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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume II (of
+8), by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume II (of 8)
+       The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 10, 2005  [eBook #17038]
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME II (OF 8)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+
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+
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME II
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+THE CHARTER, 1216-1307
+THE PARLIAMENT, 1307-1400
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November_ 1877;
+_Reprinted December_ 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.
+_Eversley Edition,_ 1895.
+London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1895
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    Volume II
+
+        Book III--The Charter--1216-1307
+
+            Chapter II--Henry the Third--1216-1232
+
+            Chapter III--The Barons' War--1232-1272
+
+            Chapter IV--Edward the First--1272-1307
+
+        Book IV--The Parliament--1307-1461
+
+            Authorities for Book IV
+
+            Chapter I--Edward II--1307-1327
+
+            Chapter II--Edward the Third--1327-1347
+
+            Chapter III--The Peasant Revolt--1347-1381
+
+            Chapter IV--Richard the Second--1381-1400
+
+
+LIST OF MAPS
+
+    Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1.jpg)
+
+    France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2.jpg)
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME II
+
+
+BOOK III
+THE CHARTER
+1216-1307
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+HENRY THE THIRD
+1216-1232
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: William Marshal]
+
+The death of John changed the whole face of English affairs. His son, Henry
+of Winchester, was but nine years old, and the pity which was stirred by
+the child's helplessness was aided by a sense of injustice in burthening
+him with the iniquity of his father. At his death John had driven from his
+side even the most loyal of his barons; but William Marshal had clung to
+him to the last, and with him was Gualo, the Legate of Innocent's
+successor, Honorius the Third. The position of Gualo as representative of
+the Papal overlord of the realm was of the highest importance, and his
+action showed the real attitude of Rome towards English freedom. The
+boy-king was hardly crowned at Gloucester when Legate and Earl issued in
+his name the very Charter against which his father had died fighting. Only
+the clauses which regulated taxation and the summoning of parliament were
+as yet declared to be suspended. The choice of William Marshal as "governor
+of King and kingdom" gave weight to this step; and its effect was seen when
+the contest was renewed in 1217. Lewis was at first successful in the
+eastern counties, but the political reaction was aided by jealousies which
+broke out between the English and French nobles in his force, and the first
+drew gradually away from him. So general was the defection that at the
+opening of summer William Marshal felt himself strong enough for a blow at
+his foes. Lewis himself was investing Dover, and a joint army of French and
+English barons under the Count of Perche and Robert Fitz-Walter was
+besieging Lincoln, when gathering troops rapidly from the royal castles the
+regent marched to the relief of the latter town. Cooped up in its narrow
+streets and attacked at once by the Earl and the garrison, the barons fled
+in utter rout; the Count of Perche fell on the field, Robert Fitz-Walter
+was taken prisoner. Lewis at once retreated on London and called for aid
+from France. But a more terrible defeat crushed his remaining hopes. A
+small English fleet which set sail from Dover under Hubert de Burgh fell
+boldly on the reinforcements which were crossing under escort of Eustace
+the Monk, a well-known freebooter of the Channel. Some incidents of the
+fight light up for us the naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the
+English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into the crowded transports,
+others hurled quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more active
+vessels crashed with their armed prows into the sides of the French ships.
+The skill of the mariners of the Cinque Ports turned the day against the
+larger forces of their opponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly
+destroyed. The royal army at once closed upon London, but resistance was
+really at an end. By a treaty concluded at Lambeth in September Lewis
+promised to withdraw from England on payment of a sum which he claimed as
+debt; his adherents were restored to their possessions, the liberties of
+London and other towns confirmed, and the prisoners on either side set at
+liberty. A fresh issue of the Charter, though in its modified form,
+proclaimed yet more clearly the temper and policy of the Earl Marshal.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Hubert de Burgh]
+
+His death at the opening of 1219, after a year spent in giving order to the
+realm, brought no change in the system he had adopted. The control of
+affairs passed into the hands of a new legate, Pandulf, of Stephen Langton
+who had just returned forgiven from Rome, and of the Justiciar, Hubert de
+Burgh. It was a time of transition, and the temper of the Justiciar was
+eminently transitional. Bred in the school of Henry the Second, Hubert had
+little sympathy with national freedom, and though resolute to maintain the
+Charter he can have had small love for it; his conception of good
+government, like that of his master, lay in a wise personal administration,
+in the preservation of order and law. But he combined with this a
+thoroughly English desire for national independence, a hatred of
+foreigners, and a reluctance to waste English blood and treasure in
+Continental struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task was one of no
+common difficulty. He was hampered by the constant interference of Rome. A
+Papal legate resided at the English court, and claimed a share in the
+administration of the realm as the representative of its overlord and as
+guardian of the young sovereign. A foreign party too had still a footing in
+the kingdom, for William Marshal had been unable to rid himself of men like
+Peter des Roches or Faukes de Breauté, who had fought on the royal side in
+the struggle against Lewis. Hubert had to deal too with the anarchy which
+that struggle left behind it. From the time of the Conquest the centre of
+England had been covered with the domains of great houses, whose longings
+were for feudal independence and whose spirit of revolt had been held in
+check partly by the stern rule of the kings and partly by the rise of a
+baronage sprung from the Court and settled for the most part in the North.
+The oppression of John united both the earlier and these newer houses in
+the struggle for the Charter. But the character of each remained unchanged,
+and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party break out in their old
+lawlessness and defiance of the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Order restored]
+
+For a time the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed to revive. But the
+Justiciar was resolute to crush it, and he was backed by the strenuous
+efforts of Stephen Langton. A new and solemn coronation of the young king
+in 1220 was followed by a demand for the restoration of the royal castles
+which had been seized by the barons and foreigners. The Earl of Chester,
+the head of the feudal baronage, though he rose in armed rebellion, quailed
+before the march of Hubert and the Primate's threats of excommunication. A
+more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de Breauté, the
+sheriff of six counties, with six royal castles in his hands, and allied
+both with the rebel barons and Llewelyn of Wales. But in 1224 his castle of
+Bedford was besieged for two months; and on its surrender the stern justice
+of Hubert hung the twenty-four knights and their retainers who formed the
+garrison before its walls. The blow was effectual; the royal castles were
+surrendered by the barons, and the land was once more at peace. Freed from
+foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from the presence of the
+foreign legate. Langton wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he
+lived no future legate should be sent to England, and with Pandulf's
+resignation in 1221 the direct interference of the Papacy in the government
+of the realm came to an end. But even these services of the Primate were
+small compared with his services to English freedom. Throughout his life
+the Charter was the first object of his care. The omission of the articles
+which restricted the royal power over taxation in the Charter which was
+published at Henry's accession in 1216 was doubtless due to the
+Archbishop's absence and disgrace at Rome. The suppression of disorder
+seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal
+ministers; for when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in
+Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the King's councillors,
+protested that it had been extorted by force and was without legal
+validity. "If you loved the King, William," the Primate burst out in anger,
+"you would not throw a stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the
+realm." The young king was cowed by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised
+observance of the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of such
+a temper among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage
+demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of
+a subsidy, and Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of
+constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the
+Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: State of the Church]
+
+These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the realm
+year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually bringing
+the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of liberty
+was at this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement which
+stirred English society to its depths. Never had the priesthood wielded
+such boundless power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third
+and his immediate successors. But its religious hold on the people was
+loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy was fading away
+before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use
+of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation
+of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy
+the struggle that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second
+disclosed a spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of
+Florence denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very
+foundations of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence
+had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to
+the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no signs as yet of religious
+revolt, and though the political action of Rome had been in the main on the
+side of freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its interference with
+national concerns which broke out in the struggle against John. "The Pope
+has no part in secular matters," had been the reply of London to the
+interdict of Innocent. And within the English Church itself there was much
+to call for reform. Its attitude in the strife for the Charter as well as
+the after work of the Primate had made it more popular than ever; but its
+spiritual energy was less than its political. The disuse of preaching, the
+decline of the monastic orders into rich landowners, the non-residence and
+ignorance of the parish priests, lowered the religious influence of the
+clergy. The abuses of the time foiled even the energy of such men as Bishop
+Grosseteste of Lincoln. His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt
+taverns, to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot and
+debauchery of the life of the baronage. But such prohibitions witness to
+the prevalence of the evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were still
+withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as ministers, judges, or
+ambassadors. Benefices were heaped in hundreds at a time on royal
+favourites like John Mansel. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes and
+then served them by half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased from
+Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks from all episcopal
+discipline. And behind all this was a group of secular statesmen and
+scholars, the successors of such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed no
+open warfare with the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its abuses and
