The appearance of Confirmatio Cartarum marked a stage in the history of parliamentary taxation. During the reigns of Henry III and Edward, machinery was constructed which could carry out the chapters of Magna Carta providing for taxation by assent. The Parliament of the three estates, assembled for the purpose of meeting the pecuniary necessities of the king, proved itself to be the easiest and most effective means by which the whole nation could grant taxes. But the evolution from the Commune Concilium, the rough prototype of Parliament, had scarcely gone farther than to supply a convenient instrument of taxation. In 1297 every tax did not need the assent of Parliament as the prerequisite to its levy; Confirmatio Cartarum was not all-inclusive. More than that, the question was still undetermined as to whether the granting of supplies should always wait upon redress of grievances. If Parliament should maintain that principle in practice, then its hold would be secure upon the executive. Power in 1297 was not far from a balance between king and nation.
If the evolution of a government can ever be attributed to the directing skill of man rather than to the slow weaving of events, the construction for England of an engine of popular taxation can be ascribed to Edward Plantagenet, and in less degree to the drafter of the working plan, Simon de Montfort. Edward perceived the nation’s problem and adapted such means as lay near his hand to its solution. So it was that an assembly, not only of the magnates of the kingdom, but of elected knights of the shire, of parish priests from the inferior clergy, of merchant citizens and burgesses from the towns, came together to provide in common for the common need.
V
TAXATION BY THE COMMONS
1297-1461
The years subsequent to 1297 up to the time of the Tudors comprise a period of differentiation within Parliament itself. Save for the event of the year 1340, when the statute was passed which completed the movement punctuated by Confirmatio Cartarum, to the effect that every form of taxation must have the sanction of Parliament in order to be legal, the three centuries showed greater progress inside the walls of Parliament than beyond them. Struggles there were in plenitude between king and Parliament Character of the period to secure adherence in practice to the theory enunciated in 1340, but the great question was that of the ruling power within Parliament. It is during this period that the Commons come forward as the sole initiators of taxes, leaving to the Lords merely the coördinate power of consent. In close interrelation with this monopoly of power over the public purse, comes, in consequence of the theory that supplies must wait upon redress of grievances, the advance toward control by the House of Commons of the entire machinery of government, legislative and executive.
It is a period of confusion and contradiction. Time and again constitutional life seems to be dead. War, disputed succession to the crown, tyranny, slip-shod government,—these and more tend to make the years 1297-1461 a bundle of scenes ill-bound together. The Wars of the Roses, the struggles with France for various causes and with varied consequences, the doting of monarchs upon foreign favorites, all contribute toward popular distraction from that interest in government, that keen hostility to maladministration, which makes for constitutional progress. There was no leader to prick the public conscience; no Simon de Montfort or Edward Plantagenet to inaugurate reforms in the great matters of government.
When Edward I put his name to Confirmatio Cartarum at Ghent, on the 5th November, 1297, he had still ten years to live. In 1301, he re-confirmed the Charters in a bill of some twelve articles forced from him by the barons in a manner which he denounced as outrageous, and thereby concluded the baronial conflict. The barons presented their claims at the Parliament of Lincoln The Parliament of Lincoln, 1301 which was summoned for the 20th January, 1301, and included amongst them, beside the plea for a confirmation of the Charters, a demand for the enforcement of general reforms, this last to be the prerequisite for a grant of money. A fifteenth of all movables was then voted to the king, to be paid upon the completion of the reforms, the date proposed being Michaelmas next coming.[188] The clergy, who still professed adherence to the bull “Clericis laicos,” with the approval of the baronage averred that they could not acquiesce in any grant of money in the face of papal prohibition. Edward, in his reply to the claims made by the barons, declared his unwillingness to admit the validity of the assertion that papal consent was necessary to the clerical grant. His confirmation of the Charters was dated 14th February, 1301.[189]