In domestic policy, seven years of monotonous administration had in a way prepared for vigorous reforms. Edward's return to England in 1274 was quickly followed by the dismissal of Walter of Merton, the chancellor of the years of quiescence. He was succeeded by Robert Burnell, who, though foiled in his quest of Canterbury, obtained an adequate standing by his preferment to the bishopric of Bath and Wells. For the eighteen years of life which still remained to him, Bishop Burnell held the chancery and possessed the chief place in Edward's counsels. The whole of this period was marked by a constant legislative activity which ceased so soon after Burnell's death that it is tempting to assign at least as large a part of the law-making of the reign to the minister as to the sovereign. A consummate lawyer and diplomatist, Burnell served Edward faithfully. Nor was his fidelity impaired either by the laxity which debarred him from higher ecclesiastical preferment or by his ambitious endeavours to raise the house of Shropshire squires from which he sprang into a great territorial family. Edward gave him his absolute confidence and was blind even to his defects.
The first general parliament of the reign to which the king summoned the commons was held at Westminster in the spring of 1275. Its work was the statute of Westminster the First, a comprehensive measure of many articles which covered almost the whole field of legislation, and is especially noteworthy for the care which its compilers took to uphold sound administration and put down abuses. Not less important was the provision of an adequate revenue for the debt-burdened king. The same parliament made Edward a permanent grant of a custom on wool, wool-fells, and leather, which remained henceforth a chief source of the regular income of the crown. The later imposition of further duties soon caused men to describe the customs of 1275 as the "Great and Ancient Custom". It was significant of the economic condition of England that the great custom was a tax on exports, not imports, and that, with the exception of leather, it was a tax on raw materials. Granted the more willingly since the main incidence of it was upon the foreign merchants, who bought up English wool for the looms of Flanders and Brabant, the custom proved a source of revenue which could easily be manipulated, increased, and assigned in advance to the Italian financiers, willing to lend money to a necessitous king. A new step in our financial history was attained when this tax on trade steps into the place so long held by the taxes on land, from which the Normans and Angevins had derived their enormous revenue.
The statute of Westminster the First had a long series of fellows. Next year came the statute of Rageman, which supplemented an earlier inquest into abuses by instituting a special inquiry in cases of trespass. In 1277 the first Welsh war interrupted the current of legislation. The break was compensated for in 1278 by the passing of the important statute of Gloucester, the consummation of a policy which Edward had adopted as soon as he set foot on English soil. The troubles of Edward's youth had made clear to him the obstacles thrown in the path of orderly government by the great territorial franchises. He had been forced to modify his policy to gratify the lord of Glamorgan, and win over the house of Mortimer by the erection of a new franchise that was a palatinate in all but name. But such great "regalities" were, after all, exceptional. Much more irritating to an orderly mind were the innumerable petty immunities which made half the hundreds in England the appendages of baronial estates, and such common privileges as "return of writs," which prevented the sheriff's officers from executing his mandates on numerous manors where the lords claimed that the execution of writs must be entrusted to their bailiffs.[1] These widespread powers in private hands were the more annoying to the king since they were commonly exercised with no better warrant than long custom, and without direct grant from him.
[1] See on "return of writs" and a host of similar immunities, Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, i., 558-82.
Bracton had already laid down the doctrine that no prescription can avail against the rights of the crown, and it was a commonplace with the lawyers of the age that nothing less than a clear grant by royal charter could justify such delegation of the sovereign's powers into private hands. Within a few months of his landing, Edward sent out commissioners to inquire into the baronial immunities. The returns of these inquests, which were carried out hundred by hundred, are embodied in the precious documents called the Hundred Rolls. The study of these reports inspired the procedure of the statute of Gloucester, by which royal officers were empowered to traverse the land demanding by what warrant the lords of franchises exercised their powers. The demand of the crown for documentary proof of royal delegation would have destroyed more than half the existing liberties. But aristocratic opinion deserted Edward when he strove to carry out so violent a revolution. The irritation of the whole baronage is well expressed in the story of how Earl Warenne, unsheathing a rusty sword, declared to the commissioners: "Here is my warrant. My ancestors won their lands with the sword. With my sword I will defend them against all usurpers." Nor was this mere boasting. The return of the king's officers tells us that Warenne would not say of whom, or by what services, he held his Yorkshire stronghold of Conisborough, and that his bailiffs refused them entrance into his liberties and would not suffer his tenants to answer or appear before them.[1] Edward found it prudent not to press his claims. He disturbed few men in their franchises, and was content to have collected the mass of evidence embodied in the placita de quo warranto, and thus to have stopped the possibility of any further growth of the franchises. A few years later he accepted the compromise that continuous possession since the coronation of Richard I. was a sufficient answer to a writ of quo warranto. In this lies the whole essence of Edward's policy in relation to feudalism, a policy very similar to that of St. Louis. Every man is to have his own, and the king is not to inquire too curiously what a man's own was. But no extension of any private right was to be tolerated. Thus feudalism as a principle of political jurisdiction gradually withered away, because it was no longer suffered to take fresh root. The later land legislation of Edward's reign pushed the idea still further.
[1] Kirkby's Quest for Yorkshire, pp. 3, 227, 231, Surtees Soc.