+its faults.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Friars]
+
+To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the aim of
+two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of the
+thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at the
+sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the
+Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he cried, "must be met by zeal,
+lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by
+preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the
+mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life
+of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the
+time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take
+Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all, he flings his very clothes
+at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God. His
+passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his
+brother, he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His
+last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!" Strangely as the two men
+differed from each other, their aim was the same--to convert the heathen,
+to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to
+carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by an utter reversal
+of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the
+salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister
+for the preacher, the monk for the "brother" or friar. To force the new
+"brethren" into entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their
+vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging Friars" were
+to subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the
+very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by
+others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance
+swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders,
+the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered
+in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging preachers, clad
+in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered
+barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and
+Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Friars and the Towns]
+
+To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious
+revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most
+ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his
+fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction
+they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's ritual or the
+scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its
+minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed
+the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story
+brought religion into the fair and the market place. In England, where the
+Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in
+1224, both were received with the same delight. As the older orders had
+chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at
+Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance
+of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between
+Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods turned aside to a
+grange of the monks of Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures,
+as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs,
+the jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the
+monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to
+welcome them and witness their tricks. The disappointment was too much for
+the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate
+to find their night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome of the townsmen
+made up everywhere for the ill-will and opposition of both clergy and
+monks. The work of the Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid
+progress of population within the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary
+regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible
+scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was
+to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and the
+Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters
+of each town. Their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses; it was
+amongst the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their homes. At
+London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford they made their
+way to the swampy ground between its walls and the streams of Thames. Huts
+of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough
+fence and ditch that bounded the Friary. The order of Francis made a hard
+fight against the taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater personal
+comfort which characterized the time. "I did not enter into religion to
+build walls," protested an English provincial when the brethren pressed for
+a larger house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which the
+burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to the ground. "You
+need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his scornful
+reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar
+found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at matins. At night he
+dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester
+and Oxford with, shouts of "Kill, kill!" "I am a friar," shrieked the
+terror-stricken brother. "You lie," was the instant answer, "for you go
+shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there. In
+an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of window.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Revival of Theology]
+
+It was with less success that the order struggled against the passion of
+the time for knowledge. Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was
+by their founders, would have denied them the possession of books or
+materials for study. "I am your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis
+cried passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter. When the news of a
+great doctor's reception was brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell.
+"I am afraid, my son," he replied, "that such doctors will be the
+destruction of my vineyard. They are the true doctors who with the meekness
+of wisdom show forth good works for the edification of their neighbours."
+One kind of knowledge indeed their work almost forced on them. The
+popularity of their preaching soon led them to the deeper study of
+theology; within a short time after their establishment in England we find
+as many as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Leicester,
+Bristol, and other places, and a regular succession of teachers provided at
+each University. The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of
+their new church while philosophy was taught in the cloister. The first
+provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house and
+persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there. His influence after his promotion
+to the see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure theological study
+among the Friars, as well as their establishment in the University; and in
+this work he was ably seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco,
+under whom the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation throughout
+Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Koln borrowed from it their professors: it
+was through its influence indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly
+inferior to that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism. But the
+result of this powerful impulse was soon seen to be fatal to the wider
+intellectual activity which had till now characterized the Universities.
+Theology in its scholastic form resumed its supremacy in the schools. Its
+only efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine and law. The
+last, as he was by far the greatest, instance of the freer and wider
+culture which had been the glory of the last century, was Roger Bacon, and
+no name better illustrates the rapidity and completeness with which it
+passed away.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Roger Bacon]
+
+Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents who were driven into exile
+and reduced to poverty by the civil wars. From Oxford, where he studied
+under Edmund of Abingdon to whom he owed his introduction to the works of
+Aristotle, he passed to the University of Paris, and spent his whole
+heritage there in costly studies and experiments. "From my youth up," he
+writes, "I have laboured at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the
+friendship of all men among the Latins who had any reputation for
+knowledge. I have caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry,
+arithmetic, the construction of tables and instruments, and many needful
+things besides." The difficulties in the way of such studies as he had
+resolved to pursue were immense. He was without instruments or means of
+experiment. "Without mathematical instruments no science can be mastered,"
+he complains afterwards, "and these instruments are not to be found among
+the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred pounds.
+Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which the
+motions of the heavens are certified from the beginning to the end of the
+world without daily labour, but these tables are worth a king's ransom and
+could not be made without a vast expense. I have often attempted the
+composition of such tables, but could not finish them through failure of
+means and the folly of those whom I had to employ." Books were difficult
+and sometimes even impossible to procure. "The scientific works of
+Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients cannot be
+had without great cost; their principal works have not been translated into
+Latin, and copies of others are not to be found in ordinary libraries or
+elsewhere. The admirable books of Cicero de Republica are not to be found
+anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I have made anxious enquiry for them
+in different parts of the world, and by various messengers. I could never
+find the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for them during
+twenty years and more. And so it is with many more most useful books
+connected with the science of morals." It is only words like these of his
+own that bring home to us the keen thirst for knowledge, the patience, the
+energy of Roger Bacon. He returned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching
+record of his devotion to those whom he taught remains in the story of John
+of London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the general
+level of his pupils. "When he came to me as a poor boy," says Bacon in
+recommending him to the Pope, "I caused him to be nurtured and instructed
+for the love of God, especially since for aptitude and innocence I have
+never found so towardly a youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be
+taught in languages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratuitously
+instructed him with my own lips since the time that I received your
+mandate. There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root of
+philosophy, though he has not produced the branches, flowers, and fruit
+because of his youth, and because he has had no experience in teaching. But
+he has the means of surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and
+goes on as he has begun."
+
+The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was justified
+by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It is
+probably of himself that he speaks when he tells us that "the science of
+optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere among the
+Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science on which he had laboured
+for ten years. But his teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. From
+the moment when the Friars settled in the Universities scholasticism
+absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world. The temper of the
+age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The older enthusiasm
+for knowledge was dying down; the study of law was the one source of
+promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy was discredited,
+literature in its purer forms became almost extinct. After forty years of
+incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own words "unheard, forgotten,
+buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was
+gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially laboured in the
+attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on
+these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of
+books, experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages, and
+the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the
+friendship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined
+and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend
+Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar of the order of St.
+Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to
+the work which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the
+masses of the poor. He had written little. So far was he from attempting to
+write that his new superiors prohibited him from publishing anything under
+pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and water. But we can
+see the craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation which
+marks the man of genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange
+opportunity that suddenly opened before him. "Some few chapters on
+different subjects, written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got
+abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the notice of
+Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. But
+difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses
+for such a work as he projected would cost at least, £60, and the Pope sent
+not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like
+himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends
+raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of
+repayment from Clement. Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse and
+scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular
+form to gain the Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed
+another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. By the
+close of 1267 the work was done. The "greater work," itself in modern form
+a closely-printed folio, with its successive summaries and appendices in
+the "lesser" and the "third" works (which make a good octavo more), were
+produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen months.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Opus Majus]
+
+No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus"
+is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words
+of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of
+philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a
+greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had
+been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly
+unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast
+advantages which it offered." The developement of his scheme is on the
+largest scale; he gathers together the whole knowledge of his time on every
+branch of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he
+suggests improvements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his
+after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in
+insisting on the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of
+languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than his
+scientific investigations. From grammar he passes to mathematics, from
+mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the name of mathematics
+indeed was included all the physical science of the time. "The neglect of
+it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately, "hath
+nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he who knows
+not mathematics cannot know any other sciences; and what is more, he cannot
+discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography,
+chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into something of scientific
+form, and like rapid sketches are given of the question of climate,
+hydrography, geography, and astrology. The subject of optics, his own
+especial study, is treated with greater fulness; he enters into the
+question of the anatomy of the eye besides discussing problems which lie
+more strictly within the province of optical science. In a word, the
+"Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is "at once the
+Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of
+the after-works of Roger Bacon--and treatise after treatise has of late
+been disentombed from our libraries--are but developements in detail of the
+magnificent conception he laid before Clement. Such a work was its own
+great reward.
+
+From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and found small
+recognition. No word of acknowledgement seems to have reached its author
+from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only
+gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old
+man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll
+away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first
+in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scholasticism]
+
+The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength of the drift towards
+the practical studies, and above all towards theology in its scholastic
+guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous
+foe of mediæval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his logical method
+in the discussion and definition of theological dogma into its unexpected
+ally. It was this very method that led to "that unprofitable subtlety and
+curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the scholastic philosophy.
+But "certain it is"--to continue the same great thinker's comment on the
+Friars--"that if these schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and
+unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation,
+they had proved excellent lights to the great advancement of all learning
+and knowledge." What, amidst all their errors, they undoubtedly did was to
+insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration and a more exact use of
+words, to introduce a clear and methodical treatment of all subjects into
+discussion, and above all to substitute an appeal to reason for
+unquestioning obedience to authority. It was by this critical tendency, by
+the new clearness and precision which scholasticism gave to enquiry, that
+in spite of the trivial questions with which it often concerned itself it
+trained the human mind through the next two centuries to a temper which
+fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that brought about
+the Renascence. And it is to the same spirit of fearless enquiry as well as
+to the strong popular sympathies which their very constitution necessitated
+that we must attribute the influence which the Friars undoubtedly exerted
+in the coming struggle between the people and the Crown. Their position is
+clearly and strongly marked throughout the whole contest. The University of
+Oxford, which soon fell under the direction of their teaching, stood first
+in its resistance to Papal exactions and its claim of English liberty. The
+classes in the towns, on whom the influence of the Friars told most
+directly, were steady supporters of freedom throughout the Barons' Wars.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Political Influence]
+
+Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was of immense value, for
+it set on a religious basis and gave an intellectual form to the
+constitutional theory of the relations between king and people which was
+slowly emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assuming the
+responsibility of a Christian king to God for the good government of his
+realm, in surrounding the pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious
+sanctions, the mediæval Church entered its protest against any personal
+despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract
+between king and people; and their trenchant logic made short work of the
+royal claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience. "He who
+would be in truth a king," ran a poem which embodies their teaching at this
+time in pungent verse--"he is a 'free king' indeed if he rightly rule
+himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of
+his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction. It is one
+thing to rule according to a king's duty, another to destroy a kingdom by
+resisting the law." "Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be
+known what the generality, to whom their laws are best known, think on the
+matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make
+daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their
+own affairs which are at stake they will take the more care and will act
+with an eye to their own peace." "It concerns the community to see what
+sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm." The
+constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole
+nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to have a voice in
+the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so
+clearly stated before. But the importance of the Friar's work lay in this,
+that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the popular
+preacher. The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was
+carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother,
+begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the
+cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or
+market-place. His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to
+coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the
+homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them
+side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his
+tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened to the
+rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry the Third]
+
+Never had there been more need of such a political education of the whole
+people than at the moment we have reached. For the triumph of the Charter,
+the constitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly
+on the helplessness of the king. As boy or youth, Henry the Third had bowed
+to the control of William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he was
+now grown to manhood, and his character was from this hour to tell on the
+events of his reign. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father
+the young king was absolutely free. There was a geniality, a vivacity, a
+refinement in his temper which won a personal affection for him even in his
+worst days from some who bitterly censured his rule. The Abbey-church of
+Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor,
+remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of men
+of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. But
+of the political capacity which was the characteristic of his house he had
+little or none. Profuse, changeable, false from sheer meanness of spirit,
+impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless
+in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an empty and
+prodigal magnificence, his one notion of government was a dream of
+arbitrary power. But frivolous as the king's mood was, he clung with a weak
+man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy; and this was the policy not
+of Hubert or Langton but of John. He cherished the hope of recovering his
+heritage across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown;
+and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises which force had
+wrested from the king and which force could wrest back again. France was
+telling more and more on English opinion; and the claim which the French
+kings were advancing to a divine and absolute power gave a sanction in
+Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority which was still maintained
+by his favourite advisers in the royal council. Above all he clung to the
+alliance with the Papacy. Henry was personally devout; and his devotion
+only bound him the more firmly to his father's system of friendship with
+Rome. Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to the Papal See. Rome
+had saved him from ruin as a child; its legate had set the crown on his
+head; its threats and excommunications had foiled Lewis and built up again
+a royal party. Above all it was Rome which could alone free him from his
+oath to the Charter, and which could alone defend him if like his father he
+had to front the baronage in arms.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and Rome]
+
+His temper was now to influence the whole system of government. In 1227
+Henry declared himself of age; and though Hubert still remained Justiciar
+every year saw him more powerless in his struggle with the tendencies of
+the king. The death of Stephen Langton in 1228 was a yet heavier blow to
+English freedom. In persuading Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had
+averted a conflict between the national desire for self-government and the
+Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more
+serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by
+the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened
+which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the
+other at the Reformation. In the mediæval theory of the Papacy, as Innocent
+and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of which the
+Popes were the head, took the feudal form of the secular realms which lay
+within its pale. The Pope was its sovereign, the Bishops were his barons,
+and the clergy were his under vassals. As the king demanded aids and
+subsidies in case of need from his liegemen, so in the theory of Rome might
+the head of the Church demand aid in need from the priesthood. And at this
+moment the need of the Popes was sore. Rome had plunged into her desperate
+conflict with the Emperor, Frederick the Second, and was looking everywhere
+for the means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On England she believed
+herself to have more than a spiritual claim for support. She regarded the
+kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its overlord. It was only
+by the promise of a heavy subsidy that Henry in 1229 could buy the Papal
+confirmation of Langton's successor. But the baronage was of other mind
+than Henry as to this claim of overlordship, and the demand of an aid to
+Rome from the laity was at once rejected by them. Her spiritual claim over
+the allegiance of the clergy however remained to fall back upon, and the
+clergy were in the Pope's hand. Gregory the Ninth had already claimed for
+the Papal See a right of nomination to some prebends in each cathedral
+church; he now demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the priesthood, and
+a threat of excommunication silenced their murmurs. Exaction followed
+exaction as the needs of the Papal treasury grew greater. The very rights
+of lay patrons were set aside, and under the name of "reserves"
+presentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal market, while
+Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings of the Church.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Hubert de Burgh]
+
+The general indignation at last found vent in a wide conspiracy. In 1231
+letters from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be
+ruined by the Romans" were scattered over the kingdom by armed men; tithes
+gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were seized and given to the
+poor; the Papal collectors were beaten and their bulls trodden under foot.
