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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME II

by

JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.

Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford

THE CHARTER, 1216-1307

THE PARLIAMENT, 1307-1400

_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November_ 1877;

_Reprinted December_ 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.

_Eversley Edition,_ 1895.

London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1895

CONTENTS

Volume II

Book III--The Charter--1216-1307

Chapter II--Henry the Third--1216-1232

Chapter III--The Barons' War--1232-1272

Chapter IV--Edward the First--1272-1307

Book IV--The Parliament--1307-1461

Authorities for Book IV

Chapter I--Edward II--1307-1327

Chapter II--Edward the Third--1327-1347

Chapter III--The Peasant Revolt--1347-1381

Chapter IV--Richard the Second--1381-1400

LIST OF MAPS

Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1.jpg)

France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2.jpg)

VOLUME II

BOOK III

THE CHARTER

1216-1307

CHAPTER II

HENRY THE THIRD

1216-1232

[Sidenote: William Marshal]

The death of John changed the whole face of English affairs. His son, Henry

of Winchester, was but nine years old, and the pity which was stirred by

the child's helplessness was aided by a sense of injustice in burthening

him with the iniquity of his father. At his death John had driven from his

side even the most loyal of his barons; but William Marshal had clung to

him to the last, and with him was Gualo, the Legate of Innocent's

successor, Honorius the Third. The position of Gualo as representative of

the Papal overlord of the realm was of the highest importance, and his

action showed the real attitude of Rome towards English freedom. The

boy-king was hardly crowned at Gloucester when Legate and Earl issued in

his name the very Charter against which his father had died fighting. Only

the clauses which regulated taxation and the summoning of parliament were

as yet declared to be suspended. The choice of William Marshal as "governor

of King and kingdom" gave weight to this step; and its effect was seen when

the contest was renewed in 1217. Lewis was at first successful in the

eastern counties, but the political reaction was aided by jealousies which

broke out between the English and French nobles in his force, and the first

drew gradually away from him. So general was the defection that at the

opening of summer William Marshal felt himself strong enough for a blow at

his foes. Lewis himself was investing Dover, and a joint army of French and

English barons under the Count of Perche and Robert Fitz-Walter was

besieging Lincoln, when gathering troops rapidly from the royal castles the

regent marched to the relief of the latter town. Cooped up in its narrow

streets and attacked at once by the Earl and the garrison, the barons fled

in utter rout; the Count of Perche fell on the field, Robert Fitz-Walter

was taken prisoner. Lewis at once retreated on London and called for aid

from France. But a more terrible defeat crushed his remaining hopes. A

small English fleet which set sail from Dover under Hubert de Burgh fell

boldly on the reinforcements which were crossing under escort of Eustace

the Monk, a well-known freebooter of the Channel. Some incidents of the

fight light up for us the naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the

English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into the crowded transports,

others hurled quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more active

vessels crashed with their armed prows into the sides of the French ships.

The skill of the mariners of the Cinque Ports turned the day against the

larger forces of their opponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly

destroyed. The royal army at once closed upon London, but resistance was

really at an end. By a treaty concluded at Lambeth in September Lewis

promised to withdraw from England on payment of a sum which he claimed as

debt; his adherents were restored to their possessions, the liberties of

London and other towns confirmed, and the prisoners on either side set at

liberty. A fresh issue of the Charter, though in its modified form,

proclaimed yet more clearly the temper and policy of the Earl Marshal.

[Sidenote: Hubert de Burgh]

His death at the opening of 1219, after a year spent in giving order to the

realm, brought no change in the system he had adopted. The control of

affairs passed into the hands of a new legate, Pandulf, of Stephen Langton

who had just returned forgiven from Rome, and of the Justiciar, Hubert de

Burgh. It was a time of transition, and the temper of the Justiciar was

eminently transitional. Bred in the school of Henry the Second, Hubert had

little sympathy with national freedom, and though resolute to maintain the

Charter he can have had small love for it; his conception of good

government, like that of his master, lay in a wise personal administration,

in the preservation of order and law. But he combined with this a

thoroughly English desire for national independence, a hatred of

foreigners, and a reluctance to waste English blood and treasure in

Continental struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task was one of no

common difficulty. He was hampered by the constant interference of Rome. A

Papal legate resided at the English court, and claimed a share in the

administration of the realm as the representative of its overlord and as

guardian of the young sovereign. A foreign party too had still a footing in

the kingdom, for William Marshal had been unable to rid himself of men like

Peter des Roches or Faukes de Breauté, who had fought on the royal side in

the struggle against Lewis. Hubert had to deal too with the anarchy which

that struggle left behind it. From the time of the Conquest the centre of

England had been covered with the domains of great houses, whose longings

were for feudal independence and whose spirit of revolt had been held in

check partly by the stern rule of the kings and partly by the rise of a

baronage sprung from the Court and settled for the most part in the North.

The oppression of John united both the earlier and these newer houses in

the struggle for the Charter. But the character of each remained unchanged,

and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party break out in their old

lawlessness and defiance of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Order restored]

For a time the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed to revive. But the

Justiciar was resolute to crush it, and he was backed by the strenuous

efforts of Stephen Langton. A new and solemn coronation of the young king

in 1220 was followed by a demand for the restoration of the royal castles

which had been seized by the barons and foreigners. The Earl of Chester,

the head of the feudal baronage, though he rose in armed rebellion, quailed

before the march of Hubert and the Primate's threats of excommunication. A

more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de Breauté, the

sheriff of six counties, with six royal castles in his hands, and allied

both with the rebel barons and Llewelyn of Wales. But in 1224 his castle of

Bedford was besieged for two months; and on its surrender the stern justice

of Hubert hung the twenty-four knights and their retainers who formed the

garrison before its walls. The blow was effectual; the royal castles were

surrendered by the barons, and the land was once more at peace. Freed from

foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from the presence of the

foreign legate. Langton wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he

lived no future legate should be sent to England, and with Pandulf's

resignation in 1221 the direct interference of the Papacy in the government

of the realm came to an end. But even these services of the Primate were

small compared with his services to English freedom. Throughout his life

the Charter was the first object of his care. The omission of the articles

which restricted the royal power over taxation in the Charter which was

published at Henry's accession in 1216 was doubtless due to the

Archbishop's absence and disgrace at Rome. The suppression of disorder

seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal

ministers; for when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in

Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the King's councillors,

protested that it had been extorted by force and was without legal

validity. "If you loved the King, William," the Primate burst out in anger,

"you would not throw a stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the

realm." The young king was cowed by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised

observance of the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of such

a temper among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage

demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of

a subsidy, and Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of

constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the

Crown.

[Sidenote: State of the Church]

These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the realm

year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually bringing

the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of liberty

was at this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement which

stirred English society to its depths. Never had the priesthood wielded

such boundless power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third

and his immediate successors. But its religious hold on the people was

loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy was fading away

before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use

of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation

of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy

the struggle that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second

disclosed a spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of

Florence denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very

foundations of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence

had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to

the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no signs as yet of religious

revolt, and though the political action of Rome had been in the main on the

side of freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its interference with

national concerns which broke out in the struggle against John. "The Pope

has no part in secular matters," had been the reply of London to the

interdict of Innocent. And within the English Church itself there was much

to call for reform. Its attitude in the strife for the Charter as well as

the after work of the Primate had made it more popular than ever; but its

spiritual energy was less than its political. The disuse of preaching, the

decline of the monastic orders into rich landowners, the non-residence and

ignorance of the parish priests, lowered the religious influence of the

clergy. The abuses of the time foiled even the energy of such men as Bishop

Grosseteste of Lincoln. His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt

taverns, to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot and

debauchery of the life of the baronage. But such prohibitions witness to

the prevalence of the evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were still

withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as ministers, judges, or

ambassadors. Benefices were heaped in hundreds at a time on royal

favourites like John Mansel. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes and

then served them by half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased from

Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks from all episcopal

discipline. And behind all this was a group of secular statesmen and

scholars, the successors of such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed no

open warfare with the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its abuses and

its faults.

[Sidenote: The Friars]

To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the aim of

two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of the

thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at the

sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the

Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he cried, "must be met by zeal,

lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by

preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the

mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life

of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the

time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take

Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all, he flings his very clothes

at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God. His

passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his

brother, he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His

last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!" Strangely as the two men

differed from each other, their aim was the same--to convert the heathen,

to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to

carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by an utter reversal

of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the

salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister

for the preacher, the monk for the "brother" or friar. To force the new

"brethren" into entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their

vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging Friars" were

to subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the

very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by

others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance

swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders,

the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered

in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging preachers, clad

in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered

barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and

Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.

[Sidenote: The Friars and the Towns]

To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious

revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most

ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his

fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction

they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's ritual or the

scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its

minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed

the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story

brought religion into the fair and the market place. In England, where the

Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in

1224, both were received with the same delight. As the older orders had

chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at

Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance

of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between

Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods turned aside to a

grange of the monks of Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures,

as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs,

the jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the

monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to

welcome them and witness their tricks. The disappointment was too much for

the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate

to find their night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome of the townsmen

made up everywhere for the ill-will and opposition of both clergy and

monks. The work of the Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid

progress of population within the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary

regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible

scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was

to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and the

Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters

of each town. Their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses; it was

amongst the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their homes. At

London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford they made their

way to the swampy ground between its walls and the streams of Thames. Huts

of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough

fence and ditch that bounded the Friary. The order of Francis made a hard

fight against the taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater personal

comfort which characterized the time. "I did not enter into religion to

build walls," protested an English provincial when the brethren pressed for

a larger house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which the

burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to the ground. "You

need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his scornful

reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar

found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at matins. At night he

dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester

and Oxford with, shouts of "Kill, kill!" "I am a friar," shrieked the

terror-stricken brother. "You lie," was the instant answer, "for you go

shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there. In

an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of window.

[Sidenote: Revival of Theology]

It was with less success that the order struggled against the passion of

the time for knowledge. Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was

by their founders, would have denied them the possession of books or

materials for study. "I am your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis

cried passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter. When the news of a

great doctor's reception was brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell.

"I am afraid, my son," he replied, "that such doctors will be the

destruction of my vineyard. They are the true doctors who with the meekness

of wisdom show forth good works for the edification of their neighbours."

One kind of knowledge indeed their work almost forced on them. The

popularity of their preaching soon led them to the deeper study of

theology; within a short time after their establishment in England we find

as many as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Leicester,

Bristol, and other places, and a regular succession of teachers provided at

each University. The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of

their new church while philosophy was taught in the cloister. The first

provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house and

persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there. His influence after his promotion

to the see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure theological study

among the Friars, as well as their establishment in the University; and in

this work he was ably seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco,

under whom the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation throughout

Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Koln borrowed from it their professors: it

was through its influence indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly

inferior to that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism. But the

result of this powerful impulse was soon seen to be fatal to the wider

intellectual activity which had till now characterized the Universities.

Theology in its scholastic form resumed its supremacy in the schools. Its

only efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine and law. The

last, as he was by far the greatest, instance of the freer and wider

culture which had been the glory of the last century, was Roger Bacon, and

no name better illustrates the rapidity and completeness with which it

passed away.

[Sidenote: Roger Bacon]

Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents who were driven into exile

and reduced to poverty by the civil wars. From Oxford, where he studied

under Edmund of Abingdon to whom he owed his introduction to the works of

Aristotle, he passed to the University of Paris, and spent his whole

heritage there in costly studies and experiments. "From my youth up," he

writes, "I have laboured at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the

friendship of all men among the Latins who had any reputation for

knowledge. I have caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry,

arithmetic, the construction of tables and instruments, and many needful

things besides." The difficulties in the way of such studies as he had

resolved to pursue were immense. He was without instruments or means of

experiment. "Without mathematical instruments no science can be mastered,"

he complains afterwards, "and these instruments are not to be found among

the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred pounds.

Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which the

motions of the heavens are certified from the beginning to the end of the

world without daily labour, but these tables are worth a king's ransom and

could not be made without a vast expense. I have often attempted the

composition of such tables, but could not finish them through failure of

means and the folly of those whom I had to employ." Books were difficult

and sometimes even impossible to procure. "The scientific works of

Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients cannot be

had without great cost; their principal works have not been translated into

Latin, and copies of others are not to be found in ordinary libraries or

elsewhere. The admirable books of Cicero de Republica are not to be found

anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I have made anxious enquiry for them

in different parts of the world, and by various messengers. I could never

find the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for them during

twenty years and more. And so it is with many more most useful books

connected with the science of morals." It is only words like these of his

own that bring home to us the keen thirst for knowledge, the patience, the

energy of Roger Bacon. He returned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching

record of his devotion to those whom he taught remains in the story of John

of London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the general

level of his pupils. "When he came to me as a poor boy," says Bacon in

recommending him to the Pope, "I caused him to be nurtured and instructed

for the love of God, especially since for aptitude and innocence I have

never found so towardly a youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be

taught in languages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratuitously

instructed him with my own lips since the time that I received your

mandate. There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root of

philosophy, though he has not produced the branches, flowers, and fruit

because of his youth, and because he has had no experience in teaching. But

he has the means of surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and

goes on as he has begun."

The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was justified

by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It is

probably of himself that he speaks when he tells us that "the science of

optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere among the

Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science on which he had laboured

for ten years. But his teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. From

the moment when the Friars settled in the Universities scholasticism

absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world. The temper of the

age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The older enthusiasm

for knowledge was dying down; the study of law was the one source of

promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy was discredited,

literature in its purer forms became almost extinct. After forty years of

incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own words "unheard, forgotten,

buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was

gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially laboured in the

attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on

these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of

books, experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages, and

the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the

friendship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined

and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend

Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar of the order of St.

Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to

the work which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the

masses of the poor. He had written little. So far was he from attempting to

write that his new superiors prohibited him from publishing anything under

pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and water. But we can

see the craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation which

marks the man of genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange

opportunity that suddenly opened before him. "Some few chapters on

different subjects, written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got

abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the notice of

Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. But

difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses

for such a work as he projected would cost at least, £60, and the Pope sent

not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like

himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends

raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of

repayment from Clement. Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse and

scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular

form to gain the Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed

another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. By the

close of 1267 the work was done. The "greater work," itself in modern form

a closely-printed folio, with its successive summaries and appendices in

the "lesser" and the "third" works (which make a good octavo more), were

produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen months.

[Sidenote: The Opus Majus]

No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus"

is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words

of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of

philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a

greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had

been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly

unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast

advantages which it offered." The developement of his scheme is on the

largest scale; he gathers together the whole knowledge of his time on every

branch of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he

suggests improvements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his

after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in

insisting on the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of

languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than his

scientific investigations. From grammar he passes to mathematics, from

mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the name of mathematics

indeed was included all the physical science of the time. "The neglect of

it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately, "hath

nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he who knows

not mathematics cannot know any other sciences; and what is more, he cannot

discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography,

chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into something of scientific

form, and like rapid sketches are given of the question of climate,

hydrography, geography, and astrology. The subject of optics, his own

especial study, is treated with greater fulness; he enters into the

question of the anatomy of the eye besides discussing problems which lie

more strictly within the province of optical science. In a word, the

"Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is "at once the

Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of

the after-works of Roger Bacon--and treatise after treatise has of late

been disentombed from our libraries--are but developements in detail of the

magnificent conception he laid before Clement. Such a work was its own

great reward.

From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and found small

recognition. No word of acknowledgement seems to have reached its author

from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only

gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old

man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll

away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first

in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon.

[Sidenote: Scholasticism]

The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength of the drift towards

the practical studies, and above all towards theology in its scholastic

guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous

foe of mediæval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his logical method

in the discussion and definition of theological dogma into its unexpected

ally. It was this very method that led to "that unprofitable subtlety and

curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the scholastic philosophy.

But "certain it is"--to continue the same great thinker's comment on the

Friars--"that if these schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and

unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation,

they had proved excellent lights to the great advancement of all learning

and knowledge." What, amidst all their errors, they undoubtedly did was to

insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration and a more exact use of

words, to introduce a clear and methodical treatment of all subjects into

discussion, and above all to substitute an appeal to reason for

unquestioning obedience to authority. It was by this critical tendency, by

the new clearness and precision which scholasticism gave to enquiry, that

in spite of the trivial questions with which it often concerned itself it

trained the human mind through the next two centuries to a temper which

fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that brought about

the Renascence. And it is to the same spirit of fearless enquiry as well as

to the strong popular sympathies which their very constitution necessitated

that we must attribute the influence which the Friars undoubtedly exerted

in the coming struggle between the people and the Crown. Their position is

clearly and strongly marked throughout the whole contest. The University of

Oxford, which soon fell under the direction of their teaching, stood first

in its resistance to Papal exactions and its claim of English liberty. The

classes in the towns, on whom the influence of the Friars told most

directly, were steady supporters of freedom throughout the Barons' Wars.

[Sidenote: Its Political Influence]

Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was of immense value, for

it set on a religious basis and gave an intellectual form to the

constitutional theory of the relations between king and people which was

slowly emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assuming the

responsibility of a Christian king to God for the good government of his

realm, in surrounding the pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious

sanctions, the mediæval Church entered its protest against any personal

despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract

between king and people; and their trenchant logic made short work of the

royal claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience. "He who

would be in truth a king," ran a poem which embodies their teaching at this

time in pungent verse--"he is a 'free king' indeed if he rightly rule

himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of

his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction. It is one

thing to rule according to a king's duty, another to destroy a kingdom by

resisting the law." "Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be

known what the generality, to whom their laws are best known, think on the

matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make

daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their

own affairs which are at stake they will take the more care and will act

with an eye to their own peace." "It concerns the community to see what

sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm." The

constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole

nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to have a voice in

the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so

clearly stated before. But the importance of the Friar's work lay in this,

that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the popular

preacher. The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was

carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother,

begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the

cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or

market-place. His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to

coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the

homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them

side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his

tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened to the

rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.

[Sidenote: Henry the Third]

Never had there been more need of such a political education of the whole

people than at the moment we have reached. For the triumph of the Charter,

the constitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly

on the helplessness of the king. As boy or youth, Henry the Third had bowed

to the control of William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he was

now grown to manhood, and his character was from this hour to tell on the

events of his reign. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father

the young king was absolutely free. There was a geniality, a vivacity, a

refinement in his temper which won a personal affection for him even in his

worst days from some who bitterly censured his rule. The Abbey-church of

Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor,

remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of men

of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. But

of the political capacity which was the characteristic of his house he had

little or none. Profuse, changeable, false from sheer meanness of spirit,

impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless

in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an empty and

prodigal magnificence, his one notion of government was a dream of

arbitrary power. But frivolous as the king's mood was, he clung with a weak

man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy; and this was the policy not

of Hubert or Langton but of John. He cherished the hope of recovering his

heritage across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown;

and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises which force had

wrested from the king and which force could wrest back again. France was

telling more and more on English opinion; and the claim which the French

kings were advancing to a divine and absolute power gave a sanction in

Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority which was still maintained

by his favourite advisers in the royal council. Above all he clung to the

alliance with the Papacy. Henry was personally devout; and his devotion

only bound him the more firmly to his father's system of friendship with

Rome. Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to the Papal See. Rome

had saved him from ruin as a child; its legate had set the crown on his

head; its threats and excommunications had foiled Lewis and built up again

a royal party. Above all it was Rome which could alone free him from his

oath to the Charter, and which could alone defend him if like his father he

had to front the baronage in arms.

[Sidenote: England and Rome]

His temper was now to influence the whole system of government. In 1227

Henry declared himself of age; and though Hubert still remained Justiciar

every year saw him more powerless in his struggle with the tendencies of

the king. The death of Stephen Langton in 1228 was a yet heavier blow to

English freedom. In persuading Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had

averted a conflict between the national desire for self-government and the

Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more

serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by

the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened

which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the

other at the Reformation. In the mediæval theory of the Papacy, as Innocent

and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of which the

Popes were the head, took the feudal form of the secular realms which lay

within its pale. The Pope was its sovereign, the Bishops were his barons,

and the clergy were his under vassals. As the king demanded aids and

subsidies in case of need from his liegemen, so in the theory of Rome might

the head of the Church demand aid in need from the priesthood. And at this

moment the need of the Popes was sore. Rome had plunged into her desperate

conflict with the Emperor, Frederick the Second, and was looking everywhere

for the means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On England she believed

herself to have more than a spiritual claim for support. She regarded the

kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its overlord. It was only

by the promise of a heavy subsidy that Henry in 1229 could buy the Papal

confirmation of Langton's successor. But the baronage was of other mind

than Henry as to this claim of overlordship, and the demand of an aid to

Rome from the laity was at once rejected by them. Her spiritual claim over

the allegiance of the clergy however remained to fall back upon, and the

clergy were in the Pope's hand. Gregory the Ninth had already claimed for

the Papal See a right of nomination to some prebends in each cathedral

church; he now demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the priesthood, and

a threat of excommunication silenced their murmurs. Exaction followed

exaction as the needs of the Papal treasury grew greater. The very rights

of lay patrons were set aside, and under the name of "reserves"

presentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal market, while

Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings of the Church.

[Sidenote: Fall of Hubert de Burgh]

The general indignation at last found vent in a wide conspiracy. In 1231

letters from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be

ruined by the Romans" were scattered over the kingdom by armed men; tithes

gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were seized and given to the

poor; the Papal collectors were beaten and their bulls trodden under foot.

The remonstrances of Rome only made clearer the national character of the

movement; but as enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen

to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done;

royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their acts; and

the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance of

Hubert de Burgh. No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the mind

of the king. But he was already in full collision with the Justiciar on

other grounds. Henry was eager to vindicate his right to the great heritage

his father had lost: the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they

loved England but because they hated France, spurred him to war; and in

1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons. But while Hubert held

power no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. The Norman

call was rejected through his influence, and when a great armament gathered

at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport

and supplies. The young king drew his sword and rushed madly on the

Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.

But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred for the year. In

1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poitou, but the failure

of the campaign was again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was

said to have prevented a decisive engagement. It was at this moment that

the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry's wrath against his

minister. In the summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar,

and dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven

him to take sanctuary. A smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly

refused. "I will die any death," he said, "before I put iron on the man who

freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." The

remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the king to replace Hubert in

sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner

into the Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless in the

realm. His fall left England without a check to the rule of Henry himself.

CHAPTER III

THE BARON'S WAR

1232-1272

[Sidenote: The Aliens]

Once master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick to declare his plan of

government. The two great checks on a merely personal rule lay as yet in

the authority of the great ministers of State and in the national character

of the administrative body which had been built up by Henry the Second.

Both of these checks Henry at once set himself to remove. He would be his

own minister. The Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the king

and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law-courts. The Chancellor had

grown into a great officer of State, and in 1226 this office had been

conferred on the Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent of the

Great Council. But Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him and naming

to this as to other offices at his pleasure. His policy was to entrust all

high posts of government to mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained

administrators, but wholly dependent on the royal will. He found equally

dependent agents of administration by surrounding himself with foreigners.

