The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

Discontent of
the greater
barons under
the growth of
the royal
power.

But by this time the spirit of the laity was roused. Gilbert of Gloucester was dead, and the heads of the baronage were Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the Marshall, and Humfrey Bohun Earl of Hereford, the Constable of England; men not of high character or of much patriotism, but of great power and spirit, and eager to take the opportunity of asserting their position, which the king’s measure for enforcing equal justice had threatened to shake. Bohun, too, had been imprisoned on account of the private war which he had carried on against Gloucester in 1288. Edward’s legal reforms had touched the baronage like every other class. A close inquiry into the title by which they held their estates and local jurisdictions—the commission, as it was called, of “quo warranto”—had alarmed them in 1278; then the Earl Warenne had boldly averred that his warrant was the sword by which his lands had been won, and by which he was prepared to defend them. They found too that, although the new legislation in some respects gave them a stronger hold on their vassals, that advantage was counterbalanced by the stronger hold which the king gained by it over themselves. They did not care to have too strong a king, or one who ruled them by ministers of his own choosing. When, then, early in 1297, Edward called for the whole military force of the kingdom to go abroad, part to follow him to Flanders to support his allies, and part to go to Gascony, they determined to thwart him. It was a moot question how far they were bound to foreign service at all; the king himself seemed to be asking them for a favor rather than a right. They knew that the clergy were hostile on account of the taxes, and the merchants on account of the wool; they would make the king feel their strength. Edward himself acted unwisely; he had become exasperated with the delay; he had lost his early and best counsellor, Robert Burnell, and had taken in his place Walter Langton, the treasurer, a faithful but unpopular and unscrupulous man, and he had conceived the notion, which was probably a true one, that the barons wished to embarrass him. The plea of necessity by which he tried to justify himself must also justify him with posterity.

Assembly of
the barons at
Salisbury.

Reconciliation
of Edward and
Archbishop
Winchelsey.

The year 1297 saw the contest decided. In February, the king had summoned the barons to meet at Salisbury. When they were assembled the two earls refused to perform their offices as marshal and constable; the clergy were in a state of outlawry, and the king did not venture to summon the representatives of the commons. The assembly broke up in wrath. Edward again laid hands on the wool, summoned the armed force, and put in execution the sentence against the clergy; the barons assembled in arms, the bishops threatened excommunication. In spite of this, the king, in July, collected the military strength of the nation at London and tried to bring matters to a decision. As the earls would not yield he determined to submit to the demands of the clergy, and to use his influence with the commons so as to get, even informally, a vote of more money. Winchelsey saw his opportunity. If the king would confirm the charters, the Great Charter and the charter of the forests, he would do his best to obtain money from the clergy; the Pope had already declared that his prohibition did not affect voluntary grants for national defence. The chief men of the commons, who although not summoned as to parliament were present in arms, agreed to vote a tax of a fifth; and the people were moved to tears by seeing the public reconciliation of the archbishop with the king, who commended his son Edward to his care whilst he himself went to war.

Confirmation
of the
charter
establishing
the right of
the people
to determine
taxation.