+The remonstrances of Rome only made clearer the national character of the
+movement; but as enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen
+to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done;
+royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their acts; and
+the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance of
+Hubert de Burgh. No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the mind
+of the king. But he was already in full collision with the Justiciar on
+other grounds. Henry was eager to vindicate his right to the great heritage
+his father had lost: the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they
+loved England but because they hated France, spurred him to war; and in
+1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons. But while Hubert held
+power no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. The Norman
+call was rejected through his influence, and when a great armament gathered
+at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport
+and supplies. The young king drew his sword and rushed madly on the
+Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.
+But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred for the year. In
+1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poitou, but the failure
+of the campaign was again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was
+said to have prevented a decisive engagement. It was at this moment that
+the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry's wrath against his
+minister. In the summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar,
+and dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven
+him to take sanctuary. A smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly
+refused. "I will die any death," he said, "before I put iron on the man who
+freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." The
+remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the king to replace Hubert in
+sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner
+into the Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless in the
+realm. His fall left England without a check to the rule of Henry himself.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE BARON'S WAR
+1232-1272
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Aliens]
+
+Once master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick to declare his plan of
+government. The two great checks on a merely personal rule lay as yet in
+the authority of the great ministers of State and in the national character
+of the administrative body which had been built up by Henry the Second.
+Both of these checks Henry at once set himself to remove. He would be his
+own minister. The Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the king
+and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law-courts. The Chancellor had
+grown into a great officer of State, and in 1226 this office had been
+conferred on the Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent of the
+Great Council. But Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him and naming
+to this as to other offices at his pleasure. His policy was to entrust all
+high posts of government to mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained
+administrators, but wholly dependent on the royal will. He found equally
+dependent agents of administration by surrounding himself with foreigners.
+The return of Peter des Roches to the royal councils was the first sign of
+the new system; and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were summoned
+over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative
+posts about the Court. The king's marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence
+was followed by the arrival in England of the new queen's uncles. The
+"Savoy," as his house in the Strand was named, still recalls Peter of Savoy
+who arrived five years later to take for a while the chief place at Henry's
+council-board; another brother, Boniface, was consecrated on Archbishop
+Edmund's death to the highest post in the realm save the Crown itself, the
+Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The young Primate, like his brother, brought
+with him foreign fashions strange enough to English folk. His armed
+retainers pillaged the markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the
+ground the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who opposed his
+visitation. London was roused by the outrage; on the king's refusal to do
+justice a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's house at Lambeth
+with cries of vengeance, and the "handsome archbishop," as his followers
+styled him, was glad to escape over sea. This brood of Provençals was
+followed in 1243 by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's queen,
+Isabella of Angoulême. Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of
+Valence received at a later time the earldom of Pembroke. Even the king's
+jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed these great
+nobles to find a fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords brought
+in their train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and three English
+earls who were in royal wardship were wedded by the king to foreigners. The
+whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men who were
+ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English government or
+English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy; the very retainers of the royal
+household turned robbers and pillaged foreign merchants in the precincts of
+the Court; corruption invaded the judicature; at the close of this period
+of misrule Henry de Bath, a justiciary, was proved to have openly taken
+bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry and the Baronage]
+
+That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on unchecked in defiance
+of the provisions of the Charter was owing to the disunion and sluggishness
+of the English baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard,
+the Earl Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth as their leader to
+demand the expulsion of the strangers from the royal Council. Though
+deserted by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent
+against him and forced the king to treat for peace. But at this critical
+moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland; he
+fell in a petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. The
+interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon, forced the king to
+dismiss Peter from court; but there was no real change of system, and the
+remonstrances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of
+Lincoln, remained fruitless. In the long interval of misrule the financial
+straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest
+Laws were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant,
+loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free
+quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this kind however were utterly
+insufficient to defray the cost of the king's prodigality. A sixth of the
+royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of
+the Crown amounted to four times its annual income. Henry was forced to
+appeal for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted in
+1237 on promise of control in its expenditure and on condition that the
+king confirmed the Charter. But Charter and promise were alike disregarded;
+and in 1242 the resentment of the barons expressed itself in a determined
+protest and a refusal of further subsidies. In spite of their refusal
+however Henry gathered money enough for a costly expedition for the
+recovery of Poitou. The attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg
+the king's force fled in disgraceful rout before the French as far as
+Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a disease which
+scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the conquerors. The treasury was
+utterly drained, and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh appeal with
+his own mouth to the baronage. But the barons had now rallied to a plan of
+action, and we can hardly fail to attribute their union to the man who
+appears at their head. This was the Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon of Montfort]
+
+Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose name had become
+memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in
+Southern Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his
+mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.
+But as Simon's tendencies were for the most part French John had kept the
+revenues of the earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim of his
+elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of Henry the Third to accept a
+divided allegiance. The refusal marks the rapid growth of that sentiment of
+nationality which the loss of Normandy had brought home. Amaury chose to
+remain French, and by a family arrangement with the king's sanction the
+honour of Leicester passed in 1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice
+made Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood still moved the jealousy of
+the barons, and this jealousy was quickened by a secret match in 1238 with
+Eleanor, the king's sister and widow of the second William Marshal. The
+match formed probably part of a policy which Henry pursued throughout his
+reign of bringing the great earldoms into closer connexion with the Crown.
+That of Chester had fallen to the king through the extinction of the family
+of its earls; Cornwall was held by his brother, Richard; Salisbury by his
+cousin. Simon's marriage linked the Earldom of Leicester to the royal
+house. But it at once brought Simon into conflict with the nobles and the
+Church. The baronage, justly indignant that such a step should have been
+taken without their consent, for the queen still remained childless and
+Eleanor's children by one whom they looked on as a stranger promised to be
+heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt which failed only through the
+desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall, who was satisfied with
+Earl Simon's withdrawal from the Royal Council. The censures of the Church
+on Eleanor's breach of a vow of chaste widowhood which she had made at her
+first husband's death were averted with hardly less difficulty by a journey
+to Rome. It was after a year of trouble that Simon returned to England to
+reap as it seemed the fruits of his high alliance. He was now formally made
+Earl of Leicester and re-entered the Royal Council. But it is probable that
+he still found there the old jealousy which had forced from him a pledge of
+retirement after his marriage; and that his enemies now succeeded in
+winning over the king. In a few months, at any rate, he found the
+changeable king alienated from him, he was driven by a burst of royal
+passion from the realm, and was forced to spend seven months in France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's early action]
+
+Henry's anger passed as quickly as it had risen, and in the spring of 1240
+the Earl was again received with honour at court. It was from this moment
+however that his position changed. As yet it had been that of a foreigner,
+confounded in the eyes of the nation at large with the Poitevins and
+Provençals who swarmed about the court. But in the years of retirement
+which followed Simon's return to England his whole attitude was reversed.
