferred it to her

best loved son John. Most of her subjects accepted her decision, and

Arthur's faction made no head in this quarter.

War with Phillip Augustus.

Loss of Normandy.

It seemed for a space as if the new king would succeed in retaining the

whole of his brother's inheritance, for King Philip very meanly allowed

himself to be bought off by the cession of the county of Evreux, and,

when his troops were withdrawn, the Angevin rebels were beaten down, and

the duchess of Brittany had to ask for peace for her son. But it had not

long been granted, when John proceeded to throw away his advantage by

acts of reckless impolicy. Though cunning, he was destitute alike of

foresight and of self-control; he could never discern the way in which

his conduct would be judged by other men, because he lacked even the

rudiments of a conscience. Ere he had been many months on the throne he

divorced his wife, Isabella of Gloucester, alleging that their marriage

had been illegal because they were within the prohibited degrees. This

act offended the English barons, but in choosing a new queen John gave

much greater offence abroad; he carried off Isabella of Angouleme from

her affianced husband, Hugh of Lusignan, the son of the count of la

Marche, his greatest vassal in northern Aquitaine, and married her

despite the precontract. This seems to have been an amorous freak, not

the result of any deep-laid policy. Roused by the insult the Lusignans

took arms, and a great part of the barons of Poitou joined them. They

appealed for aid to Philip of France, who judged it opportune to

intervene once more. He summoned John to appear before him as suzerain,

to answer the complaints of his Poitevin subjects, and when he failed to

plead declared war on him and declared his dominions escheated to the

French crown for non-fulfilment of his feudal allegiance. He enlisted

Arthur of Brittany in his cause by recognizing him once more as the

rightful owner of all John's continental fiefs save Normandy, which he

intended to take for himself. Philip then entered Normandy, while Arthur

led a Breton force into Anjou and Poitou to aid the Lusignans. The

fortune of war at first turned in favour of the English king. He

surprised his nephew while he was besieging the castle of Mirebeau in

Poitou, where the old Queen Eleanor was residing. The young duke and

most of his chief supporters were taken prisoners (August 1, 1202).

Instead of using his advantage aright, John put Arthur in secret

confinement, and after some months caused him to be murdered. He is said

also to have starved to death twenty-two knights of Poitou who had been

among his captives. The assassination of his nearest kinsman, a mere boy

of sixteen, was as unwise as it was cruel. It estranged from the king

the hearts of all his French subjects, who were already sufficiently

disgusted by many minor acts of brutality, as well as by incessant

arbitrary taxation and by the reckless ravages in which John's mercenary

troops had been indulging. The French armies met with little or no

resistance when they invaded Normandy, Anjou and Poitou. John sat inert

at Rouen, pretending to take his misfortunes lightly, and boasting that

"what was easily lost could be as easily won back." Meanwhile Philip

Augustus conquered all western Normandy, without having to fight a

battle. The great castle of Chateau Gaillard, which guards the Lower

Seine, was the only place which made a strenuous resistance. It was

finally taken by assault, despite of the efforts of the gallant

castellan, Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester, who had made head

against the besiegers for six months (September 1203-March 1204) without

receiving any assistance from his master. John finally absconded to

England in December 1203; he failed to return with an army of relief, as

he had promised, and before the summer of 1204 was over, Caen, Bayeux

and Rouen, the last places that held out for him, had been forced to

open their gates. The Norman barons had refused to strike a blow for

John, and the cities had shown but a very passive and precarious loyalty

to him. He had made himself so well hated by his cruelty and vices that

the Normans, forgetting their old hatred of France, had acquiesced in

the conquest. Two ties alone had for the last century held the duchy to

the English connexion: the one was that many Norman baronial families

held lands on this side of the Channel; the second was the national

pride which looked upon England as a conquered appendage of Normandy.

But the first had grown weaker as the custom arose of dividing family

estates between brothers, on the principle that one should take the

Norman, the other the English parts of a paternal heritage. By John's

time there were comparatively few landholders whose interests were

fairly divided between the duchy and the kingdom. Such as survived had

now to choose between losing the one or the other section of their

lands; those whose holding was mainly Norman adhered to Philip; those

who had more land in England sacrificed their transmarine estates. For

each of the two kings declared the property of the barons who did not

support him confiscated to the crown. As to the old Norman theory that

England was a conquered land, it had gradually ceased to exist as an

operative force, under kings who, like Henry II. or Richard I., were

neither Norman nor English in feeling, but Angevin. John did not, and

could not, appeal as a Norman prince to Norman patriotism.

Loss of Anjou, Touraine and Poitou.

