The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

CHAPTER X.

EDWARD I.

Position and character of Edward—The Crusade—The Accession—The Conquest of Wales—Edward’s legal reforms—Financial system—Growth of Parliament.

Political
education of
Edward I.

If ever king came to his throne with a distinct understanding of the work that lay before him, that king must have been Edward I. The lessons of the last fifteen years of his father’s reign had not been thrown away upon him. He had been trained for the task of reigning, as well by his father’s mistakes and misgovernment as by the means which the nation, under Earl Simon and the barons, had taken to remedy the evils which those mistakes and misgovernment had produced. He must have known that England required sound laws and strong administration, an adequate organization for national defence, and effective methods for preserving internal peace; and the history of the late reign must have taught him not only that without the sympathy and co-operation of the nation at large these ends could not be secured, but that the nation was itself ready, educated sufficiently, and united sufficiently, to give the aid that he required. Earl Simon and his companions had perished, but the great end of their work had been achieved; they had made it impossible for a king again to rule as John had ruled, and as Henry had tried to rule. They had drawn out a plan of reform in the laws which Henry himself had accepted after their death, although he had struggled against it and evaded it whilst they lived; for most of the articles which had been forced upon him at Oxford in 1258, and at Westminster in 1259, he had re-enacted in the great statute of Marlborough, in 1267. He had reformed his expenditure; he had observed the constitutional rule of not taxing without the consent of the national council; he had even on some occasions called together representatives of the towns and counties, as Simon had done, although he had not so far imitated his rival as to make them an integral part of his Parliament. And thus the great contest had immediate effects even under Henry.

Motives determining
Edward’s
Crusade.

Edward had learned the deeper lessons; he had conceived the desire of satisfying the more essential needs of his people. Hence, perhaps, in part, his willingness to go on the Crusade. He knew that he had made enemies in the late war; a few years would heal up the old wounds. He knew that the land was exhausted; a few years’ rest would give it time to recruit. If he were likely to be the cause of unrest, he was better away; and even if he should not return until he returned as king, he might begin his new career less hampered than he would otherwise have been by the policy of his father.

Edward’s
English
policy.

Edward’s
idea of
kingship.

But Edward was qualified to do far more than merely restore the strength and energy of his fainting people; he was fitted to start and guide them on a new path of progress. He seems to have possessed, with his English name, the desire, which he certainly did not inherit, of being an English king; of putting himself at the head of his English people to make England a great power in Christendom. His aim no doubt was to secure that place for his descendants, not, as Henry II. had done it, simply by founding a great family inheritance of states scattered and divided, but as the true king of a people strong in the feeling of national unity, bound together by good laws, but more so by a sense of national identity, an intelligent participation in all national designs. The restoration of law and order, the determination that the English crown should be supreme within the British isles, the assertion and realization of the idea that the king should work as the leader and spokesman of a nation that could enter into his plans and take a share of his responsibilities—these thoughts must have been more or less before Edward’s mind from the beginning of his reign. Very possibly he foresaw little of the exact path in which he was going to walk: the exact points of legal reform, the opportunities for conquest, the exigencies in which he would have to act for the execution of his great designs, no doubt broke gradually on his view as he proceeded. He had still something to unlearn as well as something to learn. If in spirit he was English, he was in education and by association French; if he was to be a great national king, still his idea of kingship had too much of an inherited form, a form which it did not surrender without a struggle. His greatness was not without an element which sets it far above all the greatness that arises from mere success; he had it to learn, and he learned, to rule himself, to cast away his own cherished idea of reigning, and faithfully and honorably abide by the conditions which, although forced upon him, he saw at last were needed for the true realization of his character as a national king. He was not free from faults; it is no small part of his grandeur that, in a nature so strong as his, and with temptations so powerful as those which were presented to him, those faults had so little sway. Of an eminently legal mind, he was too apt to take captious advantage of his legal position, somewhat prone to evade responsibilities to which the letter of the law did not bind him. This weakness was the source of all his mistakes and the cause of all his failures; but this was all. His mistakes were few, and his failures fewer still. Yet, as we shall see, he did not realize all that he hoped. Nor was his actual contribution to national progress exactly what he designed. There are dark lines in his history as well as bright ones. Of his schemes some were too early, some too late for success; and in some points he drew the outline rather than built the fabric that was to last. Still his reign is a great era; he is the great lawgiver, the great politician, the great organizer of the mediæval English polity.

Crusade of
Prince
Edward.

Edward’s
accession to
the English
crown.