The return of Peter des Roches to the royal councils was the first sign of

the new system; and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were summoned

over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative

posts about the Court. The king's marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence

was followed by the arrival in England of the new queen's uncles. The

"Savoy," as his house in the Strand was named, still recalls Peter of Savoy

who arrived five years later to take for a while the chief place at Henry's

council-board; another brother, Boniface, was consecrated on Archbishop

Edmund's death to the highest post in the realm save the Crown itself, the

Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The young Primate, like his brother, brought

with him foreign fashions strange enough to English folk. His armed

retainers pillaged the markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the

ground the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who opposed his

visitation. London was roused by the outrage; on the king's refusal to do

justice a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's house at Lambeth

with cries of vengeance, and the "handsome archbishop," as his followers

styled him, was glad to escape over sea. This brood of Provençals was

followed in 1243 by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's queen,

Isabella of Angoulême. Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of

Valence received at a later time the earldom of Pembroke. Even the king's

jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed these great

nobles to find a fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords brought

in their train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and three English

earls who were in royal wardship were wedded by the king to foreigners. The

whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men who were

ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English government or

English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy; the very retainers of the royal

household turned robbers and pillaged foreign merchants in the precincts of

the Court; corruption invaded the judicature; at the close of this period

of misrule Henry de Bath, a justiciary, was proved to have openly taken

bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.

[Sidenote: Henry and the Baronage]

That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on unchecked in defiance

of the provisions of the Charter was owing to the disunion and sluggishness

of the English baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard,

the Earl Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth as their leader to

demand the expulsion of the strangers from the royal Council. Though

deserted by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent

against him and forced the king to treat for peace. But at this critical

moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland; he

fell in a petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. The

interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon, forced the king to

dismiss Peter from court; but there was no real change of system, and the

remonstrances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of

Lincoln, remained fruitless. In the long interval of misrule the financial

straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest

Laws were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant,

loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free

quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this kind however were utterly

insufficient to defray the cost of the king's prodigality. A sixth of the

royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of

the Crown amounted to four times its annual income. Henry was forced to

appeal for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted in

1237 on promise of control in its expenditure and on condition that the

king confirmed the Charter. But Charter and promise were alike disregarded;

and in 1242 the resentment of the barons expressed itself in a determined

protest and a refusal of further subsidies. In spite of their refusal

however Henry gathered money enough for a costly expedition for the

recovery of Poitou. The attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg

the king's force fled in disgraceful rout before the French as far as

Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a disease which

scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the conquerors. The treasury was

utterly drained, and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh appeal with

his own mouth to the baronage. But the barons had now rallied to a plan of

action, and we can hardly fail to attribute their union to the man who

appears at their head. This was the Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.

[Sidenote: Simon of Montfort]

Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose name had become

memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in

Southern Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his

mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.

But as Simon's tendencies were for the most part French John had kept the

revenues of the earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim of his

elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of Henry the Third to accept a

divided allegiance. The refusal marks the rapid growth of that sentiment of

nationality which the loss of Normandy had brought home. Amaury chose to

remain French, and by a family arrangement with the king's sanction the

honour of Leicester passed in 1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice

made Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood still moved the jealousy of

the barons, and this jealousy was quickened by a secret match in 1238 with

Eleanor, the king's sister and widow of the second William Marshal. The

match formed probably part of a policy which Henry pursued throughout his

reign of bringing the great earldoms into closer connexion with the Crown.

That of Chester had fallen to the king through the extinction of the family

of its earls; Cornwall was held by his brother, Richard; Salisbury by his

cousin. Simon's marriage linked the Earldom of Leicester to the royal

house. But it at once brought Simon into conflict with the nobles and the

Church. The baronage, justly indignant that such a step should have been

taken without their consent, for the queen still remained childless and

Eleanor's children by one whom they looked on as a stranger promised to be

heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt which failed only through the

desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall, who was satisfied with

Earl Simon's withdrawal from the Royal Council. The censures of the Church

on Eleanor's breach of a vow of chaste widowhood which she had made at her

first husband's death were averted with hardly less difficulty by a journey

to Rome. It was after a year of trouble that Simon returned to England to

reap as it seemed the fruits of his high alliance. He was now formally made

Earl of Leicester and re-entered the Royal Council. But it is probable that

he still found there the old jealousy which had forced from him a pledge of

retirement after his marriage; and that his enemies now succeeded in

winning over the king. In a few months, at any rate, he found the

changeable king alienated from him, he was driven by a burst of royal

passion from the realm, and was forced to spend seven months in France.

[Sidenote: Simon's early action]

Henry's anger passed as quickly as it had risen, and in the spring of 1240

the Earl was again received with honour at court. It was from this moment

however that his position changed. As yet it had been that of a foreigner,

confounded in the eyes of the nation at large with the Poitevins and

Provençals who swarmed about the court. But in the years of retirement

which followed Simon's return to England his whole attitude was reversed.

There was as yet no quarrel with the king: he followed him in a campaign

across the Channel, and shared in his defeat at Saintes. But he was a

friend of Grosseteste and a patron of the Friars, and became at last known

as a steady opponent of the misrule about him. When prelates and barons

chose twelve representatives to confer with Henry in 1244 Simon stood with

Earl Richard of Cornwall at the head of them. A definite plan of reform

disclosed his hand. The confirmation of the Charter was to be followed by

the election of Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer, in the Great Council. Nor

was this restoration of a responsible ministry enough; a perpetual Council

was to attend the king and devise further reforms. The plan broke against

Henry's resistance and a Papal prohibition; but from this time the Earl

took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. The struggle of

the following years was chiefly with the exactions of the Papacy, and Simon

was one of the first to sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246

addressed to the court of Rome. He was present at the Lent Parliament of

1248, and we can hardly doubt that he shared in its bold rebuke of the

king's misrule and its renewed demand for the appointment of the higher

officers of state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the danger of

leaving at home such a centre of all efforts after reform that brought

Henry to send him in the autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for

the Crown the last of its provinces over sea.

[Sidenote: Simon in Gascony]

Threatened by France and by Navarre without as well as by revolt within,

the loss of Gascony seemed close at hand; but in a few months the stern

rule of the new Seneschal had quelled every open foe within or without its

bounds. To bring the province to order proved a longer and a harder task.

Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the Rhine: "they rode the country

by night," wrote the Earl, "like thieves, in parties of twenty or thirty or

forty," and gathered in leagues against the Seneschal, who set himself to

exact their dues to the Crown and to shield merchant and husbandman from

their violence. For four years Earl Simon steadily warred down these robber

bands, storming castles where there was need, and bridling the wilder

country with a chain of forts. Hard as the task was, his real difficulty

lay at home. Henry sent neither money nor men; and the Earl had to raise

both from his own resources, while the men whom he was fighting found

friends in Henry's council-chamber. Again and again Simon was recalled to

answer charges of tyranny and extortion made by the Gascon nobles and

pressed by his enemies at home on the king. Henry's feeble and impulsive

temper left him open to pressure like this; and though each absence of the

Earl from the province was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder which

only his presence repressed, the deputies of its nobles were still admitted

to the council-table and commissions sent over to report on the Seneschal's

administration. The strife came to a head in 1252, when the commissioners

reported that stern as Simon's rule had been the case was one in which

sternness was needful. The English barons supported Simon, and in the face

of their verdict Henry was powerless. But the king was now wholly with his

enemies; and his anger broke out in a violent altercation. The Earl offered

to resign his post if the money he had spent was repaid him, and appealed

to Henry's word. Henry hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a

false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; "and but that thou bearest

the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a

word!" A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the Earl once more

returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw

to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its

nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King

Lewis from the land. But the offer was refused; and Henry, who had himself

undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253

to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.

[Sidenote: Simon's temper]

The Earl's character had now thoroughly developed. He inherited the strict

and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance on

religious services whether by night or day. In his correspondence with Adam

Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in a perusal of

the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted

for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful

and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his

sense of honour keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of

contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in

his after career. His best friends marked honestly this fault, and it shows

the greatness of the man that he listened to their remonstrances. "Better

is a patient man," writes honest Friar Adam, "than a strong man, and he who

can rule his own temper than he who storms a city." But the one

characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his

"constancy," the firm immoveable resolve which trampled even death under

foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward the First chose as

his device, "Keep troth," was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see

in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties

both at home and abroad he "thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of

so great an exploit" as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but

once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the

failure of all support or funds from England, and the king's desertion of

his cause, till the work was done. There was the same steadiness of will

and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Robert Grosseteste show how

early Simon had learned to sympathize with the Bishop in his resistance to

Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offered him his own support and

that of his associates. But Robert passed away, and as the tide of

misgovernment mounted higher and higher the Earl silently trained himself

for the day of trial. The fruit of his self-discipline was seen when the

crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the

enthusiastic love of the people clung to the grave, stern soldier who

"stood like a pillar," unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by

the oath he had sworn.

[Sidenote: Matthew Paris]

While Simon had been warring with Gascon rebels affairs in England had been

going from bad to worse. The scourge of Papal taxation fell heavier on the

clergy. After vain appeals to Rome and to the king, Archbishop Edmund

retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-gatherer after

tax-gatherer with powers of excommunication, suspension from orders, and

presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priesthood. The

wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. Oxford gave the

signal by hunting a Papal legate out of the city amid cries of "usurer" and

"simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the

barons bade a Papal collector begone out of England. "If you tarry here

three days longer," he added, "you and your company shall be cut to

pieces." For a time Henry himself was swept away by the tide of national

indignation. Letters from the king, the nobles, and the prelates, protested

against the Papal exactions, and orders were given that no money should be

exported from the realm. But the threat of interdict soon drove Henry back

on a policy of spoliation in which he went hand in hand with Rome. The

temper which this oppression begot among even the most sober churchmen has

been preserved for us by an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst

of patriotic feeling. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is

the last, of our monastic historians. The school of St. Alban's survived

indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle into mere annalists

whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts and whose work is as

colourless as it is jejune. In Matthew the breadth and precision of the

narrative, the copiousness of his information on topics whether national or

European, the general fairness and justice of his comments, are only

surpassed by the patriotic fire and enthusiasm of the whole. He had

succeeded Roger of Wendover as chronicler at St. Alban's; and the Greater

Chronicle with an abridgement of it which long passed under the name of

Matthew of Westminster, a "History of the English," and the "Lives of the

Earlier Abbots," are only a few among the voluminous works which attest his

prodigious industry. He was an artist as well as an historian, and many of

the manuscripts which are preserved are illustrated by his own hand. A

large circle of correspondents--bishops like Grosseteste, ministers like

Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swereford--furnished him with

minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical proceedings. Pilgrims from

the East and Papal agents brought news of foreign events to his scriptorium

at St. Alban's. He had access to and quotes largely from state documents,

charters, and exchequer rolls. The frequency of royal visits to the abbey

brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself

contributed to the great chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a

faithfulness the memory of his weakness and misgovernment. On one solemn

feast-day the king recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the middle

step between the floor and the throne begged him to write the story of the

day's proceedings. While on a visit to St. Alban's he invited him to his

table and chamber, and enumerated by name two hundred and fifty of the

English baronies for his information. But all this royal patronage has left

little mark on his work. "The case," as Matthew says, "of historical

writers is hard, for if they tell the truth they provoke men, and if they

write what is false they offend God." With all the fulness of the school of

court historians, such as Benedict and Hoveden, to which in form he

belonged, Matthew Paris combines an independence and patriotism which is

strange to their pages. He denounces with the same unsparing energy the

oppression of the Papacy and of the king. His point of view is neither that

of a courtier nor of a churchman but of an Englishman, and the new national

tone of his chronicle is but the echo of a national sentiment which at last

bound nobles and yeomen and churchmen together into a people resolute to

wrest freedom from the Crown.

[Sidenote: Wales]

The nation was outraged like the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the

Charter failed to bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248,

in 1249, and again in 1255 the great Council fruitlessly renewed its demand

for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce

good government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the

great officers of the Crown were appointed in the Council of the Baronage.

But Henry refused their offer with scorn and sold his plate to the citizens

of London to find payment for his household. A spirit of mutinous defiance

broke out on the failure of all legal remedy. When the Earl of Norfolk

refused him aid Henry answered with a threat. "I will send reapers and reap

your fields for you," he said. "And I will send you back the heads of your

reapers," replied the Earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and the

refusal of supplies, the Crown was in fact penniless; and yet never was

money more wanted, for a trouble which had long pressed upon the English

kings had now grown to a height that called for decisive action. Even his

troubles at home could not blind Henry to the need of dealing with the

difficulty of Wales. Of the three Welsh states into which all that remained

unconquered of Britain had been broken by the victories of Deorham and

Chester, two had long ceased to exist. The country between the Clyde and

the Dee had been gradually absorbed by the conquests of Northumbria and the

growth of the Scot monarchy. West Wales, between the British Channel and

the estuary of the Severn, had yielded to the sword of Ecgberht. But a

fiercer resistance prolonged the independence of the great central portion

which alone in modern language preserves the name of Wales. Comprising in

itself the largest and most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was aided

in its struggle against Mercia by the weakness of its assailant, the

youngest and feeblest of the English states, as well as by an internal

warfare which distracted the energies of the invaders. But Mercia had no

sooner risen to supremacy among the English kingdoms than it took the work

of conquest vigorously in hand. Offa tore from Wales the border-land

between the Severn and the Wye; the raids of his successors carried fire

and sword into the heart of the country; and an acknowledgement of the

Mercian overlordship was wrested from the Welsh princes. On the fall of

Mercia this overlordship passed to the West-Saxon kings, and the Laws of

Howel Dda own the payment of a yearly tribute by "the prince of Aberffraw"

to "the King of London." The weakness of England during her long struggle

with the Danes revived the hopes of British independence; it was the

co-operation of the Welsh on which the northmen reckoned in their attack on

the house of Ecgberht. But with the fall of the Danelaw the British princes

were again brought to submission, and when in the midst of the Confessor's

reign the Welsh seized on a quarrel between the houses of Leofric and

Godwine to cross the border and carry their attacks into England itself,

the victories of Harold reasserted the English supremacy. Disembarking on

the coast his light-armed troops he penetrated to the heart of the

mountains, and the successors of the Welsh prince Gruffydd, whose head was

the trophy of the campaign, swore to observe the old fealty and render the

old tribute to the English Crown.

[Sidenote: Wales and the Normans]

A far more desperate struggle began when the wave of Norman conquest broke

on the Welsh frontier. A chain of great earldoms, settled by William along

the border-land, at once bridled the old marauding forays. From his county

palatine of Chester Hugh the Wolf harried Flintshire into a desert, Robert

of Belesme in his earldom of Shrewsbury "slew the Welsh," says a

chronicler, "like sheep, conquered them, enslaved them and flayed them with

nails of iron." The earldom of Gloucester curbed Britain along the lower

Severn. Backed by these greater baronies a horde of lesser adventurers

obtained the royal "licence to make conquest on the Welsh." Monmouth and

Abergavenny were seized and guarded by Norman castellans; Bernard of

Neufmarché won the lordship of Brecknock; Roger of Montgomery raised the

town and fortress in Powysland which still preserves his name. A great

rising of the whole people in the days of the second William won back some

of this Norman spoil. The new castle of Montgomery was burned, Brecknock

and Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and the Welsh poured ravaging

over the English border. Twice the Red King carried his arms fruitlessly

among the mountains against enemies who took refuge in their fastnesses

till famine and hardship drove his broken host into retreat. The wiser

policy of Henry the First fell back on his father's system of gradual

conquest. A new tide of invasion flowed along the southern coast, where the

land was level and open and accessible from the sea. The attack was aided

by strife in the country itself. Robert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Gloucester,

was summoned to his aid by a Welsh chieftain; and his defeat of Rhys ap

Tewdor, the last prince under whom Southern Wales was united, produced an

anarchy which enabled Robert to land safely on the coast of Glamorgan, to

conquer the country round, and to divide it among his soldiers. A force of

Flemings and Englishmen followed the Earl of Clare as he landed near

Milford Haven and pushing back the British inhabitants settled a "Little

England" in the present Pembrokeshire. A few daring adventurers accompanied

the Norman Lord of Kemeys into Cardigan, where land might be had for the

winning by any one who would "wage war on the Welsh."

[Sidenote: The Welsh Revival]

It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of the British race

seemed at hand, that a new outburst of energy rolled back the tide of

invasion and changed the fitful resistance of the separate Welsh provinces

into a national effort to regain independence. To all outer seeming Wales

had become utterly barbarous. Stripped of every vestige of the older Roman

civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement

from the general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons had sunk

into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk of

the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, retaining no

higher political organization than that of the clan, their strength was

broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united only in battle or in raid

against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild people there still

lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years

before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest

Englishmen. At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was

suddenly broken by a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth century

burst forth, not from one bard or another, but from the nation at large.

The Welsh temper indeed was steeped in poetry. "In every house," says the

shrewd Gerald de Barri, "strangers who arrived in the morning were

entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens and the music of the

harp." A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of

western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable

means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a

developement of the old Celtic language heard by Cæsar as the Romance

tongues are developements of Cæsar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than

any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure

and to settled literary form. No other mediæval literature shows at its

outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh.

But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling

freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into

a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the symbol of the

strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the romantic

tales which reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.

[Sidenote: The Welsh Poetry]

The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact,

tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal. When

Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The "descent

into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediæval horror with

the mediæval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends his

years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with

fair women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new

earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken

by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero's

armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright with

glancing colour. "The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk,

and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious

emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold than the flower of the

broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her

hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the

spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of

the falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the

breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses."

Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the

gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so

quick to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions,

its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passionate

melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impossible, by an instinct

of what is noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of nature.

The wildest extravagance of the tale-teller is relieved by some graceful

play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, some magical touch of

beauty. As Kulwch's greyhounds bound from side to side of their master's

steed, they "sport round him like two sea-swallows." His spear is "swifter

than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth

when the dew of June is at the heaviest." A subtle, observant love of

nature and natural beauty takes fresh colour from the passionate human

sentiment with which it is imbued. "I love the birds" sings Gwalchmai "and

their sweet voices in the lulling songs of the wood"; he watches at night

beside the fords "among the untrodden grass" to hear the nightingale and

watch the play of the sea-mew. Even patriotism takes the same picturesque

form. The Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Saxon; as he

dwells on his own he tells of "its sea-coast and its mountains, its towns

on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its waters, and its

valleys, its white sea-mews, its beauteous women." Here as everywhere the

sentiment of nature passes swiftly and subtly into the sentiment of a human

tenderness: "I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil" goes on the

song; "I love the marches of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a

snow-white arm." In the Celtic love of woman there is little of the

Teutonic depth and earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of

delicate enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light of

dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty. "White is my

love as the apple-blossom, as the ocean's spray; her face shines like the

pearly dew on Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is like the light of sunset."

The buoyant and elastic temper of the French trouveur was spiritualized in

the Welsh singers by a more refined poetic feeling. "Whoso beheld her was

filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod." A

touch of pure fancy such as this removes its object out of the sphere of

passion into one of delight and reverence.

[Sidenote: The Bards]

It is strange to pass from the world of actual Welsh history into such a

world as this. But side by side with this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy

and romance ran a torrent of intenser song. The spirit of the earlier

bards, their joy in battle, their love of freedom, broke out anew in ode

after ode, in songs extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, but fused into

poetry by the intense fire of patriotism which glowed within them. Every

fight, every hero had its verse. The names of older singers, of Taliesin,

Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, were revived in bold forgeries to animate the

national resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in North Wales that the

spirit of patriotism received its strongest inspiration from this burst of

song. Again and again Henry the Second was driven to retreat from the

impregnable fastnesses where the "Lords of Snowdon," the princes of the

house of Gruffydd ap Conan, claimed supremacy over the whole of Wales. Once

in the pass of Consilt a cry arose that the king was slain, Henry of Essex

flung down the royal standard, and the king's desperate efforts could

hardly save his army from utter rout. The bitter satire of the Welsh

singers bade him knight his horse, since its speed had alone saved him from

capture. In a later campaign the invaders were met by storms of rain, and

forced to abandon their baggage in a headlong flight to Chester. The

greatest of the Welsh odes, that known to English readers in Gray's

translation as "The Triumph of Owen," is Gwalchmai's song of victory over

the repulse of an English fleet from Abermenai.

[Sidenote: Llewelyn ap Jorwerth]

The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth seemed destined to realize

the hopes of his countrymen. The homage which he succeeded in extorting

from the whole of the Welsh chieftains during a reign which lasted from

1194 to 1246 placed him openly at the head of his race, and gave a new

character to its struggle with the English king. In consolidating his

authority within his own domains, and in the assertion of his lordship over

the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth aimed steadily at securing

the means of striking off the yoke of the Saxon. It was in vain that John

strove to buy his friendship by the hand of his natural daughter Johanna.

Fresh raids on the Marches forced the king to enter Wales in 1211; but

though his army reached Snowdon it fell back like its predecessors, starved

and broken before an enemy it could never reach. A second attack in the

same year had better success. The chieftains of South Wales were drawn from

their new allegiance to join the English forces, and Llewelyn, prisoned in

his fastnesses, was at last driven to submit. But the ink of the treaty was

hardly dry before Wales was again on fire; a common fear of the English

once more united its chieftains, and the war between John and his barons

soon removed all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his allegiance to

an excommunicated king, and allied with the barons under Fitz-Walter--too

glad to enlist in their cause a prince who could hold in check the nobles

of the border country where the royalist cause was strongest--Llewelyn

seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex Powys, the central

district of Wales where the English influence had always been powerful, to

clear the royal garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardigan, and to force even

the Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage.

[Sidenote: Llewelyn and the Bards]

England watched these efforts of the subject race with an anger still

mingled with contempt. "Who knows not," exclaims Matthew Paris as he dwells

on the new pretensions of the Welsh ruler, "who knows not that the Prince

of Wales is a petty vassal of the King of England?" But the temper of

Llewelyn's own people was far other than the temper of the English

chronicler. The hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph of

the Lord of Snowdon. His court was crowded with bardic singers. "He pours,"

sings one of them, "his gold into the lap of the bard as the ripe fruit

falls from the trees." Gold however was hardly needed to wake their

enthusiasm. Poet after poet sang of "the Devastator of England," the "Eagle

of men that loves not to lie nor sleep," "towering above the rest of men

with his long red lance," his "red helmet of battle crested with a fierce

wolf." "The sound of his coming is like the roar of the wave as it rushes

to the shore, that can neither be stayed nor hushed." Lesser bards strung

together Llewelyn's victories in rough jingle of rime and hounded him on to

the slaughter. "Be of good courage in the slaughter," sings Elidir, "cling

to thy work, destroy England, and plunder its multitudes." A fierce thirst

for blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses of the court singers.

"Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in heaps," bursts out a triumphant

bard; "St. Clears, with its bright white lands, it is not Saxons who hold

it now!" "In Swansea, the key of Lloegria, we made widows of all the

wives." "The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with

the leader of wolves and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers

with keen scent of carcases." "Better," closes the song, "better the grave

than the life of man who sighs when the horns call him forth, to the

squares of battle."

[Sidenote: The Welsh hopes]

But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out of the mere mob of

chieftains who live by rapine, and boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from

hand to hand through the hall that "they take and give no quarter."

"Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious," he was "the great Caesar" who was

to gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of the Celtic race.

Mysterious prophecies, the prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from

lip to lip and were heard even along the Seine and the Rhine, came home

again to nerve Wales to its last struggle with the stranger. Medrawd and

Arthur, men whispered, would appear once more on earth to fight over again

the fatal battle of Camlan in which the hero-king perished. The last

conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still lived to combat for his

people. The supposed verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope of a

restoration of the Cymry. "In their hands shall be all the land from

Britanny to Man: ... a rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving out

of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gathered up in the strange work

of Geoffry of Monmouth, these predictions had long been making a deep

impression not on Wales only but on its conquerors. It was to meet the

dreams of a yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king at

Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the Second. But neither trick

nor conquest could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory

of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who joined his

host, "that your people of rebels can withstand my army?" "My people,"

replied the chieftain, "may be weakened by your might, and even in great

part destroyed, but unless the wrath of God be on the side of its foe it

will not perish utterly. Nor deem I that other race or other tongue will

answer for this corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last day

save this people and tongue of Wales." So ran the popular rime, "Their Lord

they will praise, their speech they shall keep, their land they shall

lose--except wild Wales."