But the end was not come even now. The archbishop and the earls knew how often the charters had been confirmed in vain in King Henry’s days; and it was an evil omen that the king, whilst offering to confirm them, was attempting to exact money without a vote of Parliament. They drew up a series of new articles to be added to the Great Charter, and, after some difficulty, forced them upon the king just as he was preparing to embark. Edward saw that he must yield, but he left his son and his ministers to finish the negotiation. As soon as he had sailed the earls went to the Exchequer and forbade the officers of that court to collect the newly-imposed tax; the young Prince Edward was urged to summon the knights of the shire to receive the copies of the charter which his father had promised, and on October 10 the charters were re-issued, with an addition of seven articles, by which the king renounced the right of taxing the nation without national consent. It is true that these articles were not drawn up with such exactness as to prevent all evasion, and Edward I. and Edward III. are accused of using the obscurities of the wording to justify them in transgressing the spirit of the concession. But the confirmation of the charters, however won, was the completion of the work begun by Stephen Langton and the barons at Runnymede. It established finally the principle that for all taxation, direct and indirect, the consent of the nation must be asked, and made it clear that all transgressions of that principle, whether within the letter of the law or beyond it, were evasions of the spirit of the constitution. The seven articles were these: by the first the charters were confirmed; by the second all proceedings in contravention of them were declared null; by the third copies of them were to be sent to the cathedral churches to be read twice a year; and by the fourth the bishops were to excommunicate all who transgressed them. These four were the contribution of the prelates, the condition under which the clergy had been reconciled. By the fifth article the king declared that the exactions, by which the people had been aggrieved, should not be regarded as giving him a customary right to take such exactions any more; by the sixth he promised that he would no more take such “aids, tasks, and prizes but by common assent of the realm;” and by the seventh he undertook not to impose on the wool of the country any such “maletote” or heavy custom in future without their common assent and good will. It would have been clearer if the rights renounced had been absolutely renounced and clearly specified. The king and his servants soon learned that, without taking such taxes and maletotes as had been complained of, they could by negotiating with the merchants raise money indirectly without consulting parliament, but that excuse was never allowed by the parliament to be sufficient, and, when they could, they closed every opening for evasion. Thus was England’s greatest king compelled to make to his people the greatest of all constitutional concessions, at the very moment at which by his new organization of Parliament he had placed the nation for the first time in a position in which they could compel him to fulfill it. It was to some extent a compromise, in which both parties felt themselves justified in putting their own interpretation on the terms by which they had been reconciled, but it is not the less a landmark in the history of England, second only to Magna Carta. The confirmatio cartarum is the fulfillment, made now to the whole consolidated people, of the promises made in the charter to a nation just awaking to its unity and to the sense of its own just claims.

Dissatisfaction
of Edward with
his subjects.

Re-confirmation
of the
Charters.

Before we turn again to the military work of the reign, the war for the subjection of Scotland, which was one of the main causes of Edward’s difficulties at this time, and which furnished him with hard work for the rest of his life, we may briefly sum up the sequel of the great constitutional crisis. Not the least of the causes that led to Edward’s irritation, and provoked him to impolitic violence, was the thought that the nation did not trust him. From the beginning of the reign he had labored indefatigably for their good; he had amended their laws, and had given them what, to all intents and purposes, was a new and free constitution. He felt that he had a right to their confidence, and a right to direct, if not also to control, the mechanism which he had created. But as yet it was only thirty years since the Battle of Evesham. Men were still alive who remembered the countless tergiversations of Henry III., and who, so warned, could scarcely help suspecting that Edward in the hour of need would repudiate his obligations, as his father had done. They did not profess to be satisfied with the act of confirmation which Edward sealed at Ghent on November 5, 1297. As soon as he returned from Flanders, in the following year, the earls insisted on a renewal of the act, and, before they would join him in the Scottish war, the king had to promise to grant it. In March, 1299 the promise was fulfilled, but the confirmation was even now regarded as incomplete. The enforcement of the charter of the forests involved a new survey of the forests, and the king, when he promised that this should be done, made a distinct reservation of the rights of the crown, and of some questions which had just been referred to the court of Rome. The reservation appeared to the people to be an evident token of insincerity; and to calm the excitement Edward, two months afterwards, executed an unconditional confirmation. Still, however, it was declared that the forest reforms were intentionally delayed; and in a full parliament, held at London in March, 1300, the confirmation was repeated, additional articles being embodied in an important act called “The articles upon the charters.” In consequence of these the survey of the forests was made and the report of the survey presented to a parliament held at Lincoln in January, 1301, at which all the old animosities threatened to revive, and the barons, backed by the commons, and with Archbishop Winchelsey at their head, subjected the king to a pressure which he felt most bitterly and never forgave.