Edward was thirty-three years old at the time of his father’s death. He had been for eighteen years a married man; his wife, Eleanor of Castile, was the sister of that Alfonso the Wise who had been the competitor of Richard of Cornwall for the imperial crown, a noble and faithful lady. He himself was a tall, strong man, an adept in all knightly accomplishments, brave to rashness, and now skilled and experienced in war. His crusade had not been a successful one. Late in starting, he had reached the African coast in the autumn of 1270, to find Lewis IX. dead, and the hopes of the pilgrims already waning. After spending the winter in Sicily, he had, in May, 1271, gone on, like Richard Cœur de Lion, to Acre, and had spent more than a year in an attempt to retrieve the fortunes of the Frank kingdom. It was quite in vain. Mutual jealousies and universal mistrust had eaten out the heart of the Crusaders. A few dashing exploits, and a few almost wanton inroads, could do little more than exasperate the hatred of the Moslem. Edward played his part as a knight, but he had neither force nor opportunity to do more. Still he made himself feared; and an attempt at assassination in June, 1272, warned him of the risks he was running. An emissary of the Sultan Bibars struck him in his tent. The weapon was poisoned, it was said, and the story was told and believed, that his faithful queen, who had followed him in his pilgrimage, had sucked the poison from the wound. Two months later he sailed homewards, thoroughly disappointed, and heavily burdened with the cost of his expedition. He was slowly proceeding on his way, when, at Capua, in January, 1273, he received the news of his father’s death and of the death of his eldest son John, a boy of six. Quickening his pace, he went on at once to Rome, visited the Pope at Orvieto, and crossed by the Mont Cenis pass to Lyons; thence to Paris, where he did homage to King Philip III. for his French provinces; and then into Gascony, where he was delayed for another year before he could come to England to be crowned.

Administration
of the
kingdom
during
Edward’s
absence.

England was still at rest. The royal dignity of Henry III. passed on at once to his son. There was no formal interregnum such as had always occurred before, between the death of the old king and the coronation of the new. Edward was proclaimed without being waited for. The king’s peace was maintained by the royal council, and the three ministers to whom, before he started, he had committed the defence of his private interests, undertook to govern England in his stead. Archbishop Giffard of York, Roger Mortimer, the great lord of the Welsh Marches, who had helped him so well in 1265, and Robert Burnell, his confidential chaplain, the man who was to be his prime minister during half his reign, acted as regents in his place, and were at once recognised by the baronage and nation as his agents. Competitor there was none. Gilbert of Gloucester, the brilliant and somewhat erratic earl who had tried to act as arbiter in the last scenes of the barons’ war, and had lost the confidence of both parties, had sworn to King Henry on his death-bed that he would maintain the rights of Edward. He, as the first baron of the kingdom, took the oath of allegiance to the new king at his father’s funeral. Early in 1273 a great assembly of all estates of the realm, an assembly not only of barons and prelates, but of knightly representatives of the shires and citizens deputed by every city, met at Westminster, and bound themselves by the same oath. One or two faint reports of local tumult served only to mark the profoundness of the general peace. The government worked in quiet; even money was raised without much murmuring.

Coronation of
Edward.

On August 2, 1274, Edward I. landed at Dover, and on the 19th he was crowned. At once the work of his reign began. He was a warrior and a lawgiver by nature, education, and opportunity; the exigencies of the time made him a financier also; and the occasion speedily arose for him to display his powers in each capacity.

Turbulence of
the Welsh
princes.

The princes of North Wales had long been a sharp thorn in the side of England. Neither force nor friendly alliance had been strong enough to keep them quiet. The love of independence, the inheritance of proud, although illusory traditions, the attachment of an affectionate people, the possession of remote mountain fastnesses, the antipathy as strongly felt towards the Norman as it had been towards the Saxon, combined to prevent either peace or submission. All the other races had combined on the soil of Britain, the Welsh would not. The demands of feudal homage made by the kings of England were evaded or repudiated; the intermarriages, by which Henry II. and John had tried to help on a national agreement had in every case failed. In every internal difficulty of English politics the Welsh princes had done their best to embarrass the action of the kings; they had intrigued with every aspirant for power, had been in league with every rebel. At the beginning of the reign of Henry III. they had conspired with Falkes de Breauté against the Marshalls; at the close of it they were in intimate alliance with the Montforts. Not only so; the necessity of guarding the Welsh border had caused the English kings to found on the March a number of feudal lordships, which were privileged to exercise almost sovereign jurisdictions, and exempted from the common operations of the English law. The Mortimers at Chirk and Wigmore, the Bohuns at Hereford and Brecon, the Marshalls at Pembroke, and the Clares in Glamorgan, were out of the reach of the king, and often turned against one another the arms which had been given them to overawe the Welsh. There they had an open ground for combats which they could not wage where English law was strong. So long as the Welsh were left free to rebel the Marchers must be left free to fight.