[Sidenote: The Provisions of Oxford]

Faith and prophecy seemed justified by the growing strength of the British

people. The weakness and dissensions which characterized the reign of Henry

the Third enabled Llewelyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a practical independence

till the close of his life, when a fresh acknowledgement of the English

supremacy was wrested from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of

his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Gruffydd, who followed him in

1246. The raids of the new chieftain swept the border to the very gates of

Chester, while his conquest of Glamorgan seemed to bind the whole people

together in a power strong enough to meet any attack from the stranger. So

pressing was the danger that it called the king's eldest son, Edward, to

the field; but his first appearance in arms ended in a crushing defeat. The

defeat however remained unavenged. Henry's dreams were of mightier

enterprises than the reduction of the Welsh. The Popes were still fighting

their weary battle against the House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its

kingdom of Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy See,

to any power that would aid them in the struggle. In 1254 it was offered to

the king's second son, Edmund. With imbecile pride Henry accepted the

offer, prepared to send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to

repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the purposes of his war. In

a Parliament at the opening of 1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the

clergy. A fresh demand was made in 1258. But the patience of the realm was

at last exhausted. Earl Simon had returned in 1253 from his government of

Gascony, and the fruit of his meditations during the four years of his

quiet stay at home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to France and

Scotland which showed there was as yet no open quarrel with Henry, was seen

in a league of the baronage and in their adoption of a new and startling

policy. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of

the Charter: its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage and a

definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge;

its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own

stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the Charter and

his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken. The barons

had secured the freedom of the realm; the secret of their long patience

during the reign of Henry lay in the difficulty of securing its right

administration. It was this difficulty which Earl Simon was prepared to

solve when action was forced on him by the stir of the realm. A great

famine added to the sense of danger from Wales and from Scotland and to the

irritation at the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year

1258 opened. It was to arrange for a campaign against Wales that Henry

called a parliament in April. But the baronage appeared in arms with

Gloucester and Leicester at their head. The king was forced to consent to

the appointment of a committee of twenty-four to draw up terms for the

reform of the state. The Twenty-four again met the Parliament at Oxford in

June, and although half the committee consisted of royal ministers and

favourites it was impossible to resist the tide of popular feeling. Hugh

Bigod, one of the firmest adherents of the two Earls, was chosen as

Justiciar. The claim to elect this great officer was in fact the leading

point in the baronial policy. But further measures were needed to hold in

check such arbitrary misgovernment as had prevailed during the last twenty

years. By the "Provisions of Oxford" it was agreed that the Great Council

should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned by the king or no; and

on each occasion "the Commonalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall

come to the Parliaments, and at other times when occasion shall be when the

King and his Council shall send for them, to treat of the wants of the king

and of his kingdom. And the Commonalty shall hold as established that which

these Twelve shall do." Three permanent committees of barons and prelates

were named to carry out the work of reform and administration. The reform

of the Church was left to the original Twenty-four; a second Twenty-four

negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent Council of Fifteen advised the

king in the ordinary work of government. The complexity of such an

arrangement was relieved by the fact that the members of each of these

committees were in great part the same persons. The Justiciar, Chancellor,

and the guardians of the king's castles swore to act only with the advice

and assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two great officers, with

the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at the end

of the year. Sheriffs were to be appointed for a single year only, no doubt

by the Council, from among the chief tenants of the county, and no undue

fees were to be exacted for the administration of justice in their court.

[Sidenote: Government of the Barons]

A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in that tongue since

the Conquest which has reached us, ordered the observance of these

Provisions. The king was in fact helpless, and resistance came only from

the foreign favourites, who refused to surrender the castles and honours

which had been granted to them. But the Twenty-four were resolute in their

action; and an armed demonstration of the barons drove the foreigners in

flight over sea. The whole royal power was now in fact in the hands of the

committees appointed by the Great Council. But the measures of the barons

showed little of the wisdom and energy which the country had hoped for. In

October 1259 the knighthood complained that the barons had done nothing but

seek their own advantage in the recent changes. This protest produced the

Provisions of Westminster, which gave protection to tenants against their

feudal lords, regulated legal procedure in the feudal courts, appointed

four knights in each shire to watch the justice of the sheriffs, and made

other temporary enactments for the furtherance of justice. But these

Provisions brought little fruit, and a tendency to mere feudal privilege

showed itself in an exemption of all nobles and prelates from attendance at

the Sheriff's courts. Their foreign policy was more vigorous and

successful. All further payment to Rome, whether secular or ecclesiastical,

was prohibited, formal notice was given to the Pope of England's withdrawal

from the Sicilian enterprise, peace put an end to the incursions of the

Welsh, and negotiations on the footing of a formal abandonment of the

king's claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in

October 1259 in a peace with France.

[Sidenote: Simon and the Baronage]

This peace, the triumph of that English policy which had been struggling

ever since the days of Hubert de Burgh with the Continental policy of Henry

and his foreign advisers, was the work of the Earl of Leicester. The

revolution had doubtless been mainly Simon's doing. In the summer of 1258,

while the great change was going on, a thunderstorm drove the king as he

passed along the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where the Earl

was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take shelter with him and have no

fear of the storm. The king refused with petulant wit. "If I fear the

thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world." But

Simon had probably small faith in the cumbrous system of government which

the Barons devised, and it was with reluctance that he was brought to swear

to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it. With their home government

he had little to do, for from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he was

chiefly busied in negotiation in France. But already his breach with

Gloucester and the bulk of his fellow councillors was marked. In the Lent

Parliament of 1259 he had reproached them, and Gloucester above all, with

faithlessness to their trust. "The things we are treating of," he cried,

"we have sworn to carry out. With such feeble and faithless men I care not

to have ought to do!" The peace with France was hardly signed when his

distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's withdrawal to the French

court at the close of the year for the formal signature of the treaty was

the signal for a reactionary movement. From France the king forbade the

summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his resumption of the

enterprise against Sicily. Both acts were distinct breaches of the

Provisions of Oxford, but Henry trusted to the divisions of the

Twenty-four. Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester; the Justiciar,

Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the spring; and both of these leaders

drew cautiously to the king. Roger Mortimer and the Earls of Hereford and

Norfolk more openly espoused the royal cause, and in February 1260 Henry

had gained confidence enough to announce that as the barons had failed to

keep their part of the Provisions he should not keep his.

[Sidenote: The Counter Revolution]

Earl Simon almost alone remained unshaken. But his growing influence was

seen in the appointment of his supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar in

Bigod's place, while his strength was doubled by the accession of the

King's son Edward to his side. In the moment of the revolution Edward had

vehemently supported the party of the foreigners. But he had sworn to

observe the Provisions, and the fidelity to his pledge which remained

throughout his life the chief note of his temper at once showed itself.

Like Simon he protested against the faithlessness of the barons in the

carrying out of their reforms, and it was his strenuous support of the

petition of the knighthood that brought about the additional Provisions of

1259. He had been brought up with Earl Simon's sons, and with the Earl

himself his relations remained friendly even at the later time of their

fatal hostilities. But as yet he seems to have had no distrust of Simon's

purposes or policy. His adhesion to the Earl recalled Henry from France;

and the king was at once joined by Gloucester in London while Edward and

Simon remained without the walls. But the love of father and son proved too

strong to bear political severance, and Edward's reconciliation foiled the

Earl's plans. He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh troubles were

breaking out, while Henry prepared to deal his final blow at the government

which, tottering as it was, still held him in check. Rome had resented the

measures which had put an end to her extortions, and it was to Rome that

Henry looked for a formal absolution from his oath to observe the

Provisions. In June 1261 he produced a Bull annulling the Provisions and

freeing him from his oath in a Parliament at Winchester. The suddenness of

the blow forbade open protest and Henry quickly followed up his victory.

Hugh Bigod, who had surrendered the Tower and Dover in the spring,

surrendered the other castles he held in the autumn. Hugh Despenser was

deposed from the Justiciarship and a royalist, Philip Basset, appointed in

his place.

[Sidenote: Simon's rising]

The news of this counter-revolution reunited for a moment the barons.

Gloucester joined Earl Simon in calling an autumn Parliament at St.

Alban's, and in summoning to it three knights from every shire south of

Trent. But the union was a brief one. Gloucester consented to refer the

quarrel with the king to arbitration and the Earl of Leicester withdrew in

August to France. He saw that for the while there was no means of

withstanding Henry, even in his open defiance of the Provisions. Foreign

soldiers were brought into the land; the king won back again the

appointment of sheriffs. For eighteen months of this new rule Simon could

do nothing but wait. But his long absence lulled the old jealousies against

him. The confusion of the realm and a fresh outbreak of troubles in Wales

renewed the disgust at Henry's government, while his unswerving

faithfulness to the Provisions fixed the eyes of all Englishmen upon the

Earl as their natural leader. The death of Gloucester in the summer of 1262

removed the one barrier to action; and in the spring of 1263 Simon landed

again in England as the unquestioned head of the baronial party. What

immediately forced him to action was a march of Edward with a body of

foreign troops against Llewelyn, who was probably by this time in

communication if not in actual alliance with the Earl. The chief opponents

of Llewelyn among the Marcher Lords were ardent supporters of Henry's

misgovernment, and when a common hostility drew the Prince and Earl

together, the constitutional position of Llewelyn as an English noble gave

formal justification for co-operation with him. At Whitsuntide the barons

met Simon at Oxford and finally summoned Henry to observe the Provisions.

His refusal was met by an appeal to arms. Throughout the country the

younger nobles flocked to Simon's standard, and the young Earl of

Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, became his warmest supporter. His rapid

movements foiled all opposition. While Henry vainly strove to raise money

and men, Simon swept the Welsh border, marched through Reading on Dover,

and finally appeared before London.

[Sidenote: Mise of Amiens]

The Earl's triumph was complete. Edward after a brief attempt at resistance

was forced to surrender Windsor and disband his foreign troops. The rising

of London in the cause of the barons left Henry helpless. But at the moment

of triumph the Earl saw himself anew forsaken. The bulk of the nobles again

drew towards the king; only six of the twelve barons who had formed the

patriot half of the committee of 1258, only four of the twelve

representatives of the community at that date, were now with the Earl. The

dread too of civil war gave strength to the cry for a compromise, and at

the end of the year it was agreed that the strife should be left to the

arbitration of the French king, Lewis the Ninth. But saint and just ruler

as he was, the royal power was in the conception of Lewis a divine thing,

which no human power could limit or fetter, and his decision, which was

given in January 1264, annulled the whole of the Provisions. Only the

Charters granted before the Provisions were to be observed. The appointment

and removal of all officers of state was to be wholly with the king, and he

was suffered to call aliens to his councils if he would. The Mise of Amiens

was at once confirmed by the Pope, and, crushing blow as it was, the barons

felt themselves bound by the award. It was only the exclusion of aliens--a

point which they had not purposed to submit to arbitration--which they

refused to concede. Luckily Henry was as inflexible on this point as on the

rest, and the mutual distrust prevented any real accommodation.

[Sidenote: Battle of Lewes]

But Henry had to reckon on more than the baronage. Deserted as he was by

the greater nobles, Simon was far from standing alone. Throughout the

recent struggle the new city governments of the craft-gilds, which were

known by the name of "Communes," had shown an enthusiastic devotion to his

cause. The queen was stopped in her attempt to escape from the Tower by an

angry mob, who drove her back with stones and foul words. When Henry

attempted to surprise Leicester in his quarters at Southwark, the Londoners

burst the gates which had been locked by the richer burghers against him,

and rescued him by a welcome into the city. The clergy and the universities

went in sympathy with the towns, and in spite of the taunts of the

royalists, who accused him of seeking allies against the nobility in the

common people, the popular enthusiasm gave a strength to the Earl which

sustained him even in this darkest hour of the struggle. He at once

resolved on resistance. The French award had luckily reserved the rights of

Englishmen to the liberties they had enjoyed before the Provisions of

Oxford, and it was easy for Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave

to the Crown was as contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions

themselves. London was the first to reject the decision; in March 1264 its

citizens mustered at the call of the town-bell at Saint Paul's, seized the

royal officials, and plundered the royal parks. But an army had already

mustered in great force at the king's summons, while Leicester found

himself deserted by the bulk of the baronage. Every day brought news of

ill. A detachment from Scotland joined Henry's forces. The younger De

Montfort was taken prisoner. Northampton was captured, the king raised the

siege of Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl Simon's only saved London

itself from a surprise by Edward. But, betrayed as he was, the Earl

remained firm to the cause. He would fight to the end, he said, even were

he and his sons left to fight alone. With an army reinforced by 15,000

Londoners, he marched in May to the relief of the Cinque Ports which were

now threatened by the king. Even on the march he was forsaken by many of

the nobles who followed him. Halting at Fletching in Sussex, a few miles

from Lewes, where the royal army was encamped, Earl Simon with the young

Earl of Gloucester offered the king compensation for all damage if he would

observe the Provisions. Henry's answer was one of defiance, and though

numbers were against him, the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a

soldier reversed the advantages of the ground; marching at dawn on the 14th

of May he seized the heights eastward of the town, and moved down these

slopes to an attack. His men with white crosses on back and breast knelt in

prayer before the battle opened, and all but reached the town before their

approach was perceived. Edward however opened the fight by a furious charge

which broke the Londoners on Leicester's left. In the bitterness of his

hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles,

slaughtering three thousand men. But he returned to find the battle lost.

Crowded in the narrow space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space

broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, the royalist centre

and left were crushed by Earl Simon. The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the

Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, "makede him a castel

of a mulne post" ("he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels" goes on

the sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.

Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father's surrender.

[Sidenote: Simon's rule]

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. "Now

England breathes in the hope of liberty," sang a poet of the time; "the

English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and

their foes are vanquished." But the moderation of the terms agreed upon in

the Mise of Lewes, a convention between the king and his captors, shows

Simon's sense of the difficulties of his position. The question of the

Provisions was again to be submitted to arbitration; and a parliament in

June, to which four knights were summoned from every county, placed the

administration till this arbitration was complete in the hands of a new

council of nine to be nominated by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester

and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester. Responsibility to the community was

provided for by the declaration of a right in the body of barons and

prelates to remove either of the Three Electors, who in turn could displace

or appoint the members of the Council. Such a constitution was of a

different order from the cumbrous and oligarchical committees of 1258. But

it had little time to work in. The plans for a fresh arbitration broke

down. Lewis refused to review his decision, and all schemes for setting

fresh judges between the king and his people were defeated by a formal

condemnation of the barons' cause issued by the Pope. Triumphant as he was

indeed Earl Simon's difficulties thickened every day. The queen with

Archbishop Boniface gathered an army in France for an invasion; Roger

Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms and only held in check by

Llewelyn. It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king,

yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. The imprisonment

too gave a shock to public feeling which thinned the Earl's ranks. In the

new Parliament which he called at the opening of 1265 the weakness of the

patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only

twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and

twenty ecclesiastics.

[Sidenote: Summons of the Commons]

But it was just this sense of his weakness which prompted the Earl to an

act that has done more than any incident of this struggle to immortalize

his name. Had the strife been simply a strife for power between the king

and the baronage the victory of either would have been equally fatal in its

results. The success of the one would have doomed England to a royal

despotism, that of the other to a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our

freedom the English baronage had been brought too low by the policy of the

kings to be able to withstand the crown single-handed. From the first

moment of the contest it had been forced to make its cause a national one.

The summons of two knights from each county, elected in its county court,

to a Parliament in 1254, even before the opening of the struggle, was a

recognition of the political weight of the country gentry which was

confirmed by the summons of four knights from every county to the

Parliament assembled after the battle of Lewes. The Provisions of Oxford,

in stipulating for attendance and counsel on the part of twelve delegates

of the "commonalty," gave the first indication of a yet wider appeal to the

people at large. But it was the weakness of his party among the baronage at

this great crisis which drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of

mighty issue in our history. As before, he summoned two knights from every

county. But he created a new force in English politics when he summoned to

sit beside them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of

delegates from the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any

matter respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ

issued by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit

beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the parliament

of the realm.

[Sidenote: Simon's difficulties]

It is only this great event however which enables us to understand the

large and prescient nature of Earl Simon's designs. Hardly a few months had

passed away since the victory of Lewes when the burghers took their seats

at Westminster, yet his government was tottering to its fall. We know

little of the Parliament's acts. It seems to have chosen Simon as Justiciar

and to have provided for Edward's liberation, though he was still to live

under surveillance at Hereford and to surrender his earldom of Chester to

Simon, who was thus able to communicate with his Welsh allies. The Earl met

the dangers from without with complete success. In September 1264 a general

muster of the national forces on Barham Down and a contrary wind put an end

to the projects of invasion entertained by the mercenaries whom the queen

had collected in Flanders; the threats of France died away into

negotiations; the Papal Legate was forbidden to cross the Channel, and his

bulls of excommunication were flung into the sea. But the difficulties at

home grew more formidable every day. The restraint upon Henry and Edward

jarred against the national feeling of loyalty, and estranged the mass of

Englishmen who always side with the weak. Small as the patriotic party

among the barons had been from the first, it grew smaller as dissensions

broke out over the spoils of victory. The Earl's justice and resolve to

secure the public peace told heavily against him. John Giffard left him

because he refused to allow him to exact ransom from a prisoner, contrary

to the agreement made after Lewes. A greater danger opened when the young

Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the estates of the foreigners,

held himself aloof from the Justiciar, and resented Leicester's prohibition

of a tournament, his naming the wardens of the royal castles by his own

authority, his holding Edward's fortresses on the Welsh marches by his own

garrisons.

[Sidenote: Edward and Gloucester]

Gloucester's later conduct proves the wisdom of Leicester's precautions. In

the spring Parliament of 1265 he openly charged the Earl with violating the

Mise of Lewes, with tyranny, and with aiming at the crown. Before its close

he withdrew to his own lands in the west and secretly allied himself with

Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Barons. Earl Simon soon followed him to the

west, taking with him the king and Edward. He moved along the Severn,

securing its towns, advanced westward to Hereford, and was marching at the

end of May along bad roads into the heart of South Wales to attack the

fortresses of Earl Gilbert in Glamorgan when Edward suddenly made his

escape from Hereford and joined Gloucester at Ludlow. The moment had been

skilfully chosen, and Edward showed a rare ability in the movements by

which he took advantage of the Earl's position. Moving rapidly along the

Severn he seized Gloucester and the bridges across the river, destroyed the

ships by which Leicester strove to escape across the Channel to Bristol,

and cut him off altogether from England. By this movement too he placed

himself between the Earl and his son Simon, who was advancing from the east

to his father's relief. Turning rapidly on this second force Edward

surprised it at Kenilworth and drove it with heavy loss within the walls of

the castle. But the success was more than compensated by the opportunity

which his absence gave to the Earl of breaking the line of the Severn.

Taken by surprise and isolated as he was, Simon had been forced to seek for

aid and troops in an avowed alliance with Llewelyn, and it was with Welsh

reinforcements that he turned to the east. But the seizure of his ships and

of the bridges of the Severn held him a prisoner in Edward's grasp, and a

fierce attack drove him back, with broken and starving forces, into the

Welsh hills. In utter despair he struck northward to Hereford; but the

absence of Edward now enabled him on the 2nd of August to throw his troops

in boats across the Severn below Worcester. The news drew Edward quickly

back in a fruitless counter-march to the river, for the Earl had already

reached Evesham by a long night march on the morning of the 4th, while his

son, relieved in turn by Edward's counter-march, had pushed in the same

night to the little town of Alcester. The two armies were now but some ten

miles apart, and their junction seemed secured. But both were spent with

long marching, and while the Earl, listening reluctantly to the request of

the King who accompanied him, halted at Evesham for mass and dinner, the

army of the younger Simon halted for the same purpose at Alcester.

[Sidenote: Battle of Evesham]

"Those two dinners doleful were, alas!" sings Robert of Gloucester; for

through the same memorable night Edward was hurrying back from the Severn

by country cross-lanes to seize the fatal gap that lay between them. As

morning broke his army lay across the road that led northward from Evesham

to Alcester. Evesham lies in a loop of the river Avon where it bends to the

south; and a height on which Edward ranged his troops closed the one outlet

from it save across the river. But a force had been thrown over the river

under Mortimer to seize the bridges, and all retreat was thus finally cut

off. The approach of Edward's army called Simon to the front, and for the

moment he took it for his son's. Though the hope soon died away a touch of

soldierly pride moved him as he recognised in the orderly advance of his

enemies a proof of his own training. "By the arm of St. James," he cried,

"they come on in wise fashion, but it was from me that they learnt it." A

glance however satisfied him of the hopelessness of a struggle; it was

impossible for a handful of horsemen with a mob of half-armed Welshmen to

resist the disciplined knighthood of the royal army. "Let us commend our

souls to God," Simon said to the little group around him, "for our bodies

are the foe's." He bade Hugh Despenser and the rest of his comrades fly

from the field. "If he died," was the noble answer, "they had no will to

live." In three hours the butchery was over. The Welsh fled at the first

onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in the cornfields and

gardens where they sought refuge. The little group of knights around Simon

fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. So

terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but gained the hill-top

when a lance-thrust brought his horse to the ground, but Simon still

rejected the summons to yield till a blow from behind felled him mortally

wounded to the ground. Then with a last cry of "It is God's grace," the

soul of the great patriot passed away.

[Sidenote: The Royalist reaction]

The triumphant blare of trumpets which welcomed the rescued king into

Evesham, "his men weeping for joy," rang out in bitter contrast to the

mourning of the realm. It sounded like the announcement of a reign of

terror. The rights and laws for which men had toiled and fought so long

seemed to have been swept away in an hour. Every town which had supported

Earl Simon was held to be at the king's mercy, its franchises to be

forfeited. The Charter of Lynn was annulled; London was marked out as the

special object of Henry's vengeance, and the farms and merchandise of its

citizens were seized as first-fruits of its plunder. The darkness which on

that fatal morning hid their books from the monks of Evesham as they sang

in choir was but a presage of the gloom which fell on the religious houses.

From Ramsey, from Evesham, from St. Alban's rose the same cry of havoc and

rapine. But the plunder of monk and burgess was little to the vast sentence

of confiscation which the mere fact of rebellion was held to have passed on

all the adherents of Earl Simon. To "disinherit" these of their lands was

to confiscate half the estates of the landed gentry of England; but the

hotter royalists declared them disinherited, and Henry was quick to lavish

their lands away on favourites and foreigners. The very chroniclers of

their party recall the pillage with shame. But all thought of resistance

lay hushed in a general terror. Even the younger Simon "saw no other rede"

than to release his prisoners. His army, after finishing its meal, was

again on its march to join the Earl when the news of his defeat met it,

heralded by a strange darkness that, rising suddenly in the north-west and

following as it were on Edward's track, served to shroud the mutilations

and horrors of the battle-field. The news was soon fatally confirmed. Simon

himself could see from afar his father's head borne off on a spear-point to

be mocked at Wigmore. But the pursuit streamed away southward and westward

through the streets of Tewkesbury, heaped with corpses of the panic-struck

Welshmen whom the townsmen slaughtered without pity; and there was no

attack as the little force fell back through the darkness and big

thunder-drops in despair upon Kenilworth. "I may hang up my axe," are the

bitter words which a poet attributes to their leader, "for feebly have I

gone"; and once within the castle he gave way to a wild sorrow, day after

day tasting neither meat nor drink.