+There was as yet no quarrel with the king: he followed him in a campaign
+across the Channel, and shared in his defeat at Saintes. But he was a
+friend of Grosseteste and a patron of the Friars, and became at last known
+as a steady opponent of the misrule about him. When prelates and barons
+chose twelve representatives to confer with Henry in 1244 Simon stood with
+Earl Richard of Cornwall at the head of them. A definite plan of reform
+disclosed his hand. The confirmation of the Charter was to be followed by
+the election of Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer, in the Great Council. Nor
+was this restoration of a responsible ministry enough; a perpetual Council
+was to attend the king and devise further reforms. The plan broke against
+Henry's resistance and a Papal prohibition; but from this time the Earl
+took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. The struggle of
+the following years was chiefly with the exactions of the Papacy, and Simon
+was one of the first to sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246
+addressed to the court of Rome. He was present at the Lent Parliament of
+1248, and we can hardly doubt that he shared in its bold rebuke of the
+king's misrule and its renewed demand for the appointment of the higher
+officers of state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the danger of
+leaving at home such a centre of all efforts after reform that brought
+Henry to send him in the autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for
+the Crown the last of its provinces over sea.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon in Gascony]
+
+Threatened by France and by Navarre without as well as by revolt within,
+the loss of Gascony seemed close at hand; but in a few months the stern
+rule of the new Seneschal had quelled every open foe within or without its
+bounds. To bring the province to order proved a longer and a harder task.
+Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the Rhine: "they rode the country
+by night," wrote the Earl, "like thieves, in parties of twenty or thirty or
+forty," and gathered in leagues against the Seneschal, who set himself to
+exact their dues to the Crown and to shield merchant and husbandman from
+their violence. For four years Earl Simon steadily warred down these robber
+bands, storming castles where there was need, and bridling the wilder
+country with a chain of forts. Hard as the task was, his real difficulty
+lay at home. Henry sent neither money nor men; and the Earl had to raise
+both from his own resources, while the men whom he was fighting found
+friends in Henry's council-chamber. Again and again Simon was recalled to
+answer charges of tyranny and extortion made by the Gascon nobles and
+pressed by his enemies at home on the king. Henry's feeble and impulsive
+temper left him open to pressure like this; and though each absence of the
+Earl from the province was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder which
+only his presence repressed, the deputies of its nobles were still admitted
+to the council-table and commissions sent over to report on the Seneschal's
+administration. The strife came to a head in 1252, when the commissioners
+reported that stern as Simon's rule had been the case was one in which
+sternness was needful. The English barons supported Simon, and in the face
+of their verdict Henry was powerless. But the king was now wholly with his
+enemies; and his anger broke out in a violent altercation. The Earl offered
+to resign his post if the money he had spent was repaid him, and appealed
+to Henry's word. Henry hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a
+false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; "and but that thou bearest
+the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a
+word!" A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the Earl once more
+returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw
+to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its
+nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King
+Lewis from the land. But the offer was refused; and Henry, who had himself
+undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253
+to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's temper]
+
+The Earl's character had now thoroughly developed. He inherited the strict
+and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance on
+religious services whether by night or day. In his correspondence with Adam
+Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in a perusal of
+the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted
+for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful
+and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his
+sense of honour keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of
+contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in
+his after career. His best friends marked honestly this fault, and it shows
+the greatness of the man that he listened to their remonstrances. "Better
+is a patient man," writes honest Friar Adam, "than a strong man, and he who
+can rule his own temper than he who storms a city." But the one
+characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his
+"constancy," the firm immoveable resolve which trampled even death under
+foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward the First chose as
+his device, "Keep troth," was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see
+in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties
+both at home and abroad he "thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of
+so great an exploit" as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but
+once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the
+failure of all support or funds from England, and the king's desertion of
+his cause, till the work was done. There was the same steadiness of will
+and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Robert Grosseteste show how
+early Simon had learned to sympathize with the Bishop in his resistance to
+Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offered him his own support and
+that of his associates. But Robert passed away, and as the tide of
+misgovernment mounted higher and higher the Earl silently trained himself
+for the day of trial. The fruit of his self-discipline was seen when the
+crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the
+enthusiastic love of the people clung to the grave, stern soldier who
+"stood like a pillar," unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by
+the oath he had sworn.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Matthew Paris]
+
+While Simon had been warring with Gascon rebels affairs in England had been
+going from bad to worse. The scourge of Papal taxation fell heavier on the
+clergy. After vain appeals to Rome and to the king, Archbishop Edmund
+retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-gatherer after
+tax-gatherer with powers of excommunication, suspension from orders, and
+presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priesthood. The
+wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. Oxford gave the
+signal by hunting a Papal legate out of the city amid cries of "usurer" and
+"simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the
+barons bade a Papal collector begone out of England. "If you tarry here
+three days longer," he added, "you and your company shall be cut to
+pieces." For a time Henry himself was swept away by the tide of national
+indignation. Letters from the king, the nobles, and the prelates, protested
+against the Papal exactions, and orders were given that no money should be
+exported from the realm. But the threat of interdict soon drove Henry back
+on a policy of spoliation in which he went hand in hand with Rome. The
+temper which this oppression begot among even the most sober churchmen has
+been preserved for us by an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst
+of patriotic feeling. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is
+the last, of our monastic historians. The school of St. Alban's survived
+indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle into mere annalists
+whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts and whose work is as
+colourless as it is jejune. In Matthew the breadth and precision of the
+narrative, the copiousness of his information on topics whether national or
+European, the general fairness and justice of his comments, are only
+surpassed by the patriotic fire and enthusiasm of the whole. He had
+succeeded Roger of Wendover as chronicler at St. Alban's; and the Greater
+Chronicle with an abridgement of it which long passed under the name of
+Matthew of Westminster, a "History of the English," and the "Lives of the
+Earlier Abbots," are only a few among the voluminous works which attest his
+prodigious industry. He was an artist as well as an historian, and many of
+the manuscripts which are preserved are illustrated by his own hand. A
+large circle of correspondents--bishops like Grosseteste, ministers like
+Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swereford--furnished him with
+minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical proceedings. Pilgrims from
+the East and Papal agents brought news of foreign events to his scriptorium
+at St. Alban's. He had access to and quotes largely from state documents,
+charters, and exchequer rolls. The frequency of royal visits to the abbey
+brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself
+contributed to the great chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a
+faithfulness the memory of his weakness and misgovernment. On one solemn
+feast-day the king recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the middle
+step between the floor and the throne begged him to write the story of the
+day's proceedings. While on a visit to St. Alban's he invited him to his
+table and chamber, and enumerated by name two hundred and fifty of the
+English baronies for his information. But all this royal patronage has left
+little mark on his work. "The case," as Matthew says, "of historical
+writers is hard, for if they tell the truth they provoke men, and if they
+write what is false they offend God." With all the fulness of the school of
+court historians, such as Benedict and Hoveden, to which in form he
+belonged, Matthew Paris combines an independence and patriotism which is
+strange to their pages. He denounces with the same unsparing energy the
+oppression of the Papacy and of the king. His point of view is neither that
+of a courtier nor of a churchman but of an Englishman, and the new national
+tone of his chronicle is but the echo of a national sentiment which at last
+bound nobles and yeomen and churchmen together into a people resolute to
+wrest freedom from the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wales]
+
+The nation was outraged like the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the
+Charter failed to bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248,
+in 1249, and again in 1255 the great Council fruitlessly renewed its demand
+for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce
+good government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the
+great officers of the Crown were appointed in the Council of the Baronage.