Rebellion of
Llewelyn,
Prince of
North Wales,
and his brother
David.

Edward had long known this. He too had been put in the position of a Marcher. His father had given him, in 1254, a great territory in Wales, between Dee and Conway, and into it he had tried, with signal ill success, to introduce English laws. He probably knew that one of his greatest tasks, when he came to the crown, would be this. And he had not to wait for his opportunity. Llewelyn, the prince of North Wales, had, by the assistance given to Simon de Montfort earned as his reward a recognition of his independence, subject only to the ancient feudal obligations. All the advantages won during the early years of Henry III. had been thus surrendered. When the tide turned Llewelyn had done homage to Henry; but when he was invited, in 1273, to perform the usual service to the new king, he refused; and again, in 1274 and 1275, he evaded the royal summons. In 1276, under the joint pressure of excommunication and a great army which Edward brought against him, he made a formal submission; performed the homage, and received, as a pledge of amity the hand of Eleanor de Montfort in marriage. But Eleanor, although she was Edward’s cousin, was Earl Simon’s daughter, and scarcely qualified to be a peacemaker. Another adviser of rebellion was found in Llewelyn’s brother David, who had hitherto taken part with the English, and had received special favors and promotion from Edward himself. The reconciliation of Edward and Llewelyn had put an end to his hopes of supplanting his brother, and he had drawn closer to him, in order to entangle him in a rebellion for which he was always ready. The peace made in 1277 lasted about four years. In 1282 the brothers rose, seized the border castles of Hawarden, Flint, and Rhuddlan, and captured the Justiciar of Wales, Roger Clifford. Edward saw then that his time was come. He marched into North Wales, carrying with him the courts of law and the exchequer, and transferring the seat of government for the time to Shrewsbury. He left nothing undone that might give the expedition the character of a national effort. He collected forces on all sides; he assembled the estates of the realm, clergy, lords, and commons, and prevailed on them to furnish liberal supplies; he obtained sentence of excommunication from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Welsh made a brave defence, and, had it not been for the almost accidental capture and murder of Llewelyn in December, England might have found the task too hard for her. The death of Llewelyn, however, and the capture of David in the following June, deprived the Welsh of their leaders, and they submitted.

Conquest of
Wales.

Statute of
Wales.

Edward began forthwith his work of consolidation. David, as a traitor to his feudal lord, a conspirator against his benefactor, a blasphemer of God, and a murderer, was tried by the king’s judges at Shrewsbury and sentenced to a terrible death, the details of which were apportioned according to the articles of the accusation. Justice satisfied, Edward devoted himself to the securing of his conquest; in 1284 he published at Rhuddlan a statute, called the Statute of Wales, which was intended to introduce the laws and customs of England, and to reform the administration of that country altogether on the English system. The process was a slow one; the Welsh retained their ancient common law and their national spirit; the administrative powers were weak and not far-reaching; the sway of the lords Marchers was suffered to continue; and, although assimilated, Wales was not incorporated with England. It was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that the principality was represented in the English Parliament, and the sovereignty, which from 1300 upwards was generally, although not invariably bestowed on the king’s eldest son, conferred under the most favorable circumstances, little more than a high-sounding title and some slight and ideal claim to the affection of a portion of the Welsh people. The task, however, which the energies of his predecessors had failed to accomplish was achieved by Edward. All Britain south of the Tweed recognized his direct and supreme authority, and the power of the Welsh nationality was so far broken that it could never more thwart the determined and united action of England.

Edward as
a lawgiver.

During the first ten years of the reign the Welsh war and rumors of war were the chief matters that distracted Edward from the scarcely less congenial work of legislation and political organization. The age was one of great lawgivers. Frederick II. had set the example in Naples, and his minister Peter de Vineis had codified there the laws and constitutions of the Norman kings of Sicily. Lewis IX. had in his “Etablissements” created a body of law for France; and Alfonso the Wise in the “Siete Partidas,” or seven divisions of a system of universal law, had tried to do the same for Spain. Law had become a chief subject of study in the universities, and Englishmen, especially clergymen, had been used for a century to go to Bologna to read the canon and civil law under the great professors there. In England the expansion of judicial machinery and judicial business, which followed the reforms of Henry II., had worked, out of old and new materials, a body of customs which became known as the common law; and one great summary of the hitherto unwritten law of England had been published towards the end of the last reign by Henry Bracton, one of the judges of the king’s court. Men’s minds had been invited by these and the like influences to this study. The nation, awaking to political work, began to see the necessity of changing or amending the existing system of law.