[Sidenote: Edward]

He was roused into action again by news of the shameful indignities which

the Marcher Lords had offered to the body of the great Earl before whom

they had trembled so long. The knights around him broke out at the tidings

in a passionate burst of fury, and clamoured for the blood of Richard of

Cornwall and his son, who were prisoners in the castle. But Simon had

enough nobleness left to interpose. "To God and him alone was it owing"

Richard owned afterwards, "that I was snatched from death." The captives

were not only saved, but set free. A Parliament had been called at

Winchester at the opening of September, and its mere assembly promised an

end to the reign of utter lawlessness. A powerful party, too, was known to

exist in the royal camp which, hostile as it had shown itself to Earl

Simon, shared his love for English liberties, and the liberation of Richard

was sure to aid its efforts. At the head of this party stood the young Earl

of Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, to whose action above all the Earl's

overthrow was due. And with Gilbert stood Edward himself. The passion for

law, the instinct of good government, which were to make his reign so

memorable in our history, had declared themselves from the first. He had

sided with the barons at the outset of their struggle with Henry; he had

striven to keep his father true to the Provisions of Oxford. It was only

when the figure of Earl Simon seemed to tower above that of Henry himself,

when the Crown seemed falling into bondage, that Edward passed to the royal

side; and now that the danger which he dreaded was over he returned to his

older attitude. In the first flush of victory, while the doom of Simon was

as yet unknown, Edward had stood alone in desiring his captivity against

the cry of the Marcher Lords for his blood. When all was done he wept over

the corpse of his cousin and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and followed

the Earl's body to the tomb. But great as was Edward's position after the

victory of Evesham, his moderate counsels were as yet of little avail. His

efforts in fact were met by those of Henry's second son, Edmund, who had

received the lands and earldom of Earl Simon, and whom the dread of any

restoration of the house of De Montfort set at the head of the

ultra-royalists. Nor was any hope of moderation to be found in the

Parliament which met in September 1265. It met in the usual temper of a

restoration-Parliament to legalize the outrages of the previous month. The

prisoners who had been released from the dungeons of the barons poured into

Winchester to add fresh violence to the demands of the Marchers. The wives

of the captive loyalists and the widows of the slain were summoned to give

fresh impulse to the reaction. Their place of meeting added fuel to the

fiery passions of the throng, for Winchester was fresh from its pillage by

the younger Simon on his way to Kenilworth, and its stubborn loyalty must

have been fanned into a flame by the losses it had endured. In such an

assembly no voice of moderation could find a hearing. The four bishops who

favoured the national cause, the bishops of London and Lincoln, of

Worcester and Chichester, were excluded from it, and the heads of the

religious houses were summoned for the mere purpose of extortion. Its

measures were but a confirmation of the violence which had been wrought.

All grants made during the king's "captivity" were revoked. The house of De

Montfort was banished from the realm. The charter of London was annulled.

The adherents of Earl Simon were disinherited and seizin of their lands was

given to the king.

[Sidenote: Simon's Miracles]

Henry at once appointed commissioners to survey and take possession of his

spoil while he moved to Windsor to triumph in the humiliation of London.

Its mayor and forty of its chief citizens waited in the castle yard only to

be thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and Henry entered his

capital in triumph as into an enemy's city. The surrender of Dover came to

fill his cup of joy, for Richard and Amaury of Montfort had sailed with the

Earl's treasure to enlist foreign mercenaries, and it was by this port that

their force was destined to land. But a rising of the prisoners detained

there compelled its surrender in October, and the success of the royalists

seemed complete. In reality their difficulties were but beginning. Their

triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious sentiment of

the time, and religion avenged itself in its own way. Everywhere the Earl's

death was looked upon as a martyrdom; and monk and friar united in praying

for the souls of the men who fell at Evesham as for soldiers of Christ. It

was soon whispered that heaven was attesting the sanctity of De Montfort by

miracles at his tomb. How great was the effect of this belief was seen in

the efforts of King and Pope to suppress the miracles, and in their

continuance not only through the reign of Edward the First but even in the

days of his successor. But its immediate result was a sudden revival of

hope. "Sighs are changed into songs of praise," breaks out a monk of the

time, "and the greatness of our former joy has come to life again!" Nor was

it in miracles alone that the "faithful," as they proudly styled

themselves, began to look for relief "from the oppression of the

malignants." A monk of St. Alban's who was penning a eulogy of Earl Simon

in the midst of this uproar saw the rise of a new spirit of resistance in

the streets of the little town. In dread of war it was guarded and strongly

closed with bolts and bars, and refused entrance to all strangers, and

above all to horsemen, who wished to pass through. The Constable of

Hertford, an old foe of the townsmen, boasted that spite of bolts and bars

he would enter the place and carry off four of the best villeins captive.

He contrived to make his way in; but as he loitered idly about a butcher

who passed by heard him ask his men how the wind stood. The butcher guessed

his design to burn the town, and felled him to the ground. The blow roused

the townsmen. They secured the Constable and his followers, struck off

their heads, and fixed them at the four corners of the borough.

[Sidenote: The Younger Simon]

The popular reaction gave fresh heart to the younger Simon. Quitting

Kenilworth, he joined in November John D'Eyvill and Baldewin Wake in the

Isle of Axholme where the Disinherited were gathering in arms. So fast did

horse and foot flow in to him that Edward himself hurried into Lincolnshire

to meet this new danger. He saw that the old strife was just breaking out

again. The garrison of Kenilworth scoured the country; the men of the

Cinque Ports, putting wives and children on board their barks, swept the

Channel and harried the coasts; while Llewelyn, who had brought about the

dissolution of Parliament by a raid upon Chester, butchered the forces sent

against him and was master of the border. The one thing needed to link the

forces of resistance together was a head, and such a head the appearance of

Simon at Axholme seemed to promise. But Edward was resolute in his plan of

conciliation. Arriving before the camp at the close of 1265, he at once

entered into negotiations with his cousin, and prevailed on him to quit the

island and appear before the king. Richard of Cornwall welcomed Simon at

the court, he presented him to Henry as the saviour of his life, and on his

promise to surrender Kenilworth Henry gave him the kiss of peace. In spite

of the opposition of Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Lords success seemed to

be crowning this bold stroke of the peace party when the Earl of Gloucester

interposed. Desirous as he was of peace, the blood of De Montfort lay

between him and the Earl's sons, and the safety of the one lay in the ruin

of the other. In the face of this danger Earl Gilbert threw his weight into

the scale of the ultra-royalists, and peace became impossible. The question

of restitution was shelved by a reference to arbitrators; and Simon,

detained in spite of a safe-conduct, moved in Henry's train at Christmas to

witness the surrender of Kenilworth which had been stipulated as the price

of his full reconciliation with the king. But hot blood was now stirred

again on both sides. The garrison replied to the royal summons by a refusal

to surrender. They had received ward of the castle, they said, not from

Simon but from the Countess, and to none but her would they give it up. The

refusal was not likely to make Simon's position an easier one. On his

return to London the award of the arbitrators bound him to quit the realm

and not to return save with the assent of king and baronage when all were

at peace. He remained for a while in free custody at London; but warnings

that he was doomed to lifelong imprisonment drove him to flight, and he

finally sought a refuge over sea.

[Sidenote: Ban of Kenilworth]

His escape set England again on fire. Llewelyn wasted the border; the

Cinque Ports held the sea; the garrison of Kenilworth pushed their raids as

far as Oxford; Baldewin Wake with a band of the Disinherited threw himself

into the woods and harried the eastern counties; Sir Adam Gurdon, a knight

of gigantic size and renowned prowess, wasted with a smaller party the

shires of the south. In almost every county bands of outlaws were seeking a

livelihood in rapine and devastation, while the royal treasury stood empty

and the enormous fine imposed upon London had been swept into the coffers

of French usurers. But a stronger hand than the king's was now at the head

of affairs, and Edward met his assailants with untiring energy. King

Richard's son, Henry of Almaine, was sent with a large force to the north;

Mortimer hurried to hold the Welsh border; Edmund was despatched to Warwick

to hold Kenilworth in check; while Edward himself marched at the opening of

March to the south. The Berkshire woods were soon cleared, and at

Whitsuntide Edward succeeded in dispersing Adam Gurdon's band and in

capturing its renowned leader in single combat. The last blow was already

given to the rising in the north, where Henry of Almaine surprised the

Disinherited at Chesterfield and took their leader, the Earl of Derby, in

his bed. Though Edmund had done little but hold the Kenilworth knights in

check, the submission of the rest of the country now enabled the royal army

to besiege it in force. But the king was penniless, and the Parliament

which he called to replenish his treasury in August showed the resolve of

the nation that the strife should cease. They would first establish peace,

if peace were possible, they said, and then answer the king's demand.

Twelve commissioners, with Earl Gilbert at their head, were appointed on

Henry's assent to arrange terms on reconciliation. They at once decided

that none should be utterly disinherited for their part in the troubles,

but that liberty of redemption should be left open to all. Furious at the

prospect of being forced to disgorge their spoil, Mortimer and the

ultra-royalists broke out in mad threats of violence, even against the life

of the Papal legate who had pressed for the reconciliation. But the power

of the ultra-royalists was over. The general resolve was not to be shaken

by the clamour of a faction, and Mortimer's rout at Brecknock by Llewelyn,

the one defeat that chequered the tide of success, had damaged that

leader's influence. Backed by Edward and Earl Gilbert, the legate met their

opposition with a threat of excommunication, and Mortimer withdrew sullenly

from the camp. Fresh trouble in the country and the seizure of the Isle of

Ely by a band of the Disinherited quickened the labours of the Twelve. At

the close of September they pronounced their award, restoring the lands to

all who made submission on a graduated scale of redemption, promising

indemnity for all wrong done during the troubles, and leaving the

restoration of the house of De Montfort to the royal will. But to these

provisions was added an emphatic demand that "the king fully keep and

observe those liberties of the Church, charters of liberties, and forest

charters, which he is expressly and by his own mouth bound to preserve and

keep." "Let the King," they add, "establish on a lasting foundation those

concessions which he has hitherto made of his own will and not on

compulsion, and those needful ordinances which have been devised by his

subjects and by his own good pleasure."

[Sidenote: Close of the Struggle]

With this Award the struggle came to an end. The garrison of Kenilworth

held out indeed till November, and the full benefit of the Ban was only

secured when Earl Gilbert in the opening of the following year suddenly

appeared in arms and occupied London. But the Earl was satisfied, the

Disinherited were at last driven from Ely, and Llewelyn was brought to

submission by the appearance of an army at Shrewsbury. All was over by the

close of 1267. His father's age and weakness, his own brilliant military

successes, left Edward practically in possession of the royal power; and

his influence at once made itself felt. There was no attempt to return to

the misrule of Henry's reign, to his projects of continental aggrandizement

or internal despotism. The constitutional system of government for which

the Barons had fought was finally adopted by the Crown, and the Parliament

of Marlborough which assembled in November 1267 renewed the provisions by

which the baronage had remedied the chief abuses of the time in their

Provisions of Oxford and Westminster. The appointment of all officers of

state indeed was jealously reserved to the crown. But the royal expenditure

was brought within bounds. Taxation was only imposed with the assent of the

Great Council. So utterly was the land at rest that Edward felt himself

free to take the cross in 1268 and to join the Crusade which was being

undertaken by St. Lewis of France. He reached Tunis only to find Lewis dead

and his enterprise a failure, wintered in Sicily, made his way to Acre in

the spring of 1271, and spent more than a year in exploits which want of

force prevented from growing into a serious campaign. He was already on his

way home when the death of Henry the Third in November 1272 called him to

the throne.

CHAPTER IV

EDWARD THE FIRST

1272-1307

[Sidenote: Edward's Temper]

In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object

of an almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national

king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away,

when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended

for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger but

an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair

or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward's very

temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the

typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and

imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged,

stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too,

just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant

of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. It is

this oneness with the character of his people which parts the temper of

Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house. He inherited

indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his

punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who

ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped

dead from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard

selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the

house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered; and for the

most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful,

averse from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever asked mercy of me," he

said in his old age, "and was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of

his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the

bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to

drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. "It is I

who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty

fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink."

Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange

tenderness and sensitiveness to affection. Every subject throughout his

realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his

father's death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of

vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as

memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier

rested. "I loved her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's

friend, the Abbot of Cluny; "I do not cease to love her now she is dead."

And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All

the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign kings disappeared in Edward.

He was the first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with

a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them

we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand

in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England

understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels

between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as

they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection

of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene

during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face

with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned

himself frankly in the wrong.

[Sidenote: Influence of Chivalry]

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and

outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in

Edward's career. His reign was a time in which a foreign, influence told

strongly on our manners, our literature, our national spirit, for the

sudden rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy was now making

its influence dominant in Western Europe. The "chivalry" so familiar to us

in the pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of

heroism, love, and courtesy before which all depth and reality of nobleness

disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest

caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially

of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward's nature from which the

baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety,

save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere,

while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence

of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of

his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable

chivalry of his day. His frame was that of a born soldier--tall,

deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action, and he

shared to the full his people's love of venture and hard fighting. When he

encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he forced him single-handed to beg

for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting

in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself

to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. His fame as a general

seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. At

his "Round Table of Kenilworth" a hundred lords and ladies, "clad all in

silk," renewed the faded glories of Arthur's Court. The false air of

romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into

outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when

rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on

Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal

influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its

exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. "Knight

without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the

burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common

robber.

[Sidenote: Influence of Legality]

The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power over Edward's mind than

the French conception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer

class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance

into subjection, loose ties such as commendation into a definite vassalage.

But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis

and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman Law were

brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time. When the "sacred

majesty" of the Cæsars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head

of a feudal baronage every constitutional relation was changed. The

"defiance" by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason,

his after resistance "sacrilege." That Edward could appreciate what was

sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of

our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to

his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He

was never wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice,

fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law.

The high conception of royalty which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with

this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or

liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while

his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was

incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which

made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a

claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason

the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their

fathers had borne.

[Sidenote: His Moral Grandeur]

It is in the anomalies of such a character as this, in its strange mingling

of justice and wrong-doing, of grandeur and littleness, that we must look

for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in

Edward's conduct and policy. But what none of these anomalies can hide from

us is the height of moral temper which shows itself in the tenor of his

rule. Edward was every inch a king; but his notion of kingship was a lofty

and a noble one. He loved power; he believed in his sovereign rights and

clung to them with a stubborn tenacity. But his main end in clinging to

them was the welfare of his people. Nothing better proves the self-command

which he drew from the purpose he set before him than his freedom from the

common sin of great rulers--the lust of military glory. He was the first of

our kings since William the Conqueror who combined military genius with

political capacity; but of the warrior's temper, of the temper that finds

delight in war, he had little or none. His freedom from it was the more

remarkable that Edward was a great soldier. His strategy in the campaign

before Evesham marked him as a consummate general. Earl Simon was forced to

admire the skill of his advance on the fatal field, and the operations by

which he met the risings that followed it were a model of rapidity and

military grasp. In his Welsh campaigns he was soon to show a tenacity and

force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could

head a furious charge of horse as at Lewes, or organize a commissariat

which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In

his old age he was quick to discover the value of the English archery and

to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But master as he was of the

art of war, and forced from time to time to show his mastery in great

campaigns, in no single instance was he the assailant. He fought only when

he was forced to fight; and when fighting was over he turned back quietly

to the work of administration and the making of laws.

[Sidenote: His Political Genius]

War in fact was with Edward simply a means of carrying out the ends of

statesmanship, and it was in the character of his statesmanship that his

real greatness made itself felt. His policy was an English policy; he was

firm to retain what was left of the French dominion of his race, but he

abandoned from the first all dreams of recovering the wider dominions which

his grandfather had lost. His mind was not on that side of the Channel, but

on this. He concentrated his energies on the consolidation and good

government of England itself. We can only fairly judge the annexation of

Wales or his attempt to annex Scotland if we look on his efforts in either

quarter as parts of the same scheme of national administration to which we

owe his final establishment of our judicature, our legislation, our

parliament. The character of his action was no doubt determined in great

part by the general mood of his age, an age whose special task and aim

seemed to be that of reducing to distinct form the principles which had

sprung into a new and vigorous life during the age which preceded it. As

the opening of the thirteenth century had been an age of founders,

creators, discoverers, so its close was an age of lawyers, of rulers such

as St. Lewis of France or Alfonso the Wise of Castille, organizers,

administrators, framers of laws and institutions. It was to this class that

Edward himself belonged. He had little of creative genius, of political

originality, but he possessed in a high degree the passion for order and

good government, the faculty of organization, and a love of law which broke

out even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped. In the

judicial reforms to which so much of his attention was directed he showed

himself, if not an "English Justinian," at any rate a clear-sighted and

judicious man of business, developing, reforming, bringing into a shape

which has borne the test of five centuries' experience the institutions of

his predecessors. If the excellence of a statesman's work is to be measured

by its duration and the faculty it has shown of adapting itself to the

growth and developement of a nation, then the work of Edward rises to the

highest standard of excellence. Our law courts preserve to this very day

the form which he gave them. Mighty as has been the growth of our

Parliament, it has grown on the lines which he laid down. The great roll of

English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the Statutes of Edward.

The routine of the first Henry, the administrative changes which had been

imposed on the nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second,

were transformed under Edward into a political organization with

carefully-defined limits, directed not by the king's will alone but by the

political impulse of the people at large. His social legislation was based

in the same fashion on principles which had already been brought into

practical working by Henry the Second. It was no doubt in great measure

owing to this practical sense of its financial and administrative value

rather than to any foresight of its political importance that we owe

Edward's organization of our Parliament. But if the institutions which we

commonly associate with his name owe their origin to others, they owe their

form and their perpetuity to him.

[Sidenote: Constitutional Aspect of his Reign]

The king's English policy, like his English name, was in fact the sign of a

new epoch. England was made. The long period of national formation had come

practically to an end. With the reign of Edward begins the constitutional

England in which we live. It is not that any chasm separates our history

before it from our history after it as the chasm of the Revolution divides

the history of France, for we have traced the rudiments of our constitution

to the first moment of the English settlement in Britain. But it is with

these as with our language. The tongue of Ælfred is the very tongue we

speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it has to be

learned like the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the English of

Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the historian

and philologer can study the origin and developement of our national

speech, in the last a schoolboy can enjoy the story of Troilus and Cressida

or listen to the gay chat of the Canterbury Pilgrims. In precisely the same

way a knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for the right

understanding of later legislation, its origin and its developement, while

the principles of our Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in

the Meetings of Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great Council of barons

after it. But the Parliaments which Edward gathered at the close of his

reign are not merely illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they

are absolutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen's. At

the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons, the Courts of Justice, the

forms of public administration, the relations of Church and State, all

local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, in great measure the

framework of society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially

retain. In a word the long struggle of the constitution for actual

existence has come to an end. The contests which follow are not contests

that tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual fabric of our

institutions; they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which

England has learned and is still learning how best to use and how wisely to

develope the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the balance

of its social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms

to the varying conditions of the time.

[Sidenote: The Earlier Finance]

The news of his father's death found Edward at Capua in the opening of

1273; but the quiet of his realm under a regency of which Roger Mortimer

was the practical head left him free to move slowly homewards. Two of his

acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his mind was already

dwelling on the state of English finance and of English law. His visit to

the Pope at Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission to levy from the

clergy a tenth of their income for the three coming years, while he drew

from Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco Accursi, to aid in the task

of legal reform. At Paris he did homage to Philip the Third for his French

possessions, and then turning southward he devoted a year to the ordering

of Gascony. It was not till the summer of 1274 that the king reached

England. But he had already planned the work he had to do, and the measures

which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the spirit in

which he was to set about it. The First Statute of Westminster was rather a

code than a statute. It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was

an attempt to summarize a number of previous enactments contained in the

Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the Statute of Marlborough, as

well as to embody some of the administrative measures of Henry the Second

and his son. But a more pressing need than that of a codification of the

law was the need of a reorganization of finance. While the necessities of

the Crown were growing with the widening of its range of administrative

action, the revenues of the Crown admitted of no corresponding expansion.

In the earliest times of our history the outgoings of the Crown were as

small as its income. All local expenses, whether for justice or road-making

or fortress-building, were paid by local funds; and the national "fyrd"

served at its own cost in the field. The produce of a king's private

estates with the provisions due to him from the public lands scattered over

each county, whether gathered by the king himself as he moved over his

realm, or as in later days fixed at a stated rate and collected by his

sheriff, were sufficient to defray the mere expenses of the Court. The

Danish wars gave the first shock to this simple system. To raise a ransom

which freed the land from the invader, the first land-tax, under the name

of the Danegeld, was laid on every hide of ground; and to this national

taxation the Norman kings added the feudal burthens of the new military

estates created by the Conquest, reliefs paid on inheritance, profits of

marriages and wardship, and the three feudal aids. But foreign warfare soon

exhausted these means of revenue; the barons and bishops in their Great

Council were called on at each emergency for a grant from their lands, and

at each grant a corresponding demand was made by the king as a landlord on

the towns, as lying for the most part in the royal demesne. The cessation

of Danegeld under Henry the Second and his levy of scutage made little

change in the general incidence of taxation: it still fell wholly on the

land, for even the townsmen paid as holders of their tenements. But a new

principle of taxation was disclosed in the tithe levied for a Crusade at

the close of Henry's reign. Land was no longer the only source of wealth.

The growth of national prosperity, of trade and commerce, was creating a

mass of personal property which offered irresistible temptations to the

Angevin financiers. The old revenue from landed property was restricted and

lessened by usage and compositions. Scutage was only due for foreign

campaigns: the feudal aids only on rare and stated occasions: and though

the fines from the shire-courts grew with the growth of society the dues

from the public lands were fixed and incapable of developement. But no

usage fettered the Crown in dealing with personal property, and its growth

in value promised a growing revenue. From the close of Henry the Second's

reign therefore this became the most common form of taxation. Grants of

from a seventh to a thirtieth of moveables, household-property, and stock

were demanded; and it was the necessity of procuring their assent to these

demands which enabled the baronage through the reign of Henry the Third to

bring a financial pressure to bear on the Crown.

[Sidenote: Indirect Taxation]

But in addition to these two forms of direct taxation indirect taxation

also was coming more and more to the front. The right of the king to grant

licences to bring goods into or to trade within the realm, a right

springing from the need for his protection felt by the strangers who came

there for purposes of traffic, laid the foundation of our taxes on imports.

Those on exports were only a part of the general system of taxing personal

property which we have already noticed. How tempting this source of revenue

was proving we see from a provision of the Great Charter which forbids the

levy of more than the ancient customs on merchants entering or leaving the

realm. Commerce was in fact growing with the growing wealth of the people.

The crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which date from this period

shows the prosperity of the country. Christian architecture reached its

highest beauty in the opening of Edward's reign; a reign marked by the

completion of the abbey church of Westminster and of the cathedral church

at Salisbury. An English noble was proud to be styled "an incomparable

builder," while some traces of the art which was rising into life across

the Alps flowed in, it may be, with the Italian ecclesiastics whom the

Papacy forced on the English Church. The shrine of the Confessor at

Westminster, the mosaic pavement beside the altar of the abbey, the

paintings on the walls of its chapterhouse remind us of the schools which

were springing up under Giotto and the Pisans. But the wealth which this

art progress shows drew trade to English shores. England was as yet simply

an agricultural country. Gascony sent her wines; her linens were furnished

by the looms of Ghent and Liége; Genoese vessels brought to her fairs the

silks, the velvets, the glass of Italy. In the barks of the Hanse merchants

came fur and amber from the Baltic, herrings, pitch, timber, and naval

stores from the countries of the north. Spain sent us iron and war-horses.