+But Henry refused their offer with scorn and sold his plate to the citizens
+of London to find payment for his household. A spirit of mutinous defiance
+broke out on the failure of all legal remedy. When the Earl of Norfolk
+refused him aid Henry answered with a threat. "I will send reapers and reap
+your fields for you," he said. "And I will send you back the heads of your
+reapers," replied the Earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and the
+refusal of supplies, the Crown was in fact penniless; and yet never was
+money more wanted, for a trouble which had long pressed upon the English
+kings had now grown to a height that called for decisive action. Even his
+troubles at home could not blind Henry to the need of dealing with the
+difficulty of Wales. Of the three Welsh states into which all that remained
+unconquered of Britain had been broken by the victories of Deorham and
+Chester, two had long ceased to exist. The country between the Clyde and
+the Dee had been gradually absorbed by the conquests of Northumbria and the
+growth of the Scot monarchy. West Wales, between the British Channel and
+the estuary of the Severn, had yielded to the sword of Ecgberht. But a
+fiercer resistance prolonged the independence of the great central portion
+which alone in modern language preserves the name of Wales. Comprising in
+itself the largest and most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was aided
+in its struggle against Mercia by the weakness of its assailant, the
+youngest and feeblest of the English states, as well as by an internal
+warfare which distracted the energies of the invaders. But Mercia had no
+sooner risen to supremacy among the English kingdoms than it took the work
+of conquest vigorously in hand. Offa tore from Wales the border-land
+between the Severn and the Wye; the raids of his successors carried fire
+and sword into the heart of the country; and an acknowledgement of the
+Mercian overlordship was wrested from the Welsh princes. On the fall of
+Mercia this overlordship passed to the West-Saxon kings, and the Laws of
+Howel Dda own the payment of a yearly tribute by "the prince of Aberffraw"
+to "the King of London." The weakness of England during her long struggle
+with the Danes revived the hopes of British independence; it was the
+co-operation of the Welsh on which the northmen reckoned in their attack on
+the house of Ecgberht. But with the fall of the Danelaw the British princes
+were again brought to submission, and when in the midst of the Confessor's
+reign the Welsh seized on a quarrel between the houses of Leofric and
+Godwine to cross the border and carry their attacks into England itself,
+the victories of Harold reasserted the English supremacy. Disembarking on
+the coast his light-armed troops he penetrated to the heart of the
+mountains, and the successors of the Welsh prince Gruffydd, whose head was
+the trophy of the campaign, swore to observe the old fealty and render the
+old tribute to the English Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wales and the Normans]
+
+A far more desperate struggle began when the wave of Norman conquest broke
+on the Welsh frontier. A chain of great earldoms, settled by William along
+the border-land, at once bridled the old marauding forays. From his county
+palatine of Chester Hugh the Wolf harried Flintshire into a desert, Robert
+of Belesme in his earldom of Shrewsbury "slew the Welsh," says a
+chronicler, "like sheep, conquered them, enslaved them and flayed them with
+nails of iron." The earldom of Gloucester curbed Britain along the lower
+Severn. Backed by these greater baronies a horde of lesser adventurers
+obtained the royal "licence to make conquest on the Welsh." Monmouth and
+Abergavenny were seized and guarded by Norman castellans; Bernard of
+Neufmarché won the lordship of Brecknock; Roger of Montgomery raised the
+town and fortress in Powysland which still preserves his name. A great
+rising of the whole people in the days of the second William won back some
+of this Norman spoil. The new castle of Montgomery was burned, Brecknock
+and Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and the Welsh poured ravaging
+over the English border. Twice the Red King carried his arms fruitlessly
+among the mountains against enemies who took refuge in their fastnesses
+till famine and hardship drove his broken host into retreat. The wiser
+policy of Henry the First fell back on his father's system of gradual
+conquest. A new tide of invasion flowed along the southern coast, where the
+land was level and open and accessible from the sea. The attack was aided
+by strife in the country itself. Robert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Gloucester,
+was summoned to his aid by a Welsh chieftain; and his defeat of Rhys ap
+Tewdor, the last prince under whom Southern Wales was united, produced an
+anarchy which enabled Robert to land safely on the coast of Glamorgan, to
+conquer the country round, and to divide it among his soldiers. A force of
+Flemings and Englishmen followed the Earl of Clare as he landed near
+Milford Haven and pushing back the British inhabitants settled a "Little
+England" in the present Pembrokeshire. A few daring adventurers accompanied
+the Norman Lord of Kemeys into Cardigan, where land might be had for the
+winning by any one who would "wage war on the Welsh."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Welsh Revival]
+
+It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of the British race
+seemed at hand, that a new outburst of energy rolled back the tide of
+invasion and changed the fitful resistance of the separate Welsh provinces
+into a national effort to regain independence. To all outer seeming Wales
+had become utterly barbarous. Stripped of every vestige of the older Roman
+civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement
+from the general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons had sunk
+into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk of
+the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, retaining no
+higher political organization than that of the clan, their strength was
+broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united only in battle or in raid
+against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild people there still
+lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years
+before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest
+Englishmen. At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was
+suddenly broken by a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth century
+burst forth, not from one bard or another, but from the nation at large.
+The Welsh temper indeed was steeped in poetry. "In every house," says the
+shrewd Gerald de Barri, "strangers who arrived in the morning were
+entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens and the music of the
+harp." A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of
+western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable
+means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a
+developement of the old Celtic language heard by Cæsar as the Romance
+tongues are developements of Cæsar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than
+any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure
+and to settled literary form. No other mediæval literature shows at its
+outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh.
+But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling
+freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into
+a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the symbol of the
+strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the romantic
+tales which reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Welsh Poetry]
+
+The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact,
+tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal. When
+Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The "descent
+into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediæval horror with
+the mediæval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends his
+years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with
+fair women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new
+earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken
+by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero's
+armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright with
+glancing colour. "The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk,
+and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious
+emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold than the flower of the
+broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her
+hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the
+spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of
+the falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the
+breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses."
+Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the
+gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so
+quick to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions,
+its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passionate
+melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impossible, by an instinct
+of what is noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of nature.
+The wildest extravagance of the tale-teller is relieved by some graceful
+play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, some magical touch of
+beauty. As Kulwch's greyhounds bound from side to side of their master's
+steed, they "sport round him like two sea-swallows." His spear is "swifter
+than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth
+when the dew of June is at the heaviest." A subtle, observant love of
+nature and natural beauty takes fresh colour from the passionate human
+sentiment with which it is imbued. "I love the birds" sings Gwalchmai "and
+their sweet voices in the lulling songs of the wood"; he watches at night
+beside the fords "among the untrodden grass" to hear the nightingale and
+watch the play of the sea-mew. Even patriotism takes the same picturesque
+form. The Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Saxon; as he
+dwells on his own he tells of "its sea-coast and its mountains, its towns
+on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its waters, and its
+valleys, its white sea-mews, its beauteous women." Here as everywhere the
+sentiment of nature passes swiftly and subtly into the sentiment of a human
+tenderness: "I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil" goes on the
+song; "I love the marches of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a
+snow-white arm." In the Celtic love of woman there is little of the
+Teutonic depth and earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of
+delicate enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light of
+dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty. "White is my
+love as the apple-blossom, as the ocean's spray; her face shines like the
+pearly dew on Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is like the light of sunset."