Probable
plan for the
codification
of the law.

In undertaking the work of a lawgiver, Edward I was simply approaching one part of his duty as a king; but his own mind had, as has been said, a legal bent; his chief minister Robert Burnell, was a great lawyer; in his journey through Italy, he had engaged the services of Francesco Accursi, an eminent jurist of Bologna, whose father had written a body of explanatory glosses on the Roman law. It is probable that the king had set before himself the codification of the law as one great object. The work of Britton, another eminent judge of his time, which is written in French, and contains much that is not in Bracton, was published in Edward’s name; and some of his longer Acts of Parliament contain provisions so varied and full, as almost to constitute codes in special departments of law. But the English nation seems to have had a dread of too elaborate systems, and the whole of the national law has never yet been under supreme authority embodied in a single compilation.

Principles of
Edward’s
legislation.

The legislation of Edward I. must be sought in the statute books. It may be generally described as an attempt to develop and apply the principles which had been conceded in Magna Carta and to adapt them to the changed circumstances of his time. That document had now become, what the laws of Edward the Confessor had been in the reign of Henry I., and the laws of Henry I. under John, the watchword of the party which was bent on preventing any increase or abuse of royal power.

Edward and
the Great
Charter.

Feudal
powers
of
the king.

Edward himself, who took for his motto the words “Pactum serva,” which may be seen upon his tomb, not unnaturally regarded the demands which were made for the re-issue of the Great Charter as a slur upon his good faith. Only once during the first half of his reign, did he undertake to re-confirm it; and when the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1279, obtained the enactment of a canon by which copies of the charter were to be affixed to the doors of the churches, the king interfered to forbid it. It is not too much, perhaps, to say that it was the legal rather than the constitutional articles of the Great Charter that he took the most pains to develop. The influence of the great lords is conspicuous in some of the provisions of his statutes, which tend to restrict the liberty of alienating lands. Jealousy of ecclesiastical aggrandizement appears in others, which forbid the acquisition of new estates by the clergy. It cannot be supposed likely that a king like Edward, would miss his opportunity of strengthening the hold which he had on both barons and prelates. The idea of constitutional liberty had now grown so powerful that he knew that he could no longer make laws, or raise taxes, or even go to war without their consent. In those respects he could not coerce them. But the legal rights which the crown had over its own vassals were a different matter. It was quite practicable for him to exact the full payment of feudal services, to prevent the impoverishment of the crown, by the transference of estates which paid a large revenue to the king on the occasion of successions or marriages of wardships, into the hands of religious corporations which neither died nor married, nor required tutelage. It was equally practicable to prevent the owners of great estates from cutting up their property, by what was called subinfeudation, into smaller holdings, which would not, any more than the church lands, render to the king the feudal services that he required. Two of Edward’s most famous statutes—the statute “De Religiosis,” in 1279, and the statute “Quia Emptores,” in 1290, were intended to secure these two points.

Powers of
the feudal
lords.

Courts of Exchequer,
King’s Bench,
and Common
Pleas.

Again, all measures for the due interpretation and execution of the law protected the people at large against the usurpations of their strong neighbors. It is not to be forgotten that although in England the feudal landlords had, more than a century before, been deprived of their power to usurp jurisdiction over their vassals, and obliged to admit the king’s judges, still a great part of Europe was governed under the old plan. We have seen how, during the barons’ war, the party opposed to the king was divided between those who really desired the freedom of the people, and those who wished to restrict the king’s power in order to increase their own. In some important matters of judicial proceeding the interests of the crown and of the people at large were still united in opposition to the claims of the great land-owners. Hence the importance of regulating and improving the courts of provincial judicature, the limitation of the functions of the sheriffs, which fell constantly into the hands of local magnates; the organization of the sessions of the king’s judges, and the opening of ways by which suits, which could not be fairly or justly settled in the country, might be heard in the king’s courts at Westminster. It is to the early years of Edward I., that we owe the final division of the three great royal tribunals; the Court of Exchequer, in which were heard all causes that touched the revenue; that of King’s Bench, which determined suits in which the king was concerned, criminal questions on the matters, which under the name of “pleas of the crown” were reserved for his particular treatment; and that of Common Pleas, which heard suits between private individuals. Now these matters were apportioned to three distinct staffs of judges, instead of being heard indiscriminately by the whole or part of the judicial body. The circuits of judges of assize were defined during the same period of the reign. Many other measures for the protection of life and property helped to increase the feeling of security in the body of the people, to further the growth of loyalty, and at the same time to increase the royal income.