Milan sent armour. The great Venetian merchant-galleys touched the southern

coasts and left in our ports the dates of Egypt, the figs and currants of

Greece, the silk of Sicily, the sugar of Cyprus and Crete, the spices of

the Eastern seas. Capital too came from abroad. The bankers of Florence and

Lucca were busy with loans to the court or vast contracts with the

wool-growers. The bankers of Cahors had already dealt a death-blow to the

usury of the Jew. Against all this England had few exports to set. The lead

supplied by the mines of Derbyshire, the salt of the Worcestershire

springs, the iron of the Weald, were almost wholly consumed at home. The

one metal export of any worth was that of tin from the tin-mines of

Cornwall. But the production of wool was fast becoming a main element of

the nation's wealth. Flanders, the great manufacturing country of the time,

lay fronting our eastern coast; and with this market close at hand the

pastures of England found more and more profit in the supply of wool. The

Cistercian order which possessed vast ranges of moorland in Yorkshire

became famous as wool-growers; and their wool had been seized for Richard's

ransom. The Florentine merchants were developing this trade by their

immense contracts; we find a single company of merchants contracting for

the purchase of the Cistercian wool throughout the year. It was after

counsel with the Italian bankers that Edward devised his scheme for drawing

a permanent revenue from this source. In the Parliament of 1275 he obtained

the grant of half a mark, or six shillings and eightpence, on each sack of

wool exported; and this grant, a grant memorable as forming the first legal

foundation of our customs-revenue, at once relieved the necessities of the

Crown.

[Sidenote: Welsh Campaign]

The grant of the wool tax enabled Edward in fact to deal with the great

difficulty of his realm. The troubles of the Barons' war, the need which

Earl Simon felt of Llewelyn's alliance to hold in check the Marcher Barons,

had all but shaken off from Wales the last traces of dependence. Even at

the close of the war the threat of an attack from the now united kingdom

only forced Llewelyn to submission on a practical acknowledgement of his

sovereignty. Although the title which Llewelyn ap Jorwerth claimed of

Prince of North Wales was recognized by the English court in the earlier

days of Henry the Third, it was withdrawn after 1229 and its claimant known

only as Prince of Aberffraw. But the loftier title of Prince of Wales which

Llewelyn ap Gruffydd assumed in 1256 was formally conceded to him in 1267,

and his right to receive homage from the other nobles of his principality

was formally sanctioned. Near however as he seemed to the final realization

of his aims, Llewelyn was still a vassal of the English Crown, and the

accession of Edward to the throne was at once followed by the demand of

homage. But the summons was fruitless; and the next two years were wasted

in as fruitless negotiation. The kingdom, however, was now well in hand.

The royal treasury was filled again, and in 1277 Edward marched on North

Wales. The fabric of Welsh greatness fell at a single blow. The chieftains

who had so lately sworn fealty to Llewelyn in the southern and central

parts of the country deserted him to join his English enemies in their

attack; an English fleet reduced Anglesea; and the Prince was cooped up in

his mountain fastnesses and forced to throw himself on Edward's mercy. With

characteristic moderation the conqueror contented himself with adding to

the English dominions the coast-district as far as Conway and with

providing that the title of Prince of Wales should cease at Llewelyn's

death. A heavy fine which he had incurred by his refusal to do homage was

remitted; and Eleanor, a daughter of Earl Simon of Montfort whom he had

sought as his wife but who had been arrested on her way to him, was wedded

to the Prince at Edward's court.

[Sidenote: Judicial Reforms]

For four years all was quiet across the Welsh Marches, and Edward was able

again to turn his attention to the work of internal reconstruction. It is

probably to this time, certainly to the earlier years of his reign, that we

may attribute his modification of our judicial system. The King's Court was

divided into three distinct tribunals, the Court of Exchequer which took

cognizance of all causes in which the royal revenue was concerned; the

Court of Common Pleas for suits between private persons; and the King's

Bench, which had jurisdiction in all matters that affected the sovereign as

well as in "pleas of the crown" or criminal causes expressly reserved for

his decision. Each court was now provided with a distinct staff of judges.

Of yet greater importance than this change, which was in effect but the

completion of a process of severance that had long been going on, was the

establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side with that of the

common law. In his reform of 1178 Henry the Second broke up the older

King's Court, which had till then served as the final Court of Appeal, by

the severance of the purely legal judges who had been gradually added to it

from the general body of his councillors. The judges thus severed from the

Council retained the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of "the King's

Court," but the mere fact of their severance changed in an essential way

the character of the justice they dispensed. The King in Council wielded a

power which was not only judicial but executive; his decisions though based

upon custom were not fettered by it, they wore the expressions of his will,

and it was as his will that they were carried out by officers of the Crown.

But the separate bench of judges had no longer this unlimited power at

their command. They had not the king's right as representative of the

community to make the law for the redress of a wrong. They professed simply

to declare what the existing law was, even if it was insufficient for the

full purpose of redress. The authority of their decision rested mainly on

their adhesion to ancient custom or as it was styled the "common law" which

had grown up in the past. They could enforce their decisions only by

directions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and here again their

right was soon rigidly bounded by set form and custom. These bonds in fact

became tighter every day, for their decisions were now beginning to be

reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities

for their successors. It is plain that such a state of things has the

utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that

impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force

on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of

precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power. But it threw

a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress of wrong. The

increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped

the efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a

wrong which sprang from modern circumstances. Sometimes the very pedantry

and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases the highest

injustice.

[Sidenote: Equitable Jurisdiction]

It was the consciousness of this that made men cling even from the first

moment of the independent existence of these courts to the judicial power

which still remained inherent in the Crown itself. If his courts fell short

in any matter the duty of the king to do justice to all still remained, and

it was this obligation which was recognized in the provision of Henry the

Second by which all cases in which his judges failed to do justice were

reserved for the special cognizance of the royal Council itself. To this

final jurisdiction of the King in Council Edward gave a wide developement.

His assembly of the ministers, the higher permanent officials, and the law

officers of the Crown for the first time reserved to itself in its judicial

capacity the correction of all breaches of the law which the lower courts

had failed to repress, whether from weakness, partiality, or corruption,

and especially of those lawless outbreaks of the more powerful baronage

which defied the common authority of the judges. Such powers were of course

capable of terrible abuse, and it shows what real need there was felt to be

for their exercise that though regarded with jealousy by Parliament the

jurisdiction of the royal Council appears to have been steadily put into

force through the two centuries which followed. In the reign of Henry the

Seventh it took legal and statutory form in the shape of the Court of Star

Chamber, and its powers are still exercised in our own day by the Judicial

Committee of the Privy Council. But the same duty of the Crown to do

justice where its courts fell short of giving due redress for wrong

expressed itself in the jurisdiction of the Chancellor. This great officer

of State, who had perhaps originally acted only as President of the Council

when discharging its judicial functions, acquired at a very early date an

independent judicial position of the same nature. It is by remembering this

origin of the Court of Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers

it gradually acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially those

which sprang from the misconduct of government officials or of powerful

oppressors, fell within its cognizance as they fell within that of the

Royal Council, and to these were added disputes respecting the wardship of

infants, dower, rent-charges, or tithes. Its equitable jurisdiction sprang

from the defective nature and the technical and unbending rules of the

common law. As the Council had given redress in cases where law became

injustice, so the Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the rules

of procedure adopted by the common law courts on the petition of a party

for whose grievance the common law provided no adequate remedy. An

analogous extension of his powers enabled the Chancellor to afford relief

in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse of trust, and this side of his

jurisdiction was largely extended at a later time by the results of

legislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical bodies. The separate

powers of the Chancellor, whatever was the original date at which they were

first exercised, seem to have been thoroughly established under Edward the

First.

[Sidenote: Law and the Baronage]

What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers such as these by the

Crown and its council was the need which was still to exist for centuries

of an effective means of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law.

Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had now become

established. A king could no longer make laws or levy taxes or even make

war without their assent. The nation reposed in them an unwavering trust,

for they were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose violence the

strong hand of a Norman ruler had been needed to protect his subjects; they

were as English as the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty

by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound them to look on

themselves as its natural guardians. The close of the Barons' War solved

the problem which had so long troubled the realm, the problem how to ensure

the government of the realm in accordance with the provisions of the Great

Charter, by the transfer of the business of administration into the hands

of a standing committee of the greater barons and prelates, acting as chief

officers of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers of the

Crown. The body thus composed was known as the Continual Council; and the

quiet government of the kingdom by this body in the long interval between

the death of Henry the Third and his son's return shows how effective this

rule of the nobles was. It is significant of the new relation which they

were to strive to establish between themselves and the Crown that in the

brief which announced Edward's accession the Council asserted that the new

monarch mounted his throne "by the will of the peers." But while the

political influence of the baronage as a leading element in the whole

nation thus steadily mounted, the personal and purely feudal power of each

individual baron on his own estates as steadily fell. The hold which the

Crown gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage,

the circuits of the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds within which

baronial justice saw itself circumscribed, the blow dealt by scutage at

their military power, the prompt intervention of the Council in their

feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to the common level of their fellow

subjects. Much yet remained to be done; for within the general body of the

baronage there existed side by side with the nobles whose aims were purely

national nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal despotism simply a

chance of setting up again their feudal privileges; and different as the

English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a feudal _noblesse_ like that

of Germany or France there is in every military class a natural drift

towards violence and lawlessness. Throughout Edward's reign his strong hand

was needed to enforce order on warring nobles. Great earls, such as those

of Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in Shropshire the Earl

of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and poorer

nobles the wealth of the trader, the long wain of goods as it passed along

the highway, remained a tempting prey. Once, under cover of a mock

tournament of monks against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded

in introducing themselves into the great merchant fair at Boston; at

nightfall every booth was on fire, the merchants robbed and slaughtered,

and the booty carried off to ships which lay ready at the quay. Streams of

gold and silver, ran the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down the

gutters to the sea; "all the money in England could hardly make good the

loss." Even at the close of Edward's reign lawless bands of

"trail-bastons," or club-men, maintained themselves by general outrage,

aided the country nobles in their feuds, and wrested money and goods from

the great tradesmen.

[Sidenote: Edward and the Baronage]

The king was strong enough to face and imprison the warring earls, to hang

the chiefs of the Boston marauders, and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous

commissions. But the repression of baronial outrage was only a part of

Edward's policy in relation to the Baronage. Here, as elsewhere, he had to

carry out the political policy of his house, a policy defined by the great

measures of Henry the Second, his institution of scutage, his general

assize of arms, his extension of the itinerant judicature of the royal

judges. Forced by the first to an exact discharge of their military duties

to the Crown, set by the second in the midst of a people trained equally

with the nobles to arms, their judicial tyranny curbed and subjected to the

king's justice by the third, the barons had been forced from their old

standpoint of an isolated class to the new and nobler position of a

people's leaders. Edward watched jealously over the ground which the Crown

had gained. Immediately after his landing he appointed a commission of

enquiry into the judicial franchises then existing, and on its report (of

which the existing "Hundred-Rolls" are the result) itinerant justices were

sent in 1278 to discover by what right these franchises were held. The

writs of "quo warranto" were roughly met here and there. Earl Warenne bared

a rusty sword and flung it on the justices' table. "This, sirs," he said,

"is my warrant. By the sword our fathers won their lands when they came

over with the Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep them." But the king

was far from limiting himself to the mere carrying out of the plans of

Henry the Second. Henry had aimed simply at lowering the power of the great

feudatories; Edward aimed rather at neutralizing their power by raising the

whole body of landowners to the same level. We shall see at a later time

the measures which were the issues of this policy, but in the very opening

of his reign a significant step pointed to the king's drift. In the summer

of 1278 a royal writ ordered all freeholders who held lands to the value of

twenty pounds to receive knighthood at the king's hands.

[Sidenote: Edward and the Church]

Acts as significant announced Edward's purpose of carrying out another side

of Henry's policy, that of limiting in the same way the independent

jurisdiction of the Church. He was resolute to force it to become

thoroughly national by bearing its due part of the common national

burthens, and to break its growing dependence upon Rome. But the

ecclesiastical body was jealous of its position as a power distinct from

the power of the Crown, and Edward's policy had hardly declared itself when

in 1279 Archbishop Peckham obtained a canon from the clergy by which copies

of the Great Charter, with its provisions in favour of the liberties of the

Church, were to be affixed to the doors of churches. The step was meant as

a defiant protest against all interference, and it was promptly forbidden.

An order issued by the Primate to the clergy to declare to their flocks the

sentences of excommunication directed against all who obtained royal writs

to obstruct suits in church courts, or who, whether royal officers or no,

neglected to enforce their sentences, was answered in a yet more emphatic

way. By falling into the "dead hand" or "mortmain" of the Church land

ceased to render its feudal services; and in 1279 the Statute "de

Religiosis," or as it is commonly called "of Mortmain," forbade any further

alienation of land to religious bodies in such wise that it should cease to

render its due service to the king. The restriction was probably no

beneficial one to the country at large, for Churchmen were the best

landlords, and it was soon evaded by the ingenuity of the clerical lawyers;

but it marked the growing jealousy of any attempt to set aside what was

national from serving the general need and profit of the nation. Its

immediate effect was to stir the clergy to a bitter resentment. But Edward

remained firm, and when the bishops proposed to restrict the royal courts

from dealing with cases of patronage or causes which touched the chattels

of Churchmen he met their proposals by an instant prohibition.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Wales]

The resentment of the clergy had soon the means of showing itself during a

new struggle with Wales. The persuasions of his brother David, who had

deserted him in the previous war but who deemed his desertion

insufficiently rewarded by an English lordship, roused Llewelyn to a fresh

revolt. A prophecy of Merlin was said to promise that when English money

became round a Prince of Wales should be crowned in London; and at this

moment a new coinage of copper money, coupled with a prohibition to break

the silver penny into halves and quarters, as had been commonly done, was

supposed to fulfil the prediction. In 1282 Edward marched in overpowering

strength into the heart of Wales. But Llewelyn held out in Snowdon with the

stubbornness of despair, and the rout of an English force which had crossed

into Anglesea prolonged the contest into the winter. The cost of the war

fell on the king's treasury. Edward had called for but one general grant

through the past eight years of his reign; but he was now forced to appeal

to his people, and by an expedient hitherto without precedent two

provincial Councils were called for this purpose. That for Southern England

met at Northampton, that for Northern at York; and clergy and laity were

summoned, though in separate session, to both. Two knights came from every

shire, two burgesses from every borough, while the bishops brought their

archdeacons, abbots, and the proctors of their cathedral clergy. The grant

of the laity was quick and liberal. But both at York and Northampton the

clergy showed their grudge at Edward's measures by long delays in supplying

his treasury. Pinched however as were his resources and terrible as were

the sufferings of his army through the winter Edward's firmness remained

unbroken; and rejecting all suggestions of retreat he issued orders for the

formation of a new army at Caermarthen to complete the circle of investment

round Llewelyn. But the war came suddenly to an end. The Prince sallied

from his mountain hold for a raid upon Radnorshire and fell in a petty

skirmish on the banks of the Wye. With him died the independence of his

race. After six months of flight his brother David was made prisoner; and a

Parliament summoned at Shrewsbury in the autumn of 1283, to which each

county again sent its two knights and twenty boroughs their two burgesses,

sentenced him to a traitor's death. The submission of the lesser chieftains

soon followed: and the country was secured by the building of strong

castles at Conway and Caernarvon, and the settlement of English barons on

the confiscated soil. The Statute of Wales which Edward promulgated at

Rhuddlan in 1284 proposed to introduce English law and the English

administration of justice and government into Wales. But little came of the

attempt; and it was not till the time of Henry the Eighth that the country

was actually incorporated with England and represented in the English

Parliament. What Edward had really done was to break the Welsh resistance.

The policy with which he followed up his victory (for the "massacre of the

bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and though two later

rebellions and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English towns in

their midst showed that the country was still far from being reconciled to

its conquest, it ceased to be any serious danger to England for a hundred

years.

[Sidenote: New Legislation]

From the work of conquest Edward again turned to the work of legislation.

In the midst of his struggle with Wales he had shown his care for the

commercial classes by a Statute of Merchants in 1283, which provided for

the registration of the debts of leaders and for their recovery by

distraint of the debtor's goods and the imprisonment of his person. The

close of the war saw two measures of even greater importance. The second

Statute of Westminster which appeared in 1285 is a code of the same sort as

the first, amending the Statutes of Mortmain, of Merton, and of Gloucester,

as well as the laws of dower and advowson, remodelling the system of

justices of assize, and curbing the abuses of manorial jurisdiction. In the

same year appeared the greatest of Edward's measures for the enforcement of

public order. The Statute of Winchester revived and reorganized the old

institutions of national police and national defence. It regulated the

action of the hundred, the duty of watch and ward, and the gathering of the

fyrd or militia of the realm as Henry the Second had moulded it into form

in his Assize of Arms. Every man was bound to hold himself in readiness,

duly armed, for the king's service in case of invasion or revolt, and to

pursue felons when hue and cry was made after them. Every district was held

responsible for crimes committed within its bounds; the gates of each town

were to be shut at nightfall; and all strangers were required to give an

account of themselves to the magistrates of any borough which they entered.

By a provision which illustrates at once the social and physical condition

of the country at the time all brushwood was ordered to be destroyed within

a space of two hundred feet on either side of the public highway as a

security for travellers against sudden attacks from robbers. To enforce the

observance of this act knights were appointed in every shire under the name

of Conservators of the Peace, a name which as the benefit of these local

magistrates was more sensibly felt and their powers were more largely

extended was changed into that which they still retain of Justices of the

Peace. So orderly however was the realm that Edward was able in 1286 to

pass over sea to his foreign dominions, and to spend the next three years

in reforming their government. But the want of his guiding hand was at last

felt; and the Parliament of 1289 refused a new tax till the king came home

again.

[Sidenote: "Quia Emptores"]

He returned to find the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford at war, and his

judges charged with violence and corruption. The two Earls were brought to

peace, and Earl Gilbert allied closely to the royal house by a marriage

with the king's daughter Johanna. After a careful investigation the

judicial abuses were recognized and amended. Two of the chief justices were

banished from the realm and their colleagues imprisoned and fined. But

these administrative measures were only preludes to a great legislative act

which appeared in 1290. The Third Statute of Westminster, or, to use the

name by which it is more commonly known, the Statute "Quia Emptores," is

one of those legislative efforts which mark the progress of a wide social

revolution in the country at large. The number of the greater barons was

diminishing every day, while the number of the country gentry and of the

more substantial yeomanry was increasing with the increase of the national

wealth. The increase showed itself in a growing desire to become

proprietors of land. Tenants of the barons received under-tenants on

condition of their rendering them similar services to those which they

themselves rendered to their lords; and the baronage, while duly receiving

the services in compensation for which they had originally granted their

lands in fee, saw with jealousy the feudal profits of these new

under-tenants, the profits of wardships or of reliefs and the like, in a

word the whole increase in the value of the estate consequent on its

subdivision and higher cultivation, passing into other hands than their

own. The purpose of the statute "Quia Emptores" was to check this process

by providing that in any case of alienation the sub-tenant should

henceforth hold, not of the tenant, but directly of the superior lord. But

its result was to promote instead of hindering the transfer and subdivision

of land. The tenant who was compelled before the passing of the statute to

retain in any case so much of the estate as enabled him to discharge his

feudal services to the overlord of whom he held it, was now enabled by a

process analogous to the modern sale of "tenant-right," to transfer both

land and services to new holders. However small the estates thus created

might be, the bulk were held directly of the Crown; and this class of

lesser gentry and freeholders grew steadily from this time in numbers and

importance.

[Sidenote: The Crown and the Jews]

The year which saw "Quia Emptores" saw a step which remains the great blot

upon Edward's reign. The work abroad had exhausted the royal treasury, and

he bought a grant from his Parliament by listening to their wishes in the

matter of the Jews. Jewish traders had followed William the Conqueror from

Normandy, and had been enabled by his protection to establish themselves in

separate quarters or "Jewries" in all larger English towns. The Jew had no

right or citizenship in the land. The Jewry in which he lived was exempt

from the common law. He was simply the king's chattel, and his life and

goods were at the king's mercy. But he was too valuable a possession to be

lightly thrown away. If the Jewish merchant had no standing-ground in the

local court the king enabled him to sue before a special justiciary; his

bonds were deposited for safety in a chamber of the royal palace at

Westminster; he was protected against the popular hatred in the free

exercise of his religion and allowed to build synagogues and to manage his

own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi. The royal protection

was dictated by no spirit of tolerance or mercy. To the kings the Jew was a

mere engine of finance. The wealth which he accumulated was wrung from him

whenever the crown had need, and torture and imprisonment were resorted to

when milder means failed. It was the gold of the Jew that filled the royal

treasury at the outbreak of war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers

that the foreign kings found strength, to hold their baronage at bay.

[Sidenote: Popular Hatred of the Jews]

That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier years of his

settlement, beneficial to the nation at large there can be little doubt.

His arrival was the arrival of a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he

necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time his loans gave an

impulse to industry. The century which followed the Conquest witnessed an

outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with castles and

cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed their erection to the loans

of the Jew. His own example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture. The

buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmund's, still retain their

name of "Jews' Houses" were almost the first houses of stone which

superseded the mere hovels of the English burghers. Nor was their influence

simply industrial. Through their connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain

and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences. A

Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself

studied under English rabbis. But the general progress of civilization now

drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and

Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial finance. He fell

back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily

accompanied with much of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the

religious hatred against their race. Wild stories floated about of children

carried off to be circumcised or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was found

slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as "St. Hugh."

The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish quarters and

attempt their conversion, but the popular fury rose too fast for these

gentler means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews

from hanging by their prayer to Henry the Third the populace angrily

refused the brethren alms.

[Sidenote: The Jewish Defiance]

But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance. The picture which

is commonly drawn of the Jew as timid, silent, crouching under oppression,

however truly it may represent the general position of his race throughout

mediæval Europe, is far from being borne out by historical fact on this

side the Channel. In England the attitude of the Jew, almost to the very

end, was an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. He knew that the

royal policy exempted him from the common taxation, the common justice, the

common obligations of Englishmen. Usurer, extortioner as the realm held him

to be, the royal justice would secure him the repayment of his bonds. A

royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence

against the king's "chattels." The Red King actually forbade the conversion

of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a poor exchange, he said, that

would rid him of a valuable property and give him only a subject. We see in

such a case as that of Oxford the insolence that grew out of this

consciousness of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a

town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its

peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could penetrate into

the square of little alleys which lay behind the present Town Hall; the

Church itself was powerless to prevent a synagogue from rising in haughty

rivalry over against the cloister of St. Frideswide. Prior Philip of St.

Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at his door as

the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles which were

said to be wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his

feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open

his fingers, the Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd that

flocked to St. Frideswide's shrine on the ground that such recoveries of

life and limb were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever wrought.

Sickness and death in the prior's story avenge the saint on her blasphemer,

but no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to

deal with him. A more daring act of fanaticism showed the temper of the

Jews even at the close of Henry the Third's reign. As the usual procession

of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's on the Ascension

Day of 1268 a Jew suddenly burst from a group of his comrades in front of

the synagogue, and wrenching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under

foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the

Crown sheltered the Oxford Jews from any burst of popular vengeance. The

sentence of the king condemned them to set up a cross of marble on the spot

where the crime was committed, but even this sentence was in part remitted,

and a less offensive place was found for the cross in an open plot by

Merton College.