+The buoyant and elastic temper of the French trouveur was spiritualized in
+the Welsh singers by a more refined poetic feeling. "Whoso beheld her was
+filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod." A
+touch of pure fancy such as this removes its object out of the sphere of
+passion into one of delight and reverence.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Bards]
+
+It is strange to pass from the world of actual Welsh history into such a
+world as this. But side by side with this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy
+and romance ran a torrent of intenser song. The spirit of the earlier
+bards, their joy in battle, their love of freedom, broke out anew in ode
+after ode, in songs extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, but fused into
+poetry by the intense fire of patriotism which glowed within them. Every
+fight, every hero had its verse. The names of older singers, of Taliesin,
+Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, were revived in bold forgeries to animate the
+national resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in North Wales that the
+spirit of patriotism received its strongest inspiration from this burst of
+song. Again and again Henry the Second was driven to retreat from the
+impregnable fastnesses where the "Lords of Snowdon," the princes of the
+house of Gruffydd ap Conan, claimed supremacy over the whole of Wales. Once
+in the pass of Consilt a cry arose that the king was slain, Henry of Essex
+flung down the royal standard, and the king's desperate efforts could
+hardly save his army from utter rout. The bitter satire of the Welsh
+singers bade him knight his horse, since its speed had alone saved him from
+capture. In a later campaign the invaders were met by storms of rain, and
+forced to abandon their baggage in a headlong flight to Chester. The
+greatest of the Welsh odes, that known to English readers in Gray's
+translation as "The Triumph of Owen," is Gwalchmai's song of victory over
+the repulse of an English fleet from Abermenai.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Llewelyn ap Jorwerth]
+
+The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth seemed destined to realize
+the hopes of his countrymen. The homage which he succeeded in extorting
+from the whole of the Welsh chieftains during a reign which lasted from
+1194 to 1246 placed him openly at the head of his race, and gave a new
+character to its struggle with the English king. In consolidating his
+authority within his own domains, and in the assertion of his lordship over
+the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth aimed steadily at securing
+the means of striking off the yoke of the Saxon. It was in vain that John
+strove to buy his friendship by the hand of his natural daughter Johanna.
+Fresh raids on the Marches forced the king to enter Wales in 1211; but
+though his army reached Snowdon it fell back like its predecessors, starved
+and broken before an enemy it could never reach. A second attack in the
+same year had better success. The chieftains of South Wales were drawn from
+their new allegiance to join the English forces, and Llewelyn, prisoned in
+his fastnesses, was at last driven to submit. But the ink of the treaty was
+hardly dry before Wales was again on fire; a common fear of the English
+once more united its chieftains, and the war between John and his barons
+soon removed all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his allegiance to
+an excommunicated king, and allied with the barons under Fitz-Walter--too
+glad to enlist in their cause a prince who could hold in check the nobles
+of the border country where the royalist cause was strongest--Llewelyn
+seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex Powys, the central
+district of Wales where the English influence had always been powerful, to
+clear the royal garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardigan, and to force even
+the Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Llewelyn and the Bards]
+
+England watched these efforts of the subject race with an anger still
+mingled with contempt. "Who knows not," exclaims Matthew Paris as he dwells
+on the new pretensions of the Welsh ruler, "who knows not that the Prince
+of Wales is a petty vassal of the King of England?" But the temper of
+Llewelyn's own people was far other than the temper of the English
+chronicler. The hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph of
+the Lord of Snowdon. His court was crowded with bardic singers. "He pours,"
+sings one of them, "his gold into the lap of the bard as the ripe fruit
+falls from the trees." Gold however was hardly needed to wake their
+enthusiasm. Poet after poet sang of "the Devastator of England," the "Eagle
+of men that loves not to lie nor sleep," "towering above the rest of men
+with his long red lance," his "red helmet of battle crested with a fierce
+wolf." "The sound of his coming is like the roar of the wave as it rushes
+to the shore, that can neither be stayed nor hushed." Lesser bards strung
+together Llewelyn's victories in rough jingle of rime and hounded him on to
+the slaughter. "Be of good courage in the slaughter," sings Elidir, "cling
+to thy work, destroy England, and plunder its multitudes." A fierce thirst
+for blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses of the court singers.
+"Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in heaps," bursts out a triumphant
+bard; "St. Clears, with its bright white lands, it is not Saxons who hold
+it now!" "In Swansea, the key of Lloegria, we made widows of all the
+wives." "The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with
+the leader of wolves and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers
+with keen scent of carcases." "Better," closes the song, "better the grave
+than the life of man who sighs when the horns call him forth, to the
+squares of battle."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Welsh hopes]
+
+But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out of the mere mob of
+chieftains who live by rapine, and boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from
+hand to hand through the hall that "they take and give no quarter."
+"Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious," he was "the great Caesar" who was
+to gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of the Celtic race.
+Mysterious prophecies, the prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from
+lip to lip and were heard even along the Seine and the Rhine, came home
+again to nerve Wales to its last struggle with the stranger. Medrawd and
+Arthur, men whispered, would appear once more on earth to fight over again
+the fatal battle of Camlan in which the hero-king perished. The last
+conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still lived to combat for his
+people. The supposed verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope of a
+restoration of the Cymry. "In their hands shall be all the land from
+Britanny to Man: ... a rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving out
+of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gathered up in the strange work
+of Geoffry of Monmouth, these predictions had long been making a deep
+impression not on Wales only but on its conquerors. It was to meet the
+dreams of a yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king at
+Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the Second. But neither trick
+nor conquest could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory
+of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who joined his
+host, "that your people of rebels can withstand my army?" "My people,"
+replied the chieftain, "may be weakened by your might, and even in great
+part destroyed, but unless the wrath of God be on the side of its foe it
+will not perish utterly. Nor deem I that other race or other tongue will
+answer for this corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last day
+save this people and tongue of Wales." So ran the popular rime, "Their Lord
+they will praise, their speech they shall keep, their land they shall
+lose--except wild Wales."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Provisions of Oxford]
+
+Faith and prophecy seemed justified by the growing strength of the British
+people. The weakness and dissensions which characterized the reign of Henry
+the Third enabled Llewelyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a practical independence
+till the close of his life, when a fresh acknowledgement of the English
+supremacy was wrested from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of
+his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Gruffydd, who followed him in
+1246. The raids of the new chieftain swept the border to the very gates of
+Chester, while his conquest of Glamorgan seemed to bind the whole people
+together in a power strong enough to meet any attack from the stranger. So
+pressing was the danger that it called the king's eldest son, Edward, to
+the field; but his first appearance in arms ended in a crushing defeat. The
+defeat however remained unavenged. Henry's dreams were of mightier
+enterprises than the reduction of the Welsh. The Popes were still fighting
+their weary battle against the House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its
+kingdom of Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy See,
+to any power that would aid them in the struggle. In 1254 it was offered to
+the king's second son, Edmund. With imbecile pride Henry accepted the
+offer, prepared to send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to
+repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the purposes of his war. In
+a Parliament at the opening of 1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the
+clergy. A fresh demand was made in 1258. But the patience of the realm was
+at last exhausted. Earl Simon had returned in 1253 from his government of
+Gascony, and the fruit of his meditations during the four years of his
+quiet stay at home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to France and
+Scotland which showed there was as yet no open quarrel with Henry, was seen
+in a league of the baronage and in their adoption of a new and startling
+policy. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of
+the Charter: its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage and a
+definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge;
+its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own
+stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the Charter and
+his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken. The barons
+had secured the freedom of the realm; the secret of their long patience
+during the reign of Henry lay in the difficulty of securing its right