The successes of Philip Augustus did not cease with the conquest of

Normandy. His armies pushed forward in the south also; Anjou, Touraine

and nearly all Poitou submitted to him. Only Guienne and southern

Aquitaine held out for King John, partly because they preferred a weak

and distant master to such a strenuous and grasping prince as King

Philip, partly because they were far more alien in blood and language to

their French neighbours than were Normans or Angevins. The Gascons were

practically a separate nationality, and the house of Capet had no

ancient connexion with them. The kings of England were yet to reign at

Bordeaux and Bayonne for two hundred and fifty years. But the connexion

with Gascony meant little compared with the now vanished connexion with

Normandy. Henry I. or Henry II. could run over to his continental

dominions in a day or two days; Dieppe and Harfleur were close to

Portsmouth and Hastings. It was a different thing for John and his

successors to undertake the long voyage to Bordeaux, around the stormy

headlands of Brittany and across the Bay of Biscay. Visits to their

continental dominions had to be few and far between; they were long,

costly and dangerous when a French fleet--a thing never seen before

Philip Augustus conquered Normandy--might be roaming in the Channel. The

kings of England became perforce much more home-keeping sovereigns after

1204.

It was certainly not a boon for England that her present sovereign was

destined to remain within her borders for the greater part of his

remaining years. To know John well was to loathe him, as every

contemporary chronicle bears witness. The two years that followed the

loss of Normandy were a time of growing discontent and incessant

disputes about taxation. The king kept collecting scutages and tallages,

yet barons and towns complained that nothing seemed to be done with the

money he collected. At last, however, in 1206, the king did make an

expedition to Poitou, and recovered some of its southern borders. Yet,

with his usual inconsequence, he did not follow up his success, but made

a two years' truce with Philip of France on the basis of _uti

possidetis_--which left Normandy and all the territories on and about

the Loire in the hands of the conqueror.

Quarrel with the Papacy.

It is probable that this pacification was the result of a new quarrel

which John had just taken up with a new enemy--the Papacy. The dispute

on the question of free election, which was to range over all the

central years of his reign, had just begun. In the end of 1205 Hubert

Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, had died. The king announced his

intention of procuring the election of John de Gray, bishop of Norwich,

as his successor; but, though his purpose was well known, the chapter

(i.e. the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury) met secretly and elected

their sub-prior Reginald as archbishop. They sent him to Rome at once,

to receive confirmation from Pope Innocent III., whom they knew to be a

zealous champion of the rights of the Church. But John descended upon

them in great wrath, and by threats compelled them to hold a second

meeting, and to elect his nominee Gray, in whose name application for

confirmation was also made to the pope. Innocent, however, seeing a

splendid chance of asserting his authority, declared both the elections

that had taken place invalid, the first because it had been clandestine,

the second because it had been held under _force majeure_, and proceeded

to nominate a friend of his own--Cardinal Stephen Langton, an Englishman

of proved capacity and blameless life, then resident in Rome. He was far

the worthiest of the three candidates, but it was an intolerable

invasion of the rights of the English crown and the English Church that

an archbishop should be foisted on them in this fashion. The

representatives of the chapter who had been sent to Rome were persuaded

or compelled to elect him in the pope's presence (Dec. 1206).

King John was furious, and not without good reason; he refused to accept

Langton, whom he declared (quite unjustly) to be a secret friend of

Philip of France, and sequestrated the lands of the monks of Canterbury.

On this the pope threatened to lay an interdict on himself and his

realm. The king replied by issuing a proclamation to the effect that he

would outlaw any clerk who should accept the validity of such an

interdict and would confiscate his lands. Despising such threats

Innocent carried out his threat, and put England under the ban of the

Church on the 23rd of March 1208.

In obedience to the pope's orders the large majority of the English

clergy closed their churches, and suspended the ordinary course of the

services and celebration of the sacraments. Baptism and extreme unction

only were continued, lest souls should be lost; and marriages were

permitted but not inside the walls of churches. Foreseeing the wrath of

the king against all who obeyed the mandate from Rome, the larger number

of the bishops and many others of the higher clergy fled overseas to

escape the storm. Those who were bold enough to remain behind had much

to endure. John, openly rejoicing at the plunder that lay before him,

declared the temporalities of all who had accepted the interdict,

whether they had exiled themselves or no, to be confiscated. His

treasury was soon so well filled that he could dispense with ordinary

taxation. He also outlawed the whole body of the clergy, save the timid

remnant who promised to disregard the papal commands.

Character of John's rule.

Nothing proves more conclusively the strength of the Angevin monarchy,

and the decreasing power of feudalism, than that an unpopular king like

John could maintain his strife with the pope, and suppress the

discontents of his subjects, for nearly five years before the inevitable

explosion came. Probably his long immunity was due in the main to the

capacity of his strong-handed justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter; the king

hated him bitterly, but generally took his advice. The crash only came

when Geoffrey died in 1213; his ungrateful master only expressed joy.

"Now by God's feet am I for the first time king of England," he

exclaimed, when the news reached him. He proceeded to fill the vacancy

with a mere Poitevin adventurer, Peter des Roches, whom he had made

bishop of Winchester some time before. Indeed John's few trusted

confidants were nearly all foreigners, such men as the mercenary

captains Gerard of Athies and Engelhart of Cigogne, whom he made

sheriffs and castellans to the discontent of all Englishmen. He spent

all his money in maintaining bands of hired _Brabancons_ and _routiers_,

by whose aid he for some time succeeded in terrorizing the countryside.