Statute of
Winchester.

A third principle of Edward’s legislation may be discovered in the careful reform and expansion of some of the most ancient institutions, which he knew had in former reigns assisted greatly in the defence of the crown and in the maintenance of peace and order. In the Statute of Winchester, in 1285, he placed the ancient militia system, which Henry II., had remodeled by the Assize of Arms, upon a better footing, and re-organized the “watch and ward,” by which the particular districts and communities were trained to keep order and to search for and arrest criminals. Similar methods were followed in the preparations for national defence in 1294, and both by sea and land the old duty of guarding the country, was based upon the same primitive system. In all these particular points we may trace a purpose of developing the policy by which Henry II., had tried to overthrow the influence of feudalism, and to strengthen his administration by alliance with the great body of the free people; by placing arms in their hands, providing them with just and accessible tribunals, and by diminishing, as far as could be done, the means which the landlord had of oppressing those who held their land under him. We shall see by and by how the same principles affected his plans, or the plans which circumstances forced upon him, for the development of the Parliament and constitution. But before doing this we must look at the question of finance, which, with those of war and legislation, gave him, from the very beginning of the reign, a great deal of hard work. This has been already sketched in connection with the work of Henry II. It must now be viewed in fuller detail.

Sources of
the royal
revenue.

The sources of royal revenue were various rather than abundant. There were, first of all, the estates of the crown, crown lands strictly so called, which the king as king possessed and managed like any other landlord, out of which he provided for his family and friends, and which, in spite of the national jealousy of favorites, were always more liable to be diminished than to be increased. Of the same class, though with some important differences, were the estates which fell into the hands of the sovereign on the extinction of great families or the forfeiture of their owners; so the earldom of Chester had come into the hands of Henry III. on the death of the last earl, and the estates of the Montforts after the battle of Evesham. These estates—escheats, as they were called—seldom remained long in the king’s hands; the magnates did not like to see the inheritances of their fellows one by one absorbed in the royal domain, and it was necessary from time to time to provide for new rising men and for younger sons of the king. The possession of crown estates is, of course, common to all ages and forms of royalty. But a somewhat intricate system pervades the English finance of the middle ages, and grows out of the growing history of the nation itself. Under the Anglo-Saxon kings there had been little call for taxation. The king had a revenue from the public lands of the nation, which furnished him with provisions and money, enough to supply all needs that were not satisfied from his royal estates. It was a part of the sheriff’s duty to collect these contributions, and they were later on fixed at a regular sum to be paid by the sheriff, and exacted by him from the county he ruled. All local administration was maintained by popular action, the land-owners being liable for the three great task’s called “trinoda necessitas,” the building of bridges and fortresses, and the service in arms for national defence; and thus the king had little expense if he had little revenue. In the great emergencies, however, of the Danish wars, a tax of two shillings on the hide of land, the famous Danegeld, was established and became perpetual.

The Exchequer.

These three, the royal lands, the contributions of the shires, and the Danegeld, were the sources of revenue which William the Conqueror found when he had secured his hold on England. Under him, or under the ministers of William Rufus, were introduced a number of new expedients for raising money, expedients which were made easy by the new doctrine of land tenure that had been brought in at the Conquest. The Norman kings did not commute the old for the new methods, but simply added the feudal burdens to the ancient national taxes. The Exchequer under Henry I., audited the national, or rather the royal, accounts; twice a year the sheriffs paid the “ferm”—that is, the composition or rent for the ancient dues of their counties—the Danegeld, and the fines arising from the local courts of law; but at the same times were paid the feudal incidents, the reliefs, the sums which the son paid to secure the inheritance of his father, the profits of marriages, of wardships, and the aids which the king as feudal lord of the whole land claimed as a right from his vassals. Henry I. had, in the beginning of his reign, promised to make these demands definite and reasonable, and he had done so; but they were heavy notwithstanding. Still nothing beyond these could, even on the feudal theory, be taken from the subject without the consent of the national council. When the king’s necessities were too great to be met by the ordinary means, the barons and bishops in council were asked for a grant; and the inferior classes received in the county courts an intimation of what they were expected to contribute. It is true that there was little liberty of refusing or chance of evading payment, but a certain form of consent on the part of the tax-payer was thus maintained.