[Sidenote: Expulsion of the Jews]

Up to Edward's day indeed the royal protection had never wavered. Henry the

Second granted the Jews a right of burial outside every city where they

dwelt. Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and

organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration of

their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself, though he

once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The

troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater than even the royal

greed could reap; the Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates; and only

a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would have

enabled them to own freeholds. But the sack of Jewry after Jewry showed the

popular hatred during the Barons' war, and at its close fell on the Jews

the more terrible persecution of the law. To the cry against usury and the

religious fanaticism which threatened them was now added the jealousy with

which the nation that had grown up round the Charter regarded all

exceptional jurisdictions or exemptions from the common law and the common

burthens of the realm. As Edward looked on the privileges of the Church or

the baronage, so his people looked on the privileges of the Jews. The

growing weight of the Parliament told against them. Statute after statute

hemmed them in. They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ

Christian servants, to move through the streets without the two white

tablets of wool on their breasts which distinguished their race. They were

prohibited from building new synagogues or eating with Christians or acting

as physicians to them. Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the

bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order which bade them

renounce usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do no more,

and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies for his treasury and

himself swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects, bought the grant of a

fifteenth from clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his

realm. No share of the enormities which accompanied this expulsion can fall

upon the king, for he not only suffered the fugitives to take their

personal wealth with them but punished with the halter those who plundered

them at sea. But the expulsion was none the less cruel. Of the sixteen

thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few reached the shores of France.

Many were wrecked, others robbed and flung overboard. One shipmaster turned

out a crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank and bade them call a new

Moses to save them from the sea.

[Illustration: Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1t.jpg)]

[Sidenote: Scotland]

From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his nobler schemes of legal and

administrative reforms, Edward was suddenly called away to face complex

questions which awaited him in the North. At the moment which we have

reached the kingdom of the Scots was still an aggregate of four distinct

countries, each with its different people, its different tongue, its

different history. The old Pictish kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the

original Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or Strathclyde,

and the Lowlands which stretched from the Firth of Forth to the English

border, had become united under the kings of the Scots; Pictland by

inheritance, Cumbria by a grant from the English king Eadmund, the Lowlands

by conquest, confirmed as English tradition alleged by a grant from Cnut.

The shadowy claim of dependence on the English Crown which dated from the

days when a Scotch king "commended" himself and his people to Ælfred's son

Eadward, a claim strengthened by the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm as a

"fellow worker" of the English sovereign "by sea and land," may have been

made more real through this last convention. But whatever change the

acquisition of the Lowlands made in the relation of the Scot kings to the

English sovereigns, it certainly affected in a very marked way their

relation both to England and to their own realm. Its first result was the

fixing of the royal residence in their new southern dominion at Edinburgh;

and the English civilization which surrounded them from the moment of this

settlement on what was purely English ground changed the Scot kings in all

but blood into Englishmen. The marriage of King Malcolm with Margaret, the

sister of Eadgar Ætheling, not only hastened this change but opened a way

to the English crown. Their children were regarded by a large party within

England as representatives of the older royal race and as claimants of the

throne, and this danger grew as William's devastation of the North not only

drove fresh multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the Lowlands but filled

the Scotch court with English nobles who fled thither for refuge. So

formidable indeed became the pretensions of the Scot kings that they forced

the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into a complete change of policy. The

Conqueror and William the Red had met the threats of the Scot sovereigns by

invasions which ended again and again in an illusory homage, but the

marriage of Henry the First with the Scottish Matilda robbed the claims of

the Scottish line of much of their force while it enabled him to draw their

kings into far closer relations with the Norman throne. King David not only

abandoned the ambitious dreams of his predecessors to place himself at the

head of his niece Matilda's party in her contest with Stephen, but as

Henry's brother-in-law he figured as the first noble of the English Court

and found English models and English support in the work of organization

which he attempted within his own dominions. As the marriage with Margaret

had changed Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain into an English king, so that

of Matilda brought about the conversion of David into a Norman and feudal

sovereign. His court was filled with Norman nobles from the South, such as

the Balliols and Bruces who were destined to play so great a part

afterwards but who now for the first time obtained fiefs in the Scottish

realm, and a feudal jurisprudence modelled on that of England was

introduced into the Lowlands.

[Sidenote: Scotch and English Crowns]

A fresh connexion between Scotland and the English sovereigns began with

the grant of lordships within England itself to the Scot kings or their

sons. The Earldom of Northumberland was held by David's son Henry, that of

Huntingdon by David, brother of William the Lion. Homage was sometimes

rendered, whether for these lordships, for the Lowlands, or for the whole

Scottish realm, but it was the capture of William the Lion during the

revolt of the English baronage which first suggested to the ambition of

Henry the Second the project of a closer dependence of Scotland on the

English Crown. To gain his freedom William consented to hold his kingdom of

Henry and his heirs. The prelates and lords of Scotland did homage to Henry

as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in all Scotch causes was

allowed to the superior court of the English suzerain. From this bondage

however Scotland was freed by the prodigality of Richard who allowed her to

buy back the freedom she had forfeited. Both sides fell into their old

position, but both were ceasing gradually to remember the distinctions

between the various relations in which the Scot king stood for his

different provinces to the English Crown. Scotland had come to be thought

of as a single country; and the court of London transferred to the whole of

it those claims of direct feudal suzerainty which at most applied only to

Strathclyde, while the court of Edinburgh looked on the English Lowlands as

holding no closer relation to England than the Pictish lands beyond the

Forth. Any difficulties which arose were evaded by a legal compromise. The

Scot kings repeatedly did homage to the English sovereign but with a

reservation of rights which were prudently left unspecified. The English

king accepted the homage on the assumption that it was rendered to him as

overlord of the Scottish realm, and this assumption was neither granted nor

denied. For nearly a hundred years the relations of the two countries were

thus kept peaceful and friendly, and the death of Alexander the Third

seemed destined to remove even the necessity of protests by a closer union

of the two kingdoms. Alexander had wedded his only daughter to the King of

Norway, and after long negotiation the Scotch Parliament proposed the

marriage of Margaret, "The Maid of Norway," the girl who was the only issue

of this marriage and so heiress of the kingdom, with the son of Edward the

First. It was however carefully provided in the marriage treaty which was

concluded at Brigham in 1290 that Scotland should remain a separate and

free kingdom, and that its laws and customs should be preserved inviolate.

No military aid was to be claimed by the English king, no Scotch appeal to

be carried to an English court. But this project was abruptly frustrated by

the child's death during her voyage to Scotland in the following October,

and with the rise of claimant after claimant of the vacant throne Edward

was drawn into far other relations to the Scottish realm.

[Sidenote: The Scotch Succession]

Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland only three could be

regarded as serious claimants. By the extinction of the line of William the

Lion the right of succession passed to the daughters of his brother David.

The claim of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, rested on his descent from the

elder of these; that of Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, on his descent

from the second; that of John Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, on his descent

from the third. It is clear that at this crisis every one in Scotland or

out of it recognized some sort of overlordship in Edward, for the Norwegian

king, the Primate of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch Earls had already

appealed to him before Margaret's death; and her death was followed by the

consent both of the claimants and the Council of Regency to refer the

question of the succession to his decision in a Parliament at Norham. But

the overlordship which the Scots acknowledged was something far less direct

and definite than the superiority which Edward claimed at the opening of

this conference in May 1291. His claim was supported by excerpts from

monastic chronicles and by the slow advance of an English army; while the

Scotch lords, taken by surprise, found little help in the delay which was

granted them. At the opening of June therefore in common with nine of the

claimants they formally admitted Edward's direct suzerainty. To the nobles

in fact the concession must have seemed a small one, for like the principal

claimants they were for the most part Norman in blood, with estates in both

countries, and looking for honours and pensions from the English Court.

From the Commons who were gathered with the nobles at Norham no such

admission of Edward's claims could be extorted; but in Scotland, feudalized

as it had been by David, the Commons were as yet of little weight and their

opposition was quietly passed by. All the rights of a feudal suzerain were

at once assumed by the English king; he entered into the possession of the

country as into that of a disputed fief to be held by its overlord till the

dispute was settled, his peace was sworn throughout the land, its castles

delivered into his charge, while its bishops and nobles swore homage to him

directly as their lord superior. Scotland was thus reduced to the

subjection which she had experienced under Henry the Second; but the full

discussion which followed over the various claims to the throne showed that

while exacting to the full what he believed to be his right Edward desired

to do justice to the country itself. The body of commissioners which the

king named to report on the claims to the throne were mainly Scotch. A

proposal for the partition of the realm among the claimants was rejected as

contrary to Scotch law. On the report of the commissioners after a

twelvemonth's investigation in favour of Balliol as representative of the

elder branch at the close of the year 1292, his homage was accepted for the

whole kingdom of Scotland with a full acknowledgement of the services due

from him to its overlord. The castles were at once delivered to the new

monarch, and for a time there was peace.

[Sidenote: Edward and Scotland]

With the accession of Balliol and the rendering of his homage for the

Scottish realm the greatness of Edward reached its height. He was lord of

Britain as no English king had been before. The last traces of Welsh

independence were trodden under foot. The shadowy claims of supremacy over

Scotland were changed into a direct overlordship. Across the one sea Edward

was lord of Guienne, across the other of Ireland, and in England itself a

wise and generous policy had knit the whole nation round his throne. Firmly

as he still clung to prerogatives which the baronage were as firm not to

own, the main struggle for the Charter was over. Justice and good

government were secured. The personal despotism which John had striven to

build up, the imperial autocracy which had haunted the imagination of Henry

the Third, were alike set aside. The rule of Edward, vigorous and effective

as it was, was a rule of law, and of law enacted not by the royal will, but

by the common council of the realm. Never had English ruler reached a

greater height of power, nor was there any sign to warn the king of the

troubles which awaited him. France, jealous as it was of his greatness and

covetous of his Gascon possessions, he could hold at bay. Wales was growing

tranquil. Scotland gave few signs of discontent or restlessness in the

first year that followed the homage of its king. Under John Balliol it had

simply fallen back into the position of dependence which it held under

William the Lion; and Edward had no purpose of pushing further his rights

as suzerain than Henry the Second had done. One claim of the English Crown

indeed was soon a subject of dispute between the lawyers of the Scotch and

of the English Council boards. Edward would have granted as freely as

Balliol himself that though Scotland was a dependent kingdom it was far

from being an ordinary fief of the English Crown. By feudal custom a

distinction had always been held to exist between the relations of a

dependent king to a superior lord and those of a vassal noble to his

sovereign. At Balliol's homage indeed Edward had disclaimed any right to

the ordinary feudal incidents of a fief, those of wardship or marriage, and

in this disclaimer he was only repeating the reservations of the marriage

treaty of Brigham. There were other customs of the Scotch realm as

incontestable as these. Even after the treaty of Falaise the Scotch king

had not been held bound to attend the council of the English baronage, to

do service in English warfare, or to contribute on the part of his Scotch

realm to English aids. If no express acknowledgement of these rights had

been made by Edward, for some time after his acceptance of Balliol's homage

they were practically observed. The claim of independent justice was more

doubtful, as it was of higher import than these. The judicial independence

of Scotland had been expressly reserved in the marriage treaty. It was

certain that no appeal from a Scotch King's Court to that of his overlord

had been allowed since the days of William the Lion. But in the

jurisprudence of the feudal lawyers the right of ultimate appeal was the

test of sovereignty, and Edward regarded Balliol's homage as having placed

him precisely in the position of William the Lion and subjected his

decisions to those of his overlord. He was resolute therefore to assert the

supremacy of his court and to receive Scotch appeals.

[Sidenote: The French Attack]

Even here however the quarrel seemed likely to end only in legal bickering.

Balliol at first gave way, and it was not till 1293 that he alleged himself

forced by the resentment both of his Baronage and his people to take up an

attitude of resistance. While appearing therefore formally at Westminster

he refused to answer an appeal before the English courts save by advice of

his Council. But real as the resentment of his barons may have been, it was

not Scotland which really spurred Balliol to this defiance. His wounded

pride had made him the tool of a power beyond the sea. The keenness with

which France had watched every step of Edward's success in the north sprang

not merely from a natural jealousy of his greatness but from its bearing on

a great object of French ambition. One fragment of Eleanor's inheritance

still remained to her descendants, Guienne and Gascony, the fair lands

along the Garonne and the territory which stretched south of that river to

the Pyrenees. It was this territory that now tempted the greed of Philip

the Fair, and it was in feeding the strife between England and the Scotch

king that Philip saw an opening for winning it. French envoys therefore

brought promises of aid to the Scotch Court; and no sooner had these

intrigues moved Balliol to resent the claims of his overlord than Philip

found a pretext for open quarrel with Edward in the frays which went

constantly on in the Channel between the mariners of Normandy and those of

the Cinque Ports. They culminated at this moment in a great sea-fight which

proved fatal to eight thousand Frenchmen, and for this Philip haughtily

demanded redress. Edward saw at once the danger of his position. He did his

best to allay the storm by promise of satisfaction to France, and by

addressing threats of punishment to the English seamen. But Philip still

clung to his wrong, while the national passion which was to prove for a

hundred years to come strong enough to hold down the royal policy of peace

showed itself in a characteristic defiance with which the seamen of the

Cinque Ports met Edward's menaces. "Be the King's Council well advised,"

ran this remonstrance, "that if wrong or grievance be done them in any

fashion against right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and all

that they have, and go seek through the seas where they shall think to make

their profit." In spite therefore of Edward's efforts the contest

continued, and Philip found in it an opportunity to cite the king before

his court at Paris for wrongs done to him as suzerain. It was hard for

Edward to dispute the summons without weakening the position which his own

sovereign courts had taken up towards the Scotch king, and in a final

effort to avert the conflict the king submitted to a legal decision of the

question, and to a formal cession of Guienne into Philip's hands for forty

days in acknowledgement of his supremacy. Bitter as the sacrifice must have

been it failed to win peace. The forty days had no sooner passed than

Philip refused to restore the fortresses which had been left in pledge. In

February 1294 he declared the English king contumacious, and in May

declared his fiefs forfeited to the French Crown. Edward was driven to take

up arms, but a revolt in Wales deferred the expedition to the following

year. No sooner however was it again taken in hand than it became clear

that a double danger had to be met. The summons which Edward addressed to

the Scotch barons to follow him in arms to Guienne was disregarded. It was

in truth, as we have seen, a breach of customary law, and was probably

meant to force Scotland into an open declaration of its connexion with

France. A second summons was followed by a more formal refusal. The

greatness of the danger threw Edward on England itself. For a war in

Guienne and the north he needed supplies; but he needed yet more the firm

support of his people in a struggle which, little as he foresaw its

ultimate results, would plainly be one of great difficulty and danger. In

1295 he called a Parliament to counsel with him on the affairs of the

realm, but with the large statesmanship which distinguished him he took

this occasion of giving the Parliament a shape and organization which has

left its assembly the most important event in English history.

[Sidenote: The Great Council]

To realize its importance we must briefly review the changes by which the

Great Council of the Norman kings had been gradually transforming itself

into what was henceforth to be known as the English Parliament. Neither the

Meeting of the Wise Men before the Conquest nor the Great Council of the

Barons after it had been in any legal or formal way representative bodies.

The first theoretically included all free holders of land, but it shrank at

an early time into a gathering of earls, higher nobles, and bishops, with

the officers and thegns of the royal household. Little change was made in

the composition of this assembly by the Conquest, for the Great Council of

the Norman kings was supposed to include all tenants who held directly of

the Crown, the bishops and greater abbots (whose character as independent

spiritual members tended more and more to merge in their position as

barons), and the high officers of the Court. But though its composition

remained the same, the character of the assembly was essentially altered;

from a free gathering of "Wise Men" it sank to a Royal Court of feudal

vassals. Its functions too seem to have become almost nominal and its

powers to have been restricted to the sanctioning, without debate or

possibility of refusal, all grants demanded from it by the Crown. But

nominal as such a sanction might be, the "counsel and consent" of the Great

Council was necessary for the legal validity of every considerable fiscal

or political measure. Its existence therefore remained an effectual protest

against the imperial theories advanced by the lawyers of Henry the Second

which declared all legislative power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It

was in fact under Henry that these assemblies became more regular, and

their functions more important. The reforms which marked his reign were

issued in the Great Council, and even financial matters were suffered to be

debated there. But it was not till the grant of the Great Charter that the

powers of this assembly over taxation were formally recognized, and the

principle established that no burthen beyond the customary feudal aids

might be imposed "save by the Common Council of the Realm."

[Sidenote: Greater and Lesser Barons]

The same document first expressly regulated its form. In theory, as we have

seen, the Great Council consisted of all who held land directly of the

Crown. But the same causes which restricted attendance at the Witenagemot

to the greater nobles told on the actual composition of the Council of

Barons. While the attendance of the ordinary tenants in chief, the Knights

or "Lesser Barons" as they were called, was burthensome from its expense to

themselves, their numbers and their dependence on the higher nobles made

the assembly of these knights dangerous to the Crown. As early therefore as

the time of Henry the First we find a distinction recognized between the

"Greater Barons," of whom the Council was usually composed, and the "Lesser

Barons" who formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown. But though the

attendance of the latter had become rare their right of attendance remained

intact. While enacting that the prelates and greater barons should be

summoned by special writs to each gathering of the Council a remarkable

provision of the Great Charter orders a general summons to be issued

through the Sheriff to all direct tenants of the Crown. The provision was

probably intended to rouse the lesser Baronage to the exercise of rights

which had practically passed into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted

in later issues of the Charter we may doubt whether the principle it

embodied ever received more than a very limited application. There are

traces of the attendance of a few of the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps

of the neighbourhood where the assembly was held, in some of its meetings

under Henry the Third, but till a late period in the reign of his successor

the Great Council practically remained a gathering of the greater barons,

the prelates, and the high officers of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Constitutional Influence of Finance]

The change which the Great Charter had failed to accomplish was now however

brought about by the social circumstances of the time. One of the most

remarkable of these was a steady decrease in the number of the greater

nobles. The bulk of the earldoms had already lapsed to the Crown through

the extinction of the families of their possessors; of the greater

baronies, many had practically ceased to exist by their division among

female co-heiresses, many through the constant struggle of the poorer

nobles to rid themselves of their rank by a disclaimer so as to escape the

burthen of higher taxation and attendance in Parliament which it involved.

How far this diminution had gone we may see from the fact that hardly more

than a hundred barons sat in the earlier Councils of Edward's reign. But

while the number of those who actually exercised the privilege of assisting

in Parliament was rapidly diminishing, the numbers and wealth of the

"lesser baronage," whose right of attendance had become a mere

constitutional tradition, was as rapidly increasing. The long peace and

prosperity of the realm, the extension of its commerce and the increased

export of wool, were swelling the ranks and incomes of the country gentry

as well as of the freeholders and substantial yeomanry. We have already

noticed the effects of the increase of wealth in begetting a passion for

the possession of land which makes this reign so critical a period in the

history of the English freeholder; but the same tendency had to some extent

existed in the preceding century, and it was a consciousness of the growing

importance of this class of rural proprietors which induced the barons at

the moment of the Great Charter to make their fruitless attempt to induce

them to take part in the deliberations of the Great Council. But while the

barons desired their presence as an aid against the Crown, the Crown itself

desired it as a means of rendering taxation more efficient. So long as the

Great Council remained a mere assembly of magnates it was necessary for the

King's ministers to treat separately with the other orders of the state as

to the amount and assessment of their contributions. The grant made in the

Great Council was binding only on the barons and prelates who made it; but

before the aids of the boroughs, the Church, or the shires could reach the

royal treasury, a separate negotiation had to be conducted by the officers

of the Exchequer with the reeves of each town, the sheriff and shire-court

of each county, and the archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of this sort

would be the more tedious and disappointing as the necessities of the Crown

increased in the later years of Edward, and it became a matter of fiscal

expediency to obtain the sanction of any proposed taxation through the

presence of these classes in the Great Council itself.

The effort however to revive the old personal attendance of the lesser

baronage which had broken down half a century before could hardly be

renewed at a time when the increase of their numbers made it more

impracticable than ever; but a means of escape from this difficulty was

fortunately suggested by the very nature of the court through which alone a

summons could be addressed to the landed knighthood. Amidst the many

judicial reforms of Henry or Edward the Shire Court remained unchanged. The

haunted mound or the immemorial oak round which the assembly gathered (for

the court was often held in the open air) were the relics of a time before

the free kingdom had sunk into a shire and its Meetings of the Wise into a

County Court. But save that the king's reeve had taken the place of the

king and that the Norman legislation had displaced the Bishop and set four

Coroners by the Sheriff's side, the gathering of the freeholders remained

much as of old. The local knighthood, the yeomanry, the husbandmen of the

county, were all represented in the crowd that gathered round the Sheriff,

as guarded by his liveried followers he published the king's writs,

announced his demand of aids, received the presentment of criminals and the

inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or

listened solemnly to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who

held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke.

It was in the County Court alone that the Sheriff could legally summon the

lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, and it was in the actual

constitution of this assembly that the Crown found a solution of the

difficulty which we have stated. For the principle of representation by

which it was finally solved was coeval with the Shire Court itself. In all

cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the

Sheriff, as members of a class, though not formally deputed for that

purpose, practically represented the judicial opinion of the county at

large. From every hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the

"jurors" through whom the presentments of the district were made to the

royal officer and with whom the assessment of its share in the general

taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on the outskirts of the crowd, clad

in the brown smock frock which still lingers in the garb of our carters and

ploughmen, were broken up into little knots of five, a reeve and four

assistants, each of which knots formed the representative of a rural

township. If in fact we regard the Shire Courts as lineally the descendants

of our earliest English Witenagemots, we may justly claim the principle of

parliamentary representation as among the oldest of our institutions.

[Sidenote: Knights of the Shire]

It was easy to give this principle a further extension by the choice of

representatives of the lesser barons in the shire courts to which they were

summoned; but it was only slowly and tentatively that this process was

applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council. As early as the close

of John's reign there are indications of the approaching change in the

summons of "four discreet knights" from every county. Fresh need of local

support was felt by both parties in the conflict of the succeeding reign,

and Henry and his barons alike summoned knights from each shire "to meet on

the common business of the realm." It was no doubt with the same purpose

that the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights in each shire

for his famous Parliament of 1265. Something like a continuous attendance

may be dated from the accession of Edward, but it was long before the

knights were regarded as more than local deputies for the assessment of

taxation or admitted to a share in the general business of the Great

Council. The statute "Quia Emptores," for instance, was passed in it before

the knights who had been summoned could attend. Their participation in the

deliberative power of Parliament, as well as their regular and continuous

attendance, dates only from the Parliament of 1295. But a far greater

constitutional change in their position had already taken place through the

extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large. The one class

entitled to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the

lesser baronage; and it was of the lesser baronage alone that the knights

were in theory the representatives. But the necessity of holding their

election in the County Court rendered any restriction of the electoral body

physically impossible. The court was composed of the whole body of

freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish the "aye, aye" of the yeoman

from the "aye, aye" of the lesser baron. From the first moment therefore of

their attendance we find the knights regarded not as mere representatives

of the baronage but as knights of the shire, and by this silent revolution

the whole body of the rural freeholders were admitted to a share in the

government of the realm.