There were a few preliminary outbreaks of rebellion, which were

suppressed with vigour and punished with horrible cruelty. John starved

to death the wife and son of William de Braose, the first baron who took

arms against him, and hanged in a row twenty-eight young boys, hostages

for the fidelity of their fathers, Welsh princes who had dabbled in

treason. Such acts provoked rage as well as fear, yet the measure of

John's iniquities was not full till 1212. Indeed for some time his

persistent prosperity provoked the indignant surprise of those who

believed him to be under a curse. If his renewed war with Philip of

France was generally unsuccessful, yet at home he held his own. The most

astounding instance of his success is that in 1210 he found leisure for

a hasty expedition to Ireland, where he compelled rebellious barons to

do homage, and received the submission of more than twenty of the local

kinglets. It is strange that he came back to find England undisturbed

behind him.

John does homage to the pope.

His long-deserved humiliation only began in the winter of 1212-1213,

when Innocent III., finding him so utterly callous as to the interdict,

took the further step of declaring him deposed from the throne for

contumacy, and handing over the execution of the penalty to the king of

France. This act provoked a certain amount of indignation in England,

and in the spring of 1213 the king was able to collect a large army on

Barham Down to resist the threatened French invasion. Yet so many of his

subjects were discontented that he dared not trust himself to the

chances of war, and, when the fleet of King Philip was ready to sail, he

surprised the world by making a sudden and grovelling submission to the

pope. Not only did he agree to receive Stephen Langton as archbishop, to

restore all the exiled clergy to their benefices, and to pay them

handsome compensation for all their losses during the last five years,

but he took the strange and ignominious step of declaring that he ceded

his whole kingdom to the pope, to hold as his vassal. He formally

resigned his crown into the hands of the legate Cardinal Pandulf, and

took it back as the pope's vassal, engaging at the same time to pay a

tribute of 1000 marks a year for England and Ireland. This was felt to

be a humiliating transaction by many of John's subjects, though to

others the joy at reconciliation with the Church caused all else to be

forgotten. The political effect of the device was all that John had

desired. His new suzerain took him under his protection, and forbade

Philip of France to proceed with his projected invasion, though ships

and men were all ready (May 1213). John's safety, however, was secured

in a more practical way when his bastard brother, William Longsword,

earl of Salisbury, made a descent on the port of Damme and burnt or sunk

a whole squadron of the French transports. After this John's spirits

rose, and he talked of crossing the seas himself to recover Normandy and

Anjou. But he soon found that his subjects were not inclined to follow

him; they were resigned to the loss of the Angevin heritage, whose union

with England brought no profit to them, however much it might interest

their king. The barons expressed their wish for a peace with France, and

when summoned to produce their feudal contingents pleaded poverty, and

raised a rather shallow theory to the effect that their services could

not be asked for wars beyond seas--against which there were conclusive

precedents in the reigns of Henry I. and Henry II. But any plea can be

raised against an unpopular king. John found himself obliged to turn

back, since hardly a man save his mercenaries had rallied to his

standard at Portsmouth. In great anger and indignation he marched off

towards the north, with his hired soldiery, swearing to punish the

barons who had taken the lead in the "strike" which had defeated his

purpose. But the outbreak of war was to be deferred for a space.

Archbishop Langton, who on assuming possession of his see had shown at

once that he was a patriotic English statesman, and not the mere

delegate of the pope, besought his master to hold back, and, when he

refused, threatened to renew the excommunication which had so lately

been removed. The old justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, now on his

death-bed, had also refused to pronounce sentence on the defaulters.

John hesitated, and meanwhile his enemies began to organize their

resistance.

Opposition of the barons.

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

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.

Alliance against France.

Battle of Bouvines.

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 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 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.

Magna Carta.

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 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 Cigogne. 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.

Civil War.

Death of John.

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 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. 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.

Henry III.

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 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.

Battle of Lincoln.

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. 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 Breaute, 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 Angouleme, 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

Provencal 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.

Simon de Monfort.

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. 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.

Condition of England under Henry III.

Beginnings of Parliament.

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 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 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.

Intellectual life.

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 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.

Religious life: the friars.

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 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.

Literature and art.

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 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.

Public discontent. The Provisions of Oxford.

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 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.

The barons' war: battle of Lewes.

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 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.

Montfort's parliament.

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 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 regime 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.

Battle of Evesham.

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 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.

Death of Henry III.

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 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.

Edward I.

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, 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.

Constitutional changes. Statutes of Westminster and Gloucester.

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 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.

Statute of Mortmain.

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 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.

Second Statute of Westminster.

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_, 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.

Statute of Winchester.

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 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.

Welsh wars.

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; 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.

Conquest of Wales.

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 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.

Expulsion of the Jews.

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 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.

Edward I. and Scotland.

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 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.

Edward I. and Philip IV.

The "model parliament" of 1295.

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 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 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.

Invasion of Scotland.

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

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.

Disputes with the clergy and baronage.

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 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.

Insurrection in Scotland. Wallace.

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 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.