Changes in
the modes
of taxation.

After the time of Henry I. important changes had taken place in the matter of taxation, many of which have been noticed in our former pages. Henry II., as we saw, introduced the payment of scutage, by which the land-owners contributed money instead of serving personally in arms. He likewise got rid of Danegeld, and consulted the towns and shires on the amount of grants required, by means of his itinerant judges. Until now all taxation had been defrayed by the land, except in the boroughs, where the contribution required was often raised by a poll-tax, an equal sum per head imposed on every inhabitant. Towards the end of the reign of Henry II. the custom of taxing movables, household furniture, and stock was introduced; first, in order to raise the national contribution for the Crusade, known as the Saladin tithe. Great part of the money required for Richard’s ransom was levied in the same way, and under John and Henry III. this became the most common way of taxing. A seventh, a tenth, a fifteenth, or a thirtieth of “movables” was from time to time asked for, and the more frequent the need became the more fully was developed the idea that the tax-payer had a right to be consulted on the amount which he was to pay, and to gain, if he could, some advantage in return. John’s frequent demands for money, and the illegal ways in which he took it, led to the exaction of the famous promise embodied in the 12th article of the Great Charter; “No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom unless by the common counsel of our kingdom, except to ransom our own person, to make our first-born son a knight, and to marry once our first-born daughter.” The 14th article describes the assembly which is to be called when any such impost is required: “We will cause our archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned severally by our letters, and besides we will cause all who hold of us in chief to be summoned by general summons by our sheriffs and bailiffs.”

The revenue
under
Henry III.

The growth of the country in wealth during the first half of the reign of Henry III. made this plan of raising revenue the most convenient and the easiest. As there were few foreign expeditions there was little opportunity of asking for scutage, and nearly all the regular taxation was raised from movables, or, as we should now say, personal property. On each occasion on which such a grant was demanded, the barons and bishops tried to obtain some compensation in the shape of a re-issue of the charters or an amendment of the law. The many confirmations of the charters during that long reign were, it may be said, purchased from the crown in this way. But Henry could not obtain grants sufficient to meet the requirements of his greedy and extravagant court. He exacted, contrary to the letter and spirit of the charter, large sums from the citizens of London, under the name of gifts; from the Jews, whom he looked upon very much as if they were part of the farming stock of his realm; and from every class of persons whom he could draw within the meshes of his legal nets, he exacted money by fine or composition for real or imaginary offences.

The customs
revenue.
Imports and
exports.

But besides the land and the personal property of its inhabitants there was another source of income which ultimately was to become most lucrative—the taxation of merchandize, imported and exported, and especially the wool, wool-fells, and leather, which were, if not exactly the chief produce of the land, at least the most profitable, the least easy to conceal, and the most easy for the king’s ministers to confiscate. These two branches of indirect taxation, although distinct in themselves, were managed by the same machinery—that of the customs; and they have to be treated together. But the taxes on imported merchandize had their origin in the licenses to trade or to introduce particular sorts of goods, which it was one of the ancient rights of the king to grant, whilst the taxes on exported produce were primarily a part of the general system of taxing movables. Both had been long in requisition; the privileges of the foreign merchants had been a source of profit even before the Conquest; the wool of the Cistercian monks and other great sheep-farmers had been demanded for Richard’s ransom, and both classes had suffered under John and Henry III. Magna Carta had contained, in its 41st article, a distinct provision in favor of free trade, which would have obviated the evils of mismanagement in this department, if it could have been carried out. All merchants were to have safe ingress and egress to and from England, and to pay only the right and ancient customs. But such a provision did not forbid separate negotiations between the king and traders, by which both made a profit to be wrung from the consumers. One part of Edward’s financial policy was to bring the customs into order and make them permanently and regularly profitable, and this he undertook in his first parliament.

Parliamentary
settlement of
revenue on
Edward I.

He had come home, deep in debt, to an inheritance heavily encumbered by his father’s debts. He had obtained from the Pope, whom he visited at Orvieto on his way, permission to exact a tenth of the income of the clergy for three years. But this would not be sufficient. He took counsel, therefore, with the Italian bankers, who had already obtained a footing in England, and devised the plan of obtaining from his assembled estates a permanent revenue from wool; half a mark—that is, six shillings and eightpence—on each sack of wool exported. This is the legal foundation of the English customs. It was formally granted in the parliament which met soon after Easter 1275, and with a grant of a fifteenth of movables, and the tax already imposed on the clergy, provided him with a revenue which carried on the government for some years. Nor did it require material increase until Edward, in 1292 and 1293, became involved in a new series of wars.