[Sidenote: Boroughs and the Crown]

The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far more radical

revolution in the admission into the Great Council of representatives from

the boroughs. The presence of knights from each shire was the recognition

of an older right, but no right of attendance or share in the national

"counsel and assent" could be pleaded for the burgesses of the towns. On

the other hand the rapid developement of their wealth made them every day

more important as elements in the national taxation. From all payment of

the dues or fines exacted by the king as the original lord of the soil on

which they had in most cases grown up the towns had long since freed

themselves by what was called the purchase of the "farm of the borough"; in

other words, by the commutation of these uncertain dues for a fixed sum

paid annually to the Crown and apportioned by their own magistrates among

the general body of the burghers. All that the king legally retained was

the right enjoyed by every great proprietor of levying a corresponding

taxation on his tenants in demesne under the name of "a free aid" whenever

a grant was made for the national necessities by the barons of the Great

Council. But the temptation of appropriating the growing wealth of the

mercantile class proved stronger than legal restrictions, and we find both

Henry the Third and his son assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure

and without any authority from the Council even over London itself. The

burgesses could refuse indeed the invitation to contribute to the "free

aids" demanded by the royal officers, but the suspension of their markets

or trading privileges brought them in the end to submission. Each of these

"free aids" however had to be extorted after a long wrangle between the

borough and the officers of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven to

comply with what they considered an extortion they could generally force

the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise and abatement of its

original demands.

[Sidenote: Burgesses in Parliament]

The same financial reasons therefore existed for desiring the presence of

borough representatives in the Great Council as existed in the case of the

shires; but it was the genius of Earl Simon which first broke through the

older constitutional tradition and summoned two burgesses from each town to

the Parliament of 1265. Time had indeed to pass before the large and

statesmanlike conception of the great patriot could meet with full

acceptance. Through the earlier part of Edward's reign we find a few

instances of the presence of representatives from the towns, but their

scanty numbers and the irregularity of their attendance show that they were

summoned rather to afford financial information to the Great Council than

as representatives in it of an Estate of the Realm. But every year pleaded

stronger and stronger for their inclusion, and in the Parliament of 1295

that of 1265 found itself at last reproduced. "It was from me that he

learnt it," Earl Simon had cried, as he recognized the military skill of

Edward's onset at Evesham; "it was from me that he learnt it," his spirit

might have exclaimed as he saw the king gathering at last two burgesses

"from every city, borough, and leading town" within his realm to sit side

by side with the knights, nobles, and barons of the Great Council. To the

Crown the change was from the first an advantageous one. The grants of

subsidies by the burgesses in Parliament proved more profitable than the

previous extortions of the Exchequer. The proportions of their grant

generally exceeded that of the other estates. Their representatives too

proved far more compliant with the royal will than the barons or knights of

the shire; only on one occasion during Edward's reign did the burgesses

waver from their general support of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Reluctance to attend]

It was easy indeed to control them, for the selection of boroughs to be

represented remained wholly in the king's hands, and their numbers could be

increased or diminished at the king's pleasure. The determination was left

to the sheriff, and at a hint from the royal Council a sheriff of Wilts

would cut down the number of represented boroughs in his shire from eleven

to three, or a sheriff of Bucks declare he could find but a single borough,

that of Wycombe, within the bounds of his county. Nor was this exercise of

the prerogative hampered by any anxiety on the part of the towns to claim

representative privileges. It was hard to suspect that a power before which

the Crown would have to bow lay in the ranks of soberly-clad traders,

summoned only to assess the contributions of their boroughs, and whose

attendance was as difficult to secure as it seemed burthensome to

themselves and the towns who sent them. The mass of citizens took little or

no part in their choice, for they were elected in the county court by a few

of the principal burghers deputed for the purpose; but the cost of their

maintenance, the two shillings a day paid to the burgess by his town as

four were paid to the knight by his county, was a burden from which the

boroughs made desperate efforts to escape. Some persisted in making no

return to the sheriff. Some bought charters of exemption from the

troublesome privilege. Of the 165 who were summoned by Edward the First

more than a third ceased to send representatives after a single compliance

with the royal summons. During the whole time from the reign of Edward the

Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the sheriff of Lancashire declined to

return the names of any boroughs at all within that county "on account of

their poverty." Nor were the representatives themselves more anxious to

appear than their boroughs to send them. The busy country squire and the

thrifty trader were equally reluctant to undergo the trouble and expense of

a journey to Westminster. Legal measures were often necessary to ensure

their presence. Writs still exist in abundance such as that by which Walter

le Rous is "held to bail in eight oxen and four cart-horses to come before

the King on the day specified" for attendance in Parliament. But in spite

of obstacles such as these the presence of representatives from the

boroughs may be regarded as continuous from the Parliament of 1295. As the

representation of the lesser barons had widened through a silent change

into that of the shire, so that of the boroughs--restricted in theory to

those in the royal demesne--seems practically from Edward's time to have

been extended to all who were in a condition to pay the cost of their

representatives' support. By a change as silent within the Parliament

itself the burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters of

taxation, was at last admitted to a full share in the deliberations and

authority of the other orders of the State.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the Clergy]

The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire to the assembly of

1295 completed the fabric of our representative constitution. The Great

Council of the Barons became the Parliament of the Realm. Every order of

the state found itself represented in this assembly, and took part in the

grant of supplies, the work of legislation, and in the end the control of

government. But though in all essential points the character of Parliament

has remained the same from that time to this, there were some remarkable

particulars in which the assembly of 1295 differed widely from the present

Parliament at St. Stephen's. Some of these differences, such as those which

sprang from the increased powers and changed relations of the different

orders among themselves, we shall have occasion to consider at a later

time. But a difference of a far more startling kind than these lay in the

presence of the clergy. If there is any part in the parliamentary scheme of

Edward the First which can be regarded as especially his own, it is his

project for the representation of the ecclesiastical order. The King had

twice at least summoned its "proctors" to Great Councils before 1295, but

it was then only that the complete representation of the Church was

definitely organized by the insertion of a clause in the writ which

summoned a bishop to Parliament requiring the personal attendance of all

archdeacons, deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for each

cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy within his diocese. The clause is

repeated in the writs of the present day, but its practical effect was

foiled almost from the first by the resolute opposition of those to whom it

was addressed. What the towns failed in doing the clergy actually did. Even

when forced to comply with the royal summons, as they seem to have been

forced during Edward's reign, they sat jealously by themselves, and their

refusal to vote supplies in any but their own provincial assemblies, or

convocations, of Canterbury and York left the Crown without a motive for

insisting on their continued attendance. Their presence indeed, though

still at times granted on some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality

that by the end of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into desuetude.

In their anxiety to preserve their existence as an isolated and privileged

order the clergy flung away a power which, had they retained it, would have

ruinously hampered the healthy developement of the state. To take a single

instance, it is difficult to see how the great changes of the Reformation

could have been brought about had a good half of the House of Commons

consisted purely of churchmen, whose numbers would have been backed by the

weight of their property as possessors of a third of the landed estates of

the realm.

[Sidenote: Parliament at Westminster]

A hardly less important difference may be found in the gradual restriction

of the meetings of Parliament to Westminster. The names of Edward's

statutes remind us of its convocation at the most various quarters, at

Winchester, Acton Burnell, Northampton. It was at a later time that

Parliament became settled in the straggling village which had grown up in

the marshy swamp of the Isle of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled

pile towered over the Thames and the new Westminster which was still rising

in Edward's day on the site of the older church of the Confessor. It is

possible that, while contributing greatly to its constitutional importance,

this settlement of the Parliament may have helped to throw into the

background its character as a supreme court of appeal. The proclamation by

which it was called together invited "all who had any grace to demand of

the King in Parliament, or any plaint to make of matters which could not be

redressed or determined by ordinary course of law, or who had been in any

way aggrieved by any of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or

their bailiffs, or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated,

charged, or surcharged to aids, subsidies, or taxes," to deliver their

petitions to receivers who sat in the Great Hall of the Palace of

Westminster. The petitions were forwarded to the King's Council, and it was

probably the extension of the jurisdiction of that body and the rise of the

Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient right of the subject to the

formal election of "Triers of Petitions" at the opening of every new

Parliament by the House of Lords, a usage which is still continued. But it

must have been owing to some memory of the older custom that the subject

always looked for redress against injuries from the Crown or its ministers

to the Parliament of the realm.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Scotland]

The subsidies granted by the Parliament of 1295 furnished the king with the

means of warfare with both Scotland and France while they assured him of

the sympathy of his people in the contest. But from the first the

reluctance of Edward to enter on the double war was strongly marked. The

refusal of the Scotch baronage to obey his summons had been followed on

Balliol's part by two secret steps which made a struggle inevitable, by a

request to Rome for absolution from his oath of fealty and by a treaty of

alliance with Philip the Fair. As yet however no open breach had taken

place, and while Edward in 1296 summoned his knighthood to meet him in the

north he called a Parliament at Newcastle in the hope of bringing about an

accommodation with the Scot king. But all thought of accommodation was

roughly ended by the refusal of Balliol to attend the Parliament, by the

rout of a small body of English troops, and by the Scotch investment of

Carlisle. Taken as he was by surprise, Edward showed at once the vigour and

rapidity of his temper. His army marched upon Berwick. The town was a rich

and well-peopled one, and although a wooden stockade furnished its only

rampart the serried ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope of an easy

conquest. Their taunts indeed stung the king to the quick. As his engineers

threw up rough entrenchments for the besieging army the burghers bade him

wait till he won the town before he began digging round it. "Kynge Edward,"

they shouted, "waune thou havest Berwick, pike thee; waune thou havest

geten, dike thee." But the stockade was stormed with the loss of a single

knight, nearly eight thousand of the citizens were mown down in a ruthless

carnage, and a handful of Flemish traders who held the town-hall stoutly

against all assailants were burned alive in it. The massacre only ceased

when a procession of priests bore the host to the king's presence, praying

for mercy. Edward with a sudden and characteristic burst of tears called

off his troops; but the town was ruined for ever, and the greatest merchant

city of northern Britain sank from that time into a petty seaport.

At Berwick Edward received Balliol's formal defiance. "Has the fool done

this folly?" the king cried in haughty scorn; "if he will not come to us,

we will come to him." The terrible slaughter however had done its work, and

his march northward was a triumphal progress. Edinburgh, Stirling, and

Perth opened their gates, Bruce joined the English army, and Balliol

himself surrendered and passed without a blow from his throne to an English

prison. No further punishment however was exacted from the prostrate realm.

Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared its forfeiture to be the

legal consequence of Balliol's treason. It lapsed in fact to its suzerain;

and its earls, barons, and gentry swore homage in Parliament at Berwick to

Edward as their king. The sacred stone on which its older sovereigns had

been installed, an oblong block of limestone which legend asserted to have

been the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended upon him, was

removed from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the

Confessor. It was enclosed by Edward's order in a stately seat, which

became from that hour the coronation chair of English kings. To the king

himself the whole business must have seemed another and easier conquest of

Wales, and the mercy and just government which had followed his first

success followed his second also. The government of the new dependency was

entrusted to John of Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English

Council of Regency. Pardon was freely extended to all who had resisted the

invasion, and order and public peace were rigidly enforced.

[Sidenote: Confirmation of the Charters]

But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had more than exhausted the

aids granted by the Parliament. The treasury was utterly drained. The

struggle indeed widened as every month went on; the costly fight with the

French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward was planning a yet

costlier attack on northern France with the aid of Flanders. Need drove him

on his return from Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion

which seemed to recall the times of John. His first blow fell on the

Church. At the close of 1294 he had already demanded half their annual

income from the clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance

that the Dean of St. Paul's, who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead

of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose the King's demand," said a

royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that he may

be noted as an enemy to the King's peace." The outraged Churchmen fell back

on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the

bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a

bull which forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their

ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for refusing to comply with further

taxation. In 1297 Archbishop Winchelsey refused on the ground of this bull

to make any grant, and Edward met his refusal by a general outlawry of the

whole order. The King's Courts were closed, and all justice denied to those

who refused the king aid. By their actual plea the clergy had put

themselves formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon forced them to

submission; but their aid did little to recruit the exhausted treasury. The

pressure of the war steadily increased, and far wider measures of arbitrary

taxation were needful to equip an expedition which Edward prepared to lead

in person to Flanders. The country gentlemen were compelled to take up

knighthood or to compound for exemption from the burthensome honour, and

forced contributions of cattle and corn were demanded from the counties.

Edward no doubt purposed to pay honestly for these supplies, but his

exactions from the merchant class rested on a deliberate theory of his

royal rights. He looked on the customs as levied absolutely at his

pleasure, and the export duty on wool--now the staple produce of the

country--was raised to six times its former amount. Although he infringed

no positive provision of charter or statute in his action, it was plain

that his course really undid all that had been gained by the Barons' war.

But the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward found stout resistance

within his realm. The barons drew together and called a meeting for the

redress of their grievances. The two greatest of the English nobles,

Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk,

placed themselves at the head of the opposition. The first was Constable,

the second Earl Marshal, and Edward bade them lead a force to Gascony as

his lieutenants while he himself sailed to Flanders. Their departure would

have left the Baronage without leaders, and the two earls availed

themselves of a plea that they were not bound to foreign service save in

attendance on the king to refuse obedience to the royal orders. "By God,

Sir Earl," swore the king to the Earl Marshal, "you shall either go or

hang!" "By God, Sir King," was the cool reply, "I will neither go nor

hang!" Both parties separated in bitter anger; the king to seize fresh

wool, to outlaw the clergy, and to call an army to his aid; the barons to

gather in arms, backed by the excommunication of the Primate. But the

strife went no further than words. Ere the Parliament he had convened could

meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness; Winchelsey offered his

mediation; and Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of

Forests as the price of a grant from the clergy and a subsidy from the

Commons. With one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of which his nature

was capable the king stood before his people in Westminster Hall and owned

with a burst of tears that he had taken their substance without due warrant

of law. His passionate appeal to their loyalty wrested a reluctant assent

to the prosecution, of the war, and in August Edward sailed for Flanders,

leaving his son regent of the realm. But the crisis had taught the need of

further securities against the royal power, and as Edward was about to

embark the barons demanded his acceptance of additional articles to the

Charter, expressly renouncing his right of taxing the nation without its

own consent. The king sailed without complying, but Winchelsey joined the

two earls and the citizens of London in forbidding any levy of supplies

till the Great Charter with these clauses was again confirmed, and the

trouble in Scotland as well as the still pending strife with France left

Edward helpless in the barons' hands. The Great Charter and the Charter of

the Forests were solemnly confirmed by him at Ghent in November; and formal

pardon was issued to the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk.

[Sidenote: Revolt of Scotland]

The confirmation of the Charter, the renunciation of any right to the

exactions by which the people were aggrieved, the pledge that the king

would no more take "such aids, tasks, and prizes but by common assent of

the realm," the promise not to impose on wool any heavy customs or

"maltôte" without the same assent, was the close of the great struggle

which had begun at Runnymede. The clauses so soon removed from the Great

Charter were now restored; and, evade them as they might, the kings were

never able to free themselves from the obligation to seek aid solely from

the general consent of their subjects. It was Scotland which had won this

victory for English freedom. At the moment when Edward and the earls stood

face to face the king saw his work in the north suddenly undone. Both the

justice and injustice of the new rule proved fatal to it. The wrath of the

Scots, already kindled by the intrusion of English priests into Scotch

livings and by the grant of lands across the border to English barons, was

fanned to fury by the strict administration of law and the repression of

feuds and cattle-lifting. The disbanding too of troops, which was caused by

the penury of the royal exchequer, united with the licence of the soldiery

who remained to quicken the national sense of wrong. The disgraceful

submission of their leaders brought the people themselves to the front. In

spite of a hundred years of peace the farmer of Fife or the Lowlands and

the artizan of the towns remained stout-hearted Northumbrian Englishmen.

They had never consented to Edward's supremacy, and their blood rose

against the insolent rule of the stranger. The genius of an outlaw knight,

William Wallace, saw in their smouldering discontent a hope of freedom for

his country, and his daring raids on outlying parties of the English

soldiery roused the country at last into revolt.

[Sidenote: Wallace]

Of Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we know little or nothing; the

very traditions of his gigantic stature and enormous strength are dim and

unhistorical. But the instinct of the Scotch people has guided it aright in

choosing him for its national hero. He was the first to assert freedom as a

national birthright, and amidst the despair of nobles and priests to call

the people itself to arms. At the head of an army drawn principally from

the coast districts north of the Tay, which were inhabited by a population

of the same blood as that of the Lowlands, Wallace in September 1297

encamped near Stirling, the pass between the north and the south, and

awaited the English advance. It was here that he was found by the English

army. The offers of John of Warenne were scornfully rejected: "We have

come," said the Scottish leader, "not to make peace, but to free our

country." The position of Wallace behind a loop of Forth was in fact chosen

with consummate skill. The one bridge which crossed the river was only

broad enough to admit two horsemen abreast; and though the English army had

been passing from daybreak but half its force was across at noon when

Wallace closed on it and cut it after a short combat to pieces in sight of

its comrades. The retreat of the Earl of Surrey over the border left

Wallace head of the country he had freed, and for a few months he acted as

"Guardian of the Realm" in Balliol's name, and headed a wild foray into

Northumberland in which the barbarous cruelties of his men left a bitter

hatred behind them which was to wreak its vengeance in the later bloodshed

of the war. His reduction of Stirling Castle at last called Edward to the

field. In the spring of 1298 the king's diplomacy had at last wrung a truce

for two years from Philip the Fair; and he at once returned to England to

face the troubles in Scotland. Marching northward with a larger host than

had ever followed his banner, he was enabled by treachery to surprise

Wallace as he fell back to avoid an engagement, and to force him on the

twenty-second of July to battle near Falkirk. The Scotch force consisted

almost wholly of foot, and Wallace drew up his spearmen in four great

hollow circles or squares, the outer ranks kneeling and the whole supported

by bowmen within, while a small force of horse were drawn up as a reserve

in the rear. It was the formation of Waterloo, the first appearance in our

history since the day of Senlac of "that unconquerable British infantry"

before which chivalry was destined to go down. For a moment it had all

Waterloo's success. "I have brought you to the ring, hop (dance) if you

can," are words of rough humour that reveal the very soul of the patriot

leader, and the serried ranks answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of

Durham who led the English van shrank wisely from the look of the squares.

"Back to your mass, Bishop," shouted the reckless knights behind him, but

the body of horse dashed itself vainly on the wall of spears. Terror spread

through the English army, and its Welsh auxiliaries drew off in a body from

the field. But the generalship of Wallace was met by that of the king.

Drawing his bowmen to the front, Edward riddled the Scottish ranks with

arrows and then hurled his cavalry afresh on the wavering line. In a moment

all was over, the maddened knights rode in and out of the broken ranks,

slaying without mercy. Thousands fell on the field, and Wallace himself

escaped with difficulty, followed by a handful of men.

[Sidenote: Second Conquest of Scotland]

But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his work was done. He had roused

Scotland into life, and even a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered.

Edward remained master only of the ground he stood on: want of supplies

forced him at last to retreat; and in the summer of the following year,

1299, when Balliol, released from his English prison, withdrew into France,

a regency of the Scotch nobles under Robert Bruce and John Comyn continued

the struggle for independence. Troubles at home and danger from abroad

stayed Edward's hand. The barons still distrusted his sincerity, and though

at their demand he renewed the Confirmation in the spring of 1299, his

attempt to add an evasive clause saving the right of the Crown proved the

justice of their distrust. In spite of a fresh and unconditional renewal of

it a strife over the Forest Charter went on till the opening of 1301 when a

new gathering of the barons in arms with the support of Archbishop

Winchelsey wrested from him its full execution. What aided freedom within

was as of old the peril without. France was still menacing, and a claim

advanced by Pope Boniface the Eighth at its suggestion to the feudal

superiority over Scotland arrested a new advance of the king across the

border. A quarrel however which broke out between Philip le Bel and the

Papacy removed all obstacles. It enabled Edward to defy Boniface and to

wring from France a treaty in which Scotland was abandoned. In 1304 he

resumed the work of invasion, and again the nobles flung down their arms as

he marched to the North. Comyn, at the head of the Regency, acknowledged

his sovereignty, and the surrender of Stirling completed the conquest of

Scotland. But the triumph of Edward was only the prelude to the carrying

out of his designs for knitting the two countries together by a generosity

and wisdom which reveal the greatness of his statesmanship. A general

amnesty was extended to all who had shared in the resistance. Wallace, who

refused to avail himself of Edward's mercy, was captured and condemned to

death at Westminster on charges of treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The

head of the great patriot, crowned in mockery with a circlet of laurel, was

placed upon London Bridge. But the execution of Wallace was the one blot on

Edward's clemency. With a masterly boldness he entrusted the government of

the country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of whom were freshly

pardoned for their share in the war, and anticipated the policy of Cromwell

by allotting ten representatives to Scotland in the Common Parliament of

his realm. A Convocation was summoned at Perth for the election of these

representatives, and a great judicial scheme which was promulgated in this

assembly adopted the amended laws of King David as the base of a new

legislation, and divided the country for judicial purposes into four

districts, Lothian, Galloway, the Highlands, and the land between the

Highlands and the Forth, at the head of each of which were placed two

justiciaries, the one English and the other Scotch.

[Sidenote: Rising of Bruce]

With the conquest and settlement of Scotland the glory of Edward seemed

again complete. The bitterness of his humiliation at home indeed still

preyed upon him, and in measure after measure we see his purpose of

renewing the strife with the baronage. In 1303 he found a means of evading

his pledge to levy no new taxes on merchandise save by assent of the realm

in a consent of the foreign merchants, whether procured by royal pressure

or no, to purchase by stated payments certain privileges of trading. In

this "New Custom" lay the origin of our import duties. A formal absolution

from his promises which he obtained from Pope Clement the Fifth in 1305

showed that he looked on his triumph in the North as enabling him to reopen

the questions which he had yielded. But again Scotland stayed his hand.

Only four months had passed since its submission, and he was preparing for

a joint Parliament of the two nations at Carlisle, when the conquered

country suddenly sprang again to arms. Its new leader was Robert Bruce, a

grandson of one of the original claimants of the crown. The Norman house of

Bruce formed a part of the Yorkshire baronage, but it had acquired through

intermarriages the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale. Both

the claimant and his son had been pretty steadily on the English side in

the contest with Balliol and Wallace, and Robert had himself been trained

in the English court and stood high in the king's favour. But the

withdrawal of Balliol gave a new force to his claims upon the crown, and

the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on foot with the Bishop of

St. Andrews so roused Edward's jealousy that Bruce fled for his life across

the border. Early in 1306 he met Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to whose

treachery he attributed the disclosure of his plans, in the church of the

Grey Friars at Dumfries, and after the interchange of a few hot words

struck him with his dagger to the ground. It was an outrage that admitted

of no forgiveness, and Bruce for very safety was forced to assume the crown

six weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. The news roused Scotland again to

arms, and summoned Edward to a fresh contest with his unconquerable foe.

But the murder of Comyn had changed the king's mood to a terrible

pitilessness. He threatened death against all concerned in the outrage, and

exposed the Countess of Buchan, who had set the crown on Bruce's head, in a

cage or open chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers of Berwick.