In 1278 it had been the turn of the barons to suffer. Next came the turn of the Church. Though Edward was a true son of the Church, he saw as clearly as William the Conqueror and Henry II. the essential incompatibility between the royal supremacy and the pretensions of the extreme ecclesiastics. The limits of Church and State, the growth of clerical wealth and immunities, and the relations of the world-power of the pope to the local authority of the king, were problems which no strong king could afford to neglect, and perhaps were incapable of solution on medieval lines. Edward saw that the most practical way of dealing with clerical claims was for him to stand in good personal relations to the chief dispensers of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. With a pope like Gregory X. it was easy for Edward to be on friendly terms; but it was more difficult to feel any cordiality for the dogmatic canonists or the furious Guelfic partisans who too often occupied the chair of St. Peter. Yet Edward was shrewd enough to see that it was worth while making sacrifices to keep on his side the power which, alike under Innocent III. and Clement IV., had given valuable assistance to his grandfather and father in their struggle against domestic enemies. Moreover the enormous growth of the system of papal provisions had given the papacy the preponderating authority in the selection of the bishops of the English Church. It was only by yielding to the popes, whenever it was possible, that Edward could secure the nomination of his own candidates to the chief ecclesiastical posts in his own realm.
In the earlier years of his reign Edward was luckier in his relations to the popes than to his own archbishops. But he found that his power at Rome broke down just where he wanted to exercise it most. He was disgusted to find how little influence he had in the selection of the Archbishops of Canterbury. Gregory X. sent to Canterbury the Dominican Robert Kilwardby, the first mendicant to hold high place in the English Church. Kilwardby was translated in 1278 to the cardinal bishopric of Porto, a post of greater dignity but less emolument and power than the English archbishopric. A cardinal bishop was bound to reside at Rome, and the real motive for this doubtful promotion was the desire to remove Kilwardby from England and to send a more active man in his place. Edward's indiscreet devotion to Bishop Burnell led him again to press his friend's claims, but, though he persuaded the monks of Christ Church to elect him, Nicholas III. quashed the appointment, and selected the Franciscan friar, John Peckham, as archbishop. Peckham, a famous theologian and physicist, had been a distinguished professor at Paris, Oxford, and Rome. He was high-minded, honourable and zealous, a saint as well as a scholar, an enthusiast for Church reform and a vigorous upholder of the extremest hierarchical pretensions. Fussy, energetic, tactless, he was the true type of the academic ecclesiastic, and alike in his personal qualities and his wonderful grasp of detail, he may be compared to Archbishop Laud. Though received by Edward with a rare magnanimity, Friar John allowed no personal considerations of gratitude to interpose between him and his duty. Reaching England in June, 1279, he presided, within six weeks of his landing, at a provincial council at Reading. In this gathering canons were passed against pluralities which frightened every benefice hunter among the clerks of the royal household. Orders were also issued for the periodical denunciation of ecclesiastical penalties against all violators of the Great Charter in a fashion that suggested that the king was an habitual offender against the fundamental laws of his realm.
Edward wrathfully laid the usurpations of the new primate before parliament, and forced Peckham to withdraw all the canons dealing with secular matters, and particularly those which concerned the Great Charter. The king set up the counter-claims of the State against the pretensions of the Church, and the estates passed the statute of Mortmain of 1279 as the layman's answer to the canons of Reading. Like most of Edward's laws the statute of Mortmain was based on earlier precedents. The wealth of the Church had long inspired statesmen with alarm, and a true follower of St. Francis like Peckham was specially convinced of the need of reducing the clergy to apostolic poverty. By the new law all grants of land to ecclesiastical corporations were expressly prohibited, under the penalty of the land being forfeited to its supreme lord. The statute was not a mere political weapon of the moment. It had a wider importance as a step in the development of Edward's anti-feudal policy, and may be regarded as a counterpart of the inquest into franchises, and as a means of protecting the State as well as of disciplining the Church. A corporation never died, and never paid reliefs or wardships. Its property never escheated for want of heirs, and, as scutages were passing out of fashion, ecclesiastics were less valuable to the king in times of war than lay lords. The recent exigencies of the Welsh war had emphasised the need of strengthening the military defences of the crown, and the new statute secured this by preventing the further devolution of lands into the dead hand of the Church. But all medieval laws were rather enunciations of an ideal than measures which practical statesmen aimed at carrying out in detail. The statute of Mortmain hardly stayed the creation of fresh monasteries and colleges, or the further endowment of old ones. All that was necessary for the pious founder was to obtain a royal dispensation from the operation of the statute. There was little need to fear that the new law would stand in the way of the power of the ecclesiastical estate.
A more distinct challenge to the Church was provoked by a further aggression of Peckham in 1281. In that year the primate summoned a council at Lambeth, wherein he sought to withdraw from the cognisance of the civil courts all suits concerning patronage and the disposition of the personal effects of ecclesiastics. To extend the jurisdiction of the forum ecclesiasticum was the surest way of exciting the hostility of the common lawyers and the king. Once more Edward annulled the proceedings of a council, and once more the submission of Peckham saved the land from a conflict which might have assumed the proportions of Becket's struggle against Henry II. Four years later Edward pressed his advantage still further by the royal ordinance of 1285, called Circumspecte agatis, which, though accepting the supremacy of the Church courts within their own sphere, narrowly defined the limits of their power in matters involving a temporal element. Again Peckham was fain to acquiesce. His policy had not only irritated the king, but alienated his fellow bishops. He visited his province with pertinacity and minuteness, and he was the less able to stand up against the king as he was engaged in violent quarrels with all his own suffragans. The leader of the bishops in resisting his claims was Thomas of Cantilupe. Restored to England by the liberal policy of Edward, Montfort's chancellor after Lewes had been raised to the see of Hereford, where his sanctity and devotion won him the universal love of his flock. Involved in costly lawsuits with the litigious primate, Thomas was forced to leave his diocese to plead his cause before the papal curia. He died in Italy in 1282, and his relics, carried back by his followers to his own cathedral, won the reputation of working miracles. A demand arose for his canonisation, and Edward before his death had secured the appointment of the papal commission, which, a few years later, added St. Thomas of Hereford to the list of saints.[1] Thus the chancellor of Montfort obtained the honour of sanctity through the action of the victor of Evesham.