The exigencies of the Welsh war, the necessity for legal changes, and the orderly arrangement of the royal revenue, could not have failed to make their mark on the growth of parliament, even if Edward had not learned the lessons of constitutional lore which his father’s reign had furnished; and, even without those lessons, Edward was eminently qualified by the very habit of his mind to be a constitutional reformer. Accordingly, in the parliaments of his reign, especially in those which were called at irregular intervals from 1275 to 1295, are found the clearest, most distinct, steps of growth, which led to the complete organization of the three estates of the realm in one central assembly. And here, again, we must take a brief retrospect.

Summoning
of representative
assemblies
for
purposes of
taxation.

The days were long past in which either the king, the barons, or the nation at large were content to see the kingdom managed by a council of barons and bishops, gathered round a sovereign who was of necessity either strong enough to coerce them or too weak to resist them. From the very beginning of the century the right of the tax-payer to give or refuse had been becoming more clearly recognized; and the methods which under Henry I. and Henry II. had been used for facilitating the collection of money provided a machinery which could be used for still more important purposes. In the twelfth century, when the king wanted money, and had declared in his council what he expected, he sent down his justices or barons of the Exchequer to arrange with the towns and counties the sums which were to be contributed. Whilst land only was taxed all questions of liability could be answered by reference to Domesday Book; but when personal property was taxed it was necessary to discover how much each man possessed before he could be made to pay. This could be ascertained only by consulting his neighbors; and, in order to do this, a system of assessment was devised by which the property of each tax-payer was valued by a jury of his neighbors. The custom of electing these assessors, and, further, of electing collectors for the counties, treasurers, and similar officers, familiarized the people with the idea of using representation for such business. For legal transactions they already used representation in the county courts. The grand jury which presented the list of accused persons to the king’s judges on circuit was, for instance, an elected and representative body, chosen in the county court. The convenience of dealing thus with the government by representative accredited agents approved itself to both king and nation long before there was any idea of calling the representatives to parliament. On one occasion, in the reign of John, each shire had been ordered to send four discreet knights to speak with the king at Oxford; and that Council of St. Albans, in which mention was first made of the charter of Henry I., contained representatives from every township in the royal demesne. In 1254, when Henry III. was in France, the queen regent summoned representative knights to the parliament to make a grant. In the parliaments which were held in 1259 and afterwards, representative knights brought up the lists of grievances under which their constituents were groaning; and in 1264 Simon de Montfort had called up from both shires and boroughs representatives to aid him in the new work of government. That part of Earl Simon’s work had not been lasting. The task was left for Edward I., to be advanced by gradual, safe steps but to be thoroughly completed, as a part of a definite and orderly arrangement, according to which the English Parliament was to be the perfect representation of the Three Estates of the Realm, assembled for purposes of taxation, legislation, and united political action. Under this system the several communities were no longer to be asked to give their money or to accept the laws, by commissions of judges whom they could neither resist nor refuse, but were to send their deputies with full powers to act for them, to join with the lords and the judges and the king himself in deliberation on all the matters on which counsel and consent were needed. The steps of the change may be traced very briefly.

Parliaments
of
Edward I.

Edward’s first parliament, in 1275, enabled him to pass a great statute of legal reform, called the Statute of Westminster the First, and to exact the new custom on wool; another assembly, the same year, granted him a fifteenth. Both these are said to represent the “communaulte,” or community of the land; but there is no evidence that the commons of either town or county were represented. They were, in fact, consulted as to taxation by special commissions, as had been done before. In 1282, when the expenses of the Welsh war were becoming heavy, Edward again tried the plan of obtaining money from the towns and counties by separate negotiation; but as that did not provide him with funds sufficient for his purpose, he called together, early in 1283, two great assemblies, one at York, and another at Northampton, in which four knights from each shire and four members from each city and borough were ordered to attend; the cathedral and conventional clergy also of the two provinces being represented at the same places, by their elected proctors. At these assemblies there was no attendance of the barons; they were with the king in Wales; but the commons made a grant of one-thirtieth, on the understanding that the lords should do the same. Another assembly was held at Shrewsbury the same year, 1283, to witness the trial of David of Wales; to this the bishops and clergy were not called, but twenty towns and all the counties were ordered to send representatives. Another step was taken in 1290: knights of the shire were again summoned; but still much remained to be done before a perfect parliament was constituted. Counsel was wanted for legislation, consent was wanted for taxation. The lords were summoned in May, and did their work in June and July, granting a feudal aid and passing the statute “Quia Emptores,” but the knights only came to vote or to promise a tax, after the law had been passed; and the towns were again taxed by special commissions. In 1294—for we must anticipate the thread of the general history—under the alarm of war with France, an alarm which led Edward into several breaches of constitutional law, he went still further, assembling the clergy by their representatives in August, and the shires by their representative knights in October. The next year, 1295, witnessed the first summons of a perfect and model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops, deans, archdeacons and elected proctors; the barons summoned severally in person by the king’s special writ, and the commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from each borough. The writ by which the prelates were called to this parliament, contained a famous sentence taken from the Roman law, “That which touches all should be approved by all,” a maxim which might serve as a motto for Edward’s constitutional scheme, however slowly it grew upon him, now permanently and consistently completed.