At the solemn feast which celebrated his son's knighthood Edward vowed on

the swan which formed the chief dish at the banquet to devote the rest of

his days to exact vengeance from the murderer himself. But even at the

moment of the vow Bruce was already flying for his life to the western

islands. "Henceforth" he said to his wife at their coronation "thou art

Queen of Scotland and I King." "I fear" replied Mary Bruce "we are only

playing at royalty like children in their games." The play was soon turned

into bitter earnest. A small English force under Aymer de Valence sufficed

to rout the disorderly levies which gathered round the new monarch, and the

flight of Bruce left his followers at Edward's mercy. Noble after noble was

sent to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred with royalty. "His

only privilege," burst forth the king, "shall be that of being hanged on a

higher gallows than the rest." Knights and priests were strung up side by

side by the English justiciaries; while the wife and daughters of Robert

Bruce were flung into Edward's prisons. Bruce himself had offered to

capitulate to Prince Edward. But the offer only roused the old king to

fury. "Who is so bold," he cried, "as to treat with our traitors without

our knowledge?" and rising from his sick-bed he led his army northwards in

the summer of 1307 to complete the conquest. But the hand of death was upon

him, and in the very sight of Scotland the old man breathed his last at

Burgh-upon-Sands.

BOOK IV

THE PARLIAMENT

1307-1461

AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV

For Edward the Second we have three important contemporaries: Thomas de la

More, Trokelowe's Annals, and the life by a monk of Malmesbury printed by

Hearne. The sympathies of the first are with the King, those of the last

two with the Barons. Murimuth's short Chronicle is also contemporary. John

Barbour's "Bruce," the great legendary storehouse for his hero's

adventures, is historically worthless.

Important as it is, the reign of Edward the Third is by no means fortunate

in its annalists. The concluding part of the Chronicle of Walter of

Hemingford or Heminburgh seems to have been jotted down as news of the

passing events reached its author: it ends at the battle of Crécy. Hearne

has published another contemporary account, that of Robert of Avesbury,

which closes in 1356. A third account by Knyghton, a canon of Leicester,

will be found in the collection of Twysden. At the end of this century and

the beginning of the next the annals which had been carried on in the Abbey

of St. Albans were thrown together by Walsingham in the "Historia

Anglicana" which bears his name, a compilation whose history may be found

in the prefaces to the "Chronica Monasterii S. Albani" issued in the Rolls

Series. An anonymous chronicler whose work is printed in the 22nd volume of

the "Archæologia" has given us the story of the Good Parliament, another

account is preserved in the "Chronica Angliæ from 1328 to 1388," published

in the Rolls Series, and fresh light has been recently thrown on the time

by the publication of a Chronicle by Adam of Usk which extends from 1377 to

1404. Fortunately the scantiness of historical narrative is compensated by

the growing fulness and abundance of our State papers. Rymer's Foedera is

rich in diplomatic and other documents for this period, and from this time

we have a storehouse of political and social information in the

Parliamentary Rolls.

For the French war itself our primary authority is the Chronicle of Jehan

le Bel, a canon of the church of St. Lambert of Liége, who himself served

in Edward's campaign against the Scots and spent the rest of his life at

the court of John of Hainault. Up to the Treaty of Brétigny, where it

closes, Froissart has done little more than copy this work, making however

large additions from his own enquiries, especially in the Flemish and

Breton campaigns and in the account of Crécy. Froissart was himself a

Hainaulter of Valenciennes; he held a post in Queen Philippa's household

from 1361 to 1369, and under this influence produced in 1373 the first

edition of his well-known Chronicle. A later edition is far less English in

tone, and a third version, begun by him in his old age after long absence

from England, is distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity

and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of his details; as an

historical authority he is of little value. The "Fasciculi Zizaniorum" in

the Rolls Series with the documents appended to it is a work of primary

authority for the history of Wyclif and his followers: a selection from his

English tracts has been made by Mr. T. Arnold for the University of Oxford,

which has also published his "Trias." The version of the Bible that bears

his name has been edited with a valuable preface by the Rev. J. Forshall

and Sir F. Madden. William Langland's poem, "The Complaint of Piers the

Ploughman" (edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society), throws

a flood of light on the social state of England after the Treaty of

Brétigny.

The "Annals of Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth," now published by

the Master of the Rolls, are our main authority for the period which

follows Edward's death. They serve as the basis of the St. Albans

compilation which bears the name of Walsingham, and from which the "Life of

Richard" by a monk of Evesham is for the most part derived. The same

violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through Walsingham and the fifth book of

Knyghton's Chronicle. The French authorities on the other hand are

vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is

supplemented by the metrical history of Creton ("Archæologia," vol. xx.),

and by the "Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart" (English Historical

Society), both works of French authors and published in France in the time

of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French feeling

against the House of Lancaster and the war-policy which it had revived. The

popular feeling in England may be seen in "Political Songs from Edward III.

to Richard III." (Rolls Series). A poem on "The Deposition of Richard II."

which has been published by the Camden Society is now ascribed to William

Langland.

With Henry the Fifth our historic materials become more abundant. We have

the "Gesta Henrici Quinti" by Titus Livius, a chaplain in the royal army; a

life by Elmham, prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical in

arrangement and facts with the former work; a biography by Robert Redman; a

metrical chronicle by Elmham (published in Rolls Series in "Memorials of

Henry the Fifth"); and the meagre chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne.

The King's Norman campaigns may be studied in M. Puiseux's "Siége de Rouen"

(Caen, 1867). The "Wars of the English in France" and Blondel's work "De

Reductione Normanniæ" (both in Rolls Series) give ample information on the

military side of this and the next reign. But with the accession of Henry

the Sixth we again enter on a period of singular dearth in its historical

authorities. The "Procès de Jeanne d'Arc" (published by the Société de

l'Histoire de France) is the only real authority for her history. For

English affairs we are reduced to the meagre accounts of William of

Worcester, of the Continuator of the Crowland Chronicle, and of Fabyan.

Fabyan is a London alderman with a strong bias in favour of the House of

Lancaster, and his work is useful for London only. The Continuator is one

of the best of his class; and though connected with the house of York, the

date of his work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field, makes him

fairly impartial; but he is sketchy and deficient in information. The more

copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in literary

ability, but of later date, and strongly Lancastrian in tone. For the

struggle between Edward and Warwick, the valuable narrative of "The Arrival

of Edward the Fourth" (Camden Society) may be taken as the official account

on the royal side. The Paston Letters are the first instance in English

history of a family correspondence, and throw great light on the social

condition of the time.

CHAPTER I

EDWARD II

1307-1327

[Sidenote: Parliament and the Kings]

In his calling together the estates of the realm Edward the First

determined the course of English history. From the first moment of its

appearance the Parliament became the centre of English affairs. The hundred

years indeed which follow its assembly at Westminster saw its rise into a

power which checked and overawed the Crown.

Of the kings in whose reigns the Parliament gathered this mighty strength

not one was likely to look with indifference on the growth of a rival

authority, and the bulk of them were men who in other times would have

roughly checked it. What held their hand was the need of the Crown. The

century and a half that followed the gathering of the estates at

Westminster was a time of almost continual war, and of the financial

pressure that springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered them.

In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought mainly an effective means

of procuring supplies for that policy of national consolidation which had

triumphed in Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. But the

triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one, and the strife brought

wider strifes in its train. When Edward wrung from Balliol an

acknowledgement of his suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France,

the war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the upgrowth of social, of

political, of religious revolution within England itself, of which that

acknowledgement was to be the prelude. But the thicker troubles gathered

round England the more the royal treasury was drained, and now that

arbitrary taxation was impossible the one means of filling it lay in a

summons of the Houses. The Crown was chained to the Parliament by a tie of

absolute need. From the first moment of parliamentary existence the life

and power of the estates assembled at Westminster hung on the question of

supplies. So long as war went on no ruler could dispense with the grants

which fed the war and which Parliament alone could afford. But it was

impossible to procure supplies save by redressing the grievances of which

Parliament complained and by granting the powers which Parliament demanded.

It was in vain that king after king, conscious that war bound them to the

Parliament, strove to rid themselves of the war. So far was the ambition of

our rulers from being the cause of the long struggle that, save in the one

case of Henry the Fifth, the desperate effort of every ruler was to arrive

at peace. Forced as they were to fight, their restless diplomacy strove to

draw from victory as from defeat a means of escape from the strife that was

enslaving the Crown. The royal Council, the royal favourites, were always

on the side of peace. But fortunately for English freedom peace was

impossible. The pride of the English people, the greed of France, foiled

every attempt at accommodation. The wisest ministers sacrificed themselves

in vain. King after king patched up truces which never grew into treaties,

and concluded marriages which brought fresh discord instead of peace. War

went ceaselessly on, and with the march of war went on the ceaseless growth

of the Parliament.

[Sidenote: Robert Bruce]

The death of Edward the First arrested only for a moment the advance of his

army to the north. The Earl of Pembroke led it across the border, and found

himself master of the country without a blow. Bruce's career became that of

a desperate adventurer, for even the Highland chiefs in whose fastnesses he

found shelter were bitterly hostile to one who claimed to be king of their

foes in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that transformed the murderer

of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation's cause. Strong and of

commanding presence, brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships

of his career with a courage and hopefulness that never failed. In the

legends that clustered round his name we see him listening in Highland

glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass

single-handed against a crowd of savage clansmen. Sometimes the small band

which clung to him were forced to support themselves by hunting and

fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their enemies tracked them to

their lair. Bruce himself had more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail

and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags. Little by little,

however, the dark sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed. James Douglas,

the darling of Scottish story, was the first of the Lowland Barons to rally

to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the king's cause. Once he

surprised his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the

dinner which was prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed

their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate. Then he staved in the

wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house and

wood-pile on fire.

[Sidenote: Edward the Second]

A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of freedom; but the

revival of the country went steadily on. Pembroke and the English forces

were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had broken out in England between

the new king and his baronage. The moral purpose which had raised his

father to grandeur was wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy,

idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being destitute of the

intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in the Plantagenets. He had no

love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign

struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to

taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses

added to the Charter. The son's purpose was the same, that of throwing off

what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the means by which he

designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a minister wholly

dependent on the Crown. We have already noticed the change by which the

"clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary

government under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly

superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the close

of the late reign a direct demand on the part of the barons to nominate the

great officers of state had been curtly rejected, but the royal choice had

been practically limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of

prelates and nobles, and however closely connected with royalty they might

be such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and opinions

of their order. The aim of the young king seems to have been to undo the

change which had been silently brought about, and to imitate the policy of

the contemporary sovereigns of France by choosing as his ministers men of

an inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown for their power, and

representatives of nothing but the policy and interests of their master.

Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from a family of Guienne, had been his

friend and companion during his father's reign, at the close of which he

had been banished from the realm for his share in intrigues which divided

Edward from his son. At the accession of the new king he was at once

recalled, created Earl of Cornwall, and placed at the head of the

administration. When Edward crossed the sea to wed Isabella of France, the

daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage planned by his father to provide

against any further intervention of France in his difficulties with

Scotland, the new minister was left as Regent in his room. The offence

given by this rapid promotion was embittered by his personal temper. Gay,

genial, thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the quickness and

audacity of Southern Gaul. The older ministers were dismissed, all claims

of precedence or inheritance were set aside in the distribution of offices

at the coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud baronage to

fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and his lance unhorsed his

opponents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit flung nicknames about

the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was "the Actor," Pembroke "the Jew,"

Warwick "the Black Dog." But taunt and defiance broke helplessly against

the iron mass of the baronage. After a few months of power the formal

demand of the Parliament for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in

May 1308 Gaveston was formally banished from the realm.

[Sidenote: Thomas of Lancaster]

But Edward was far from abandoning his favourite. In Ireland he was

unfettered by the baronage, and here Gaveston found a refuge as the King's

Lieutenant while Edward sought to obtain his recall by the intervention of

France and the Papacy. But the financial pressure of the Scotch war again

brought the king and his Parliament together in the spring of 1309. It was

only by conceding the rights which his father had sought to establish of

imposing import duties on the merchants by their own assent that he

procured a subsidy. The firmness of the baronage sprang from their having

found a head. In no point had the policy of Henry the Third more utterly

broken down than in his attempt to weaken the power of the nobles by

filling the great earldoms with kinsmen of the royal house. He had made

Simon of Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to the nation

in the Barons' war. In loading his second son, Edmund Crouchback, with

honours and estates he raised a family to greatness which overawed the

Crown. Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham he had

received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of Derby

on the extinction of the house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lancaster,

was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these lordships

the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the weight of these great baronies was added

his royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a titular king of Sicily.

His mother was dowager queen of Navarre. His half-sister by the mother's

side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel and mother of the English

queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not far

from the succession to the throne. Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a

nobler man, his adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided the

king into a really national policy. As it was his weight proved

irresistible. When Edward at the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston

the Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament

which met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the realm

should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-one "Ordainers" with

Archbishop Winchelsey at their head.

[Sidenote: Edward and the Ordainers]

Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North. A triumph in Scotland

would have given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of

his father's military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep an

army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his southern

realm to meet the Parliament of 1311 and the "Ordinances" which the

twenty-one laid before it. By this long and important statute Gaveston was

banished, other advisers were driven from the Council, and the Florentine

bankers whose loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out

of the realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First were declared

to be illegal. Its administrative provisions showed the relations which the

barons sought to establish between the new Parliament and the Crown.

Parliaments were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the

king's servants were to be brought, if need were, to justice. The great

officers of state were to be appointed with the counsel and consent of the

baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament. The same consent of the barons in

Parliament was to be needful ere the king could declare war or absent

himself from the realm. As the Ordinances show, the baronage still looked

on Parliament rather as a political organization of the nobles than as a

gathering of the three Estates of the realm. The lower clergy pass

unnoticed; the Commons are regarded as mere taxpayers whose part was still

confined to the presentation of petitions of grievances and the grant of

money. But even in this imperfect fashion the Parliament was a real

representation of the country. The barons no longer depended for their

force on the rise of some active leader, or gathered in exceptional

assemblies to wrest reforms from the Crown by threat of war. Their action

was made regular and legal. Even if the Commons took little part in forming

decisions, their force when formed hung on the assent of the knights and

burgesses to them; and the grant which alone could purchase from the Crown

the concessions which the Baronage demanded lay absolutely within the

control of the Third Estate. It was this which made the king's struggles so

fruitless. He assented to the Ordinances, and then withdrawing to the North

recalled Gaveston and annulled them. But Winchelsey excommunicated the

favourite, and the barons, gathering in arms, besieged him in Scarborough.

His surrender in May 1312 ended the strife. The "Black Dog" of Warwick had

sworn that the favourite should feel his teeth; and Gaveston flung himself

in vain at the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, praying for pity "from his

gentle lord." In defiance of the terms of his capitulation he was beheaded

on Blacklow Hill.

[Sidenote: Bannockburn]

The king's burst of grief was as fruitless as his threats of vengeance; a

feigned submission of the conquerors completed the royal humiliation, and

the barons knelt before Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon

which seemed the deathblow of the royal power. But if Edward was powerless

to conquer the baronage he could still by evading the observance of the

Ordinances throw the whole realm into confusion. The two years that follow

Gaveston's death are among the darkest in our history. A terrible

succession of famines intensified the suffering which sprang from the utter

absence of all rule as dissension raged between the barons and the king. At

last a common peril drew both parties together. The Scots had profited by

the English troubles, and Bruce's "harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of

its Earl, who had joined the English army, fairly turned the tide of

success in his favour. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and most of the Scotch

fortresses fell one by one into King Robert's hands. The clergy met in

council and owned him as their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who

still held to the English cause were coerced into submission, and Bruce

found himself strong enough to invest Stirling, the last and the most

important of the Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward. Stirling was

in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused England out of its civil

strife to an effort for the recovery of its prey. At the close of 1313

Edward recognized the Ordinances, and a liberal grant from the Parliament

enabled him to take the field. Lancaster indeed still held aloof on the

ground that the king had not sought the assent of Parliament to the war,

but thirty thousand men followed Edward to the North, and a host of wild

marauders were summoned from Ireland and Wales. The army which Bruce

gathered to oppose this inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen, and was

stationed to the south of Stirling on a rising ground flanked by a little

brook, the Bannockburn, which gave its name to the engagement. The battle

took place on the twenty-fourth of June 1314. Again two systems of warfare

were brought face to face as they had been brought at Falkirk, for Robert

like Wallace drew up his forces in hollow squares or circles of spearmen.

The English were dispirited at the very outset by the failure of an attempt

to relieve Stirling and by the issue of a single combat between Bruce and

Henry de Bohun, a knight who bore down upon him as he was riding peacefully

along the front of his army. Robert was mounted on a small hackney and held

only a light battle-axe in his hand, but warding off his opponent's spear

he cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the handle of his axe was

shattered in his grasp. At the opening of the battle the English archers

were thrown forward to rake the Scottish squares, but they were without

support and were easily dispersed by a handful of horse whom Bruce held in

reserve for the purpose. The body of men-at-arms next flung themselves on

the Scottish front, but their charge was embarrassed by the narrow space

along which the line was forced to move, and the steady resistance of the

squares soon threw the knighthood into disorder. "The horses that were

stickit," says an exulting Scotch writer, "rushed and reeled right rudely."

In the moment of failure the sight of a body of camp-followers, whom they

mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, spread panic through the English

host. It broke in a headlong rout. Its thousands of brilliant horsemen were

soon floundering in pits which guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or

riding in wild haste for the border. Few however were fortunate enough to

reach it. Edward himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded in

escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of his knighthood fell into

the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and the footmen were ruthlessly

cut down by the country folk as they fled. For centuries to come the rich

plunder of the English camp left its traces on the treasure-rolls and the

vestment-rolls of castle and abbey throughout the Lowlands.

[Sidenote: Fall of Lancaster]

Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland: but terrible as the blow was

England could not humble herself to relinquish her claim on the Scottish

crown. Edward was eager indeed for a truce, but with equal firmness Bruce

refused all negotiation while the royal title was withheld from him and

steadily pushed on the recovery of his southern dominions. His progress was

unhindered. Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and Lancaster at the head of

the Ordainers became supreme. But it was still impossible to trust the king

or to act with him, and in the dead-lock of both parties the Scots

plundered as they would. Their ravages in the North brought shame on

England such as it had never known. At last Bruce's capture of Berwick in

the spring of 1318 forced the king to give way. The Ordinances were

formally accepted, an amnesty granted, and a small number of peers

belonging to the barons' party added to the great officers of state. Had a

statesman been at the head of the baronage the weakness of Edward might

have now been turned to good purpose. But the character of the Earl of

Lancaster seems to have fallen far beneath the greatness of his position.

Distrustful of his cousin, yet himself incapable of governing, he stood

sullenly aloof from the royal Council and the royal armies, and Edward was

able to lay his failure in recovering Berwick during the campaign of 1319

to the Earl's charge. His influence over the country was sensibly weakened;

and in this weakness the new advisers on whom the king was leaning saw a

hope of destroying his power. These were a younger and elder Hugh Le

Despenser, son and grandson of the Justiciar who had fallen beside Earl

Simon at Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they may have been, they were

able men, and their policy was of a higher stamp than the wilful defiance

of Gaveston. It lay, if we may gather it from the faint indications which

remain, in a frank recognition of the power of the three Estates as opposed

to the separate action of the baronage. The rise of the younger Hugh, on

whom the king bestowed the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of its

coheiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, was rapid enough to

excite general jealousy; and in 1321 Lancaster found little difficulty in

extorting by force of arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of

popular sympathy was already wavering, and it was turned to the royal cause

by an insult offered to the queen, against whom Lady Badlesmere closed the

doors of Ledes Castle. The unexpected energy shown by Edward in avenging

this insult gave fresh strength to his cause. At the opening of 1322 he

found himself strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lancaster

convoked the baronage to force him again into exile, the weakness of their

party was shown by some negotiations into which the Earl entered with the

Scots and by his precipitate retreat to the north on the advance of the

royal army. At Boroughbridge his forces were arrested and dispersed, and

Thomas himself, brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, was tried and

condemned to death as a traitor. "Have mercy on me, King of Heaven," cried

Lancaster, as, mounted on a grey pony without a bridle, he was hurried to

execution, "for my earthly king has forsaken me." His death was followed by

that of a number of his adherents and by the captivity of others; while a

Parliament at York annulled the proceedings against the Despensers and

repealed the Ordinances.

[Sidenote: The Despensers]

It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence

of the royalists, that we owe the famous provision which reveals the policy

of the Despensers, the provision that all laws concerning "the estate of

our Lord the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm and the

people shall be treated, accorded, and established in Parliaments by our

Lord the King and by the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and

commonalty of the realm according as hath been hitherto accustomed." It

would seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that much of the

sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the assumption of all

legislative action by the baronage alone. The same policy was seen in a

reissue in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most beneficial

provisions of the Ordinances which had been formally repealed. But the

arrogance of the Despensers gave new offence; and the utter failure of a

fresh campaign against Scotland again weakened the Crown. The barbarous

forays in which the borderers under Earl Douglas were wasting

Northumberland woke a general indignation; and a grant from the Parliament

at York enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North. But Bruce

as of old declined an engagement till the wasted Lowlands starved the

invaders into a ruinous retreat. The failure forced England in the spring

of 1323 to stoop to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which

Bruce was suffered to take the royal title. We see in this act of the

Despensers the first of a series of such attempts by which minister after

minister strove to free the Crown from the bondage under which the

war-pressure laid it to the growing power of Parliament; but it ended, as

these after attempts ended, only in the ruin of the counsellors who planned

it. The pride of the country had been roused by the struggle, and the

humiliation of such a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.

It led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed this disastrous

reign.

[Sidenote: Isabella]

In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his father, had been hampered

not only by internal divisions but by the harassing intervention of France.

The rising under Bruce had been backed by French aid as well as by a

revival of the old quarrel over Guienne, and on the accession of Charles

the Fourth in 1322 a demand of homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called

Edward over sea. But the Despensers dared not let him quit the realm, and a

fresh dispute as to the right of possession in the Agénois brought about

the seizure of the bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the part of the

French. The quarrel verged upon open war, and to close it Edward's queen,

Isabella, a sister of the French king, undertook in 1325 to revisit her

home and bring about a treaty of peace between the two countries. Isabella

hated the Despensers; she was alienated from her husband; but hatred and

alienation were as yet jealously concealed. At the close of the year the

terms of peace seemed to be arranged; and though declining to cross the

sea, Edward evaded the difficulty created by the demand for personal homage

by investing his son with the Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and

despatching him to join his mother at Paris. The boy did homage to King

Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the Agénois being reserved for

legal decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and son to England.

Neither threats nor prayers however could induce either wife or child to

return to his court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher

barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and

his influence over the queen made her the centre of a vast conspiracy. With

the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the

Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter; the Italian

bankers supplied funds; and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail

in the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed

when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at

Orwell. Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he

implored, the king fled hastily to the west and embarked with the

Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible

refuge; but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he

fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl

whom they had slain. The younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at

once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the king placed in ward at

Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that

purpose at Westminster in January 1327.

[Sidenote: Deposition of Edward]

The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the

earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king who had

proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in Edward's behalf,

and only four prelates protested when the young Prince was proclaimed king

by acclamation and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes without.

The revolution took legal form in a bill which charged the captive monarch

with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his

coronation oath and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the

approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had

ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor. A

deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent

of the discrowned king to his own deposition, and Edward "clad in a plain

black gown" bowed quietly to his fate. Sir William Trussel at once

addressed him in words which better than any other mark the nature of the

step which the Parliament had taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor of the

earls, barons, and others, having for this full and sufficient power, do

render and give back to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and

fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and acquit and discharge them

thereof in the best manner that law and custom will give. And I now make

protestation in their name that they will no longer be in your fealty and

allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as king, but will account you

hereafter as a private person, without any manner of royal dignity." A

significant act followed these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount, the

steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony used only

at a king's death, and declared that all persons engaged in the royal

service were discharged. The act of Blount was only an omen of the fate

which awaited the miserable king. In the following September he was

murdered in Berkeley Castle.