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.