House of
Lords.

The House of Commons was not the only part of the parliamentary system that benefited by his genius for organization. The House of Lords became, under the same influence and about the same time, a more definitely constructed body than it had been before. Up to this reign, the numbers of barons specially summoned had greatly varied. When they were assembled for military service they had been summoned by special writ, whilst the forces of the shires were summoned by a general order to the sheriff. Although a much smaller number were requisite for purposes of counsel than for armed service, the two functions of the king’s immediate vassals were intimately connected, and for a long period, every baron or land-owner who was summoned by name to the host, might perhaps claim to be summoned by name to the parliament. But such a summons was a burden rather than a privilege. The poorer lords, the smaller land-owners, would be glad to escape it, and to throw in their lot with the commons, who were represented by elected knights; nor were the kings very anxious to entertain so large and disorderly a company of counsellors. The custom of calling to parliament a much smaller number of these tenants-in-chief than were called to the host, must have grown up during the reign of Henry III., as the idea of representation grew. From the reign of Edward I. it became the rule to call only a definite number of hereditary peers; and, although that rule was not based upon any legal enactment or any recorded resolution of government, it quickly gained acceptance as the constitutional rule; the king could increase the number of lords by new writs of summons, and the special writ conferred hereditary peerage. This limited body was the House of Lords, and the dignity of the peerage descended from father to son, no longer tied to the possession of a particular estate or quantity of land held of the king.

Representation
of the
clergy.

With the representatives of the commons and the estate of the lords Edward associated a representative assembly of clergy; delegates were to be sent from each diocese to each parliament to assist in the national work and to tax the ecclesiastical property. And the form invented by Edward in 1294 still subsists, although for many centuries no such representatives have been chosen or sat in parliament. In truth the clergy were averse to obeying the mandate for their appearance in a secular parliament, and preferred to vote the money, which it would have been very difficult for them to refuse, in the two provincial convocations of York and Canterbury, which likewise contained their chosen representatives, assembled as a spiritual council. These were called together by the writs of the two archbishops; they could, through the bishops, act in concert with the parliament, and were not unfrequently, in modern times invariably, called together within a few days of the meeting of parliament.

National
policy of
Edward I.

The latter half of Edward’s reign witnessed most of the critical occasions which opened the way for those changes or improvements in the constitutional system, and supplied means for testing their efficiency. These must form the subject of another chapter. But we may pause, before we proceed, to mark definitely one other note of Edward’s policy. Henry II., had done his best to get rid of the feudal element in judicial matters, and to create a national army independent of the influences of land tenure. He had sent his judges throughout the land and taken the judicature out of the hands of the feudal lords. He armed all freemen under the assize of arms, and, by instituting scutage, raised money to provide mercenaries. By the national militia at home and by mercenary forces abroad he strengthened himself so as not to depend for an army on that feudal rule by which every landlord led his vassals to battle. Edward I., whilst he still more perfectly carried out these principles, went further in the same direction, in his constitution of parliament. The representatives whom he called up from the shires and towns were chosen by the freemen of the shires and towns in their ancient courts; they were not the delegates of royal tenants-in-chief but of the whole free people. Even the barons who composed the House of Lords owed their places there not so much to the fact that they held great estates as the immediate vassals of the crown, as to the summons by which they were selected from a great number of persons so qualified. Even if this had not been the case, the institution of the House of Commons would itself have marked the extinction of the ancient feudal idea that the council of the king was merely the assembly of those who held their land under him. But it was so throughout Edward’s policy. In court, and camp, and council, it was the general bond of allegiance and fealty, not the peculiar tie of feudal relation, by which he chose to bind his people, in their three estates, to help him to govern and to take their share in all national work.