+administration. It was this difficulty which Earl Simon was prepared to
+solve when action was forced on him by the stir of the realm. A great
+famine added to the sense of danger from Wales and from Scotland and to the
+irritation at the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year
+1258 opened. It was to arrange for a campaign against Wales that Henry
+called a parliament in April. But the baronage appeared in arms with
+Gloucester and Leicester at their head. The king was forced to consent to
+the appointment of a committee of twenty-four to draw up terms for the
+reform of the state. The Twenty-four again met the Parliament at Oxford in
+June, and although half the committee consisted of royal ministers and
+favourites it was impossible to resist the tide of popular feeling. Hugh
+Bigod, one of the firmest adherents of the two Earls, was chosen as
+Justiciar. The claim to elect this great officer was in fact the leading
+point in the baronial policy. But further measures were needed to hold in
+check such arbitrary misgovernment as had prevailed during the last twenty
+years. By the "Provisions of Oxford" it was agreed that the Great Council
+should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned by the king or no; and
+on each occasion "the Commonalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall
+come to the Parliaments, and at other times when occasion shall be when the
+King and his Council shall send for them, to treat of the wants of the king
+and of his kingdom. And the Commonalty shall hold as established that which
+these Twelve shall do." Three permanent committees of barons and prelates
+were named to carry out the work of reform and administration. The reform
+of the Church was left to the original Twenty-four; a second Twenty-four
+negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent Council of Fifteen advised the
+king in the ordinary work of government. The complexity of such an
+arrangement was relieved by the fact that the members of each of these
+committees were in great part the same persons. The Justiciar, Chancellor,
+and the guardians of the king's castles swore to act only with the advice
+and assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two great officers, with
+the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at the end
+of the year. Sheriffs were to be appointed for a single year only, no doubt
+by the Council, from among the chief tenants of the county, and no undue
+fees were to be exacted for the administration of justice in their court.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Government of the Barons]
+
+A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in that tongue since
+the Conquest which has reached us, ordered the observance of these
+Provisions. The king was in fact helpless, and resistance came only from
+the foreign favourites, who refused to surrender the castles and honours
+which had been granted to them. But the Twenty-four were resolute in their
+action; and an armed demonstration of the barons drove the foreigners in
+flight over sea. The whole royal power was now in fact in the hands of the
+committees appointed by the Great Council. But the measures of the barons
+showed little of the wisdom and energy which the country had hoped for. In
+October 1259 the knighthood complained that the barons had done nothing but
+seek their own advantage in the recent changes. This protest produced the
+Provisions of Westminster, which gave protection to tenants against their
+feudal lords, regulated legal procedure in the feudal courts, appointed
+four knights in each shire to watch the justice of the sheriffs, and made
+other temporary enactments for the furtherance of justice. But these
+Provisions brought little fruit, and a tendency to mere feudal privilege
+showed itself in an exemption of all nobles and prelates from attendance at
+the Sheriff's courts. Their foreign policy was more vigorous and
+successful. All further payment to Rome, whether secular or ecclesiastical,
+was prohibited, formal notice was given to the Pope of England's withdrawal
+from the Sicilian enterprise, peace put an end to the incursions of the
+Welsh, and negotiations on the footing of a formal abandonment of the
+king's claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in
+October 1259 in a peace with France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon and the Baronage]
+
+This peace, the triumph of that English policy which had been struggling
+ever since the days of Hubert de Burgh with the Continental policy of Henry
+and his foreign advisers, was the work of the Earl of Leicester. The
+revolution had doubtless been mainly Simon's doing. In the summer of 1258,
+while the great change was going on, a thunderstorm drove the king as he
+passed along the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where the Earl
+was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take shelter with him and have no
+fear of the storm. The king refused with petulant wit. "If I fear the
+thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world." But
+Simon had probably small faith in the cumbrous system of government which
+the Barons devised, and it was with reluctance that he was brought to swear
+to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it. With their home government
+he had little to do, for from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he was
+chiefly busied in negotiation in France. But already his breach with
+Gloucester and the bulk of his fellow councillors was marked. In the Lent
+Parliament of 1259 he had reproached them, and Gloucester above all, with
+faithlessness to their trust. "The things we are treating of," he cried,
+"we have sworn to carry out. With such feeble and faithless men I care not
+to have ought to do!" The peace with France was hardly signed when his
+distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's withdrawal to the French
+court at the close of the year for the formal signature of the treaty was
+the signal for a reactionary movement. From France the king forbade the
+summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his resumption of the
+enterprise against Sicily. Both acts were distinct breaches of the
+Provisions of Oxford, but Henry trusted to the divisions of the
+Twenty-four. Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester; the Justiciar,
+Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the spring; and both of these leaders
+drew cautiously to the king. Roger Mortimer and the Earls of Hereford and
+Norfolk more openly espoused the royal cause, and in February 1260 Henry
+had gained confidence enough to announce that as the barons had failed to
+keep their part of the Provisions he should not keep his.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Counter Revolution]
+
+Earl Simon almost alone remained unshaken. But his growing influence was
+seen in the appointment of his supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar in
+Bigod's place, while his strength was doubled by the accession of the
+King's son Edward to his side. In the moment of the revolution Edward had
+vehemently supported the party of the foreigners. But he had sworn to
+observe the Provisions, and the fidelity to his pledge which remained
+throughout his life the chief note of his temper at once showed itself.
+Like Simon he protested against the faithlessness of the barons in the
+carrying out of their reforms, and it was his strenuous support of the
+petition of the knighthood that brought about the additional Provisions of
+1259. He had been brought up with Earl Simon's sons, and with the Earl
+himself his relations remained friendly even at the later time of their
+fatal hostilities. But as yet he seems to have had no distrust of Simon's
+purposes or policy. His adhesion to the Earl recalled Henry from France;
+and the king was at once joined by Gloucester in London while Edward and
+Simon remained without the walls. But the love of father and son proved too
+strong to bear political severance, and Edward's reconciliation foiled the
+Earl's plans. He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh troubles were
+breaking out, while Henry prepared to deal his final blow at the government
+which, tottering as it was, still held him in check. Rome had resented the
+measures which had put an end to her extortions, and it was to Rome that
+Henry looked for a formal absolution from his oath to observe the
+Provisions. In June 1261 he produced a Bull annulling the Provisions and
+freeing him from his oath in a Parliament at Winchester. The suddenness of
+the blow forbade open protest and Henry quickly followed up his victory.
+Hugh Bigod, who had surrendered the Tower and Dover in the spring,
+surrendered the other castles he held in the autumn. Hugh Despenser was
+deposed from the Justiciarship and a royalist, Philip Basset, appointed in
+his place.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's rising]
+
+The news of this counter-revolution reunited for a moment the barons.
+Gloucester joined Earl Simon in calling an autumn Parliament at St.
+Alban's, and in summoning to it three knights from every shire south of
+Trent. But the union was a brief one. Gloucester consented to refer the
+quarrel with the king to arbitration and the Earl of Leicester withdrew in
+August to France. He saw that for the while there was no means of
+withstanding Henry, even in his open defiance of the Provisions. Foreign
+soldiers were brought into the land; the king won back again the
+appointment of sheriffs. For eighteen months of this new rule Simon could
+do nothing but wait. But his long absence lulled the old jealousies against
+him. The confusion of the realm and a fresh outbreak of troubles in Wales
+renewed the disgust at Henry's government, while his unswerving
+faithfulness to the Provisions fixed the eyes of all Englishmen upon the
+Earl as their natural leader. The death of Gloucester in the summer of 1262
+removed the one barrier to action; and in the spring of 1263 Simon landed
+again in England as the unquestioned head of the baronial party. What
+immediately forced him to action was a march of Edward with a body of
+foreign troops against Llewelyn, who was probably by this time in
+communication if not in actual alliance with the Earl. The chief opponents
+of Llewelyn among the Marcher Lords were ardent supporters of Henry's
+misgovernment, and when a common hostility drew the Prince and Earl
+together, the constitutional position of Llewelyn as an English noble gave
+formal justification for co-operation with him. At Whitsuntide the barons
+met Simon at Oxford and finally summoned Henry to observe the Provisions.
+His refusal was met by an appeal to arms. Throughout the country the
+younger nobles flocked to Simon's standard, and the young Earl of
+Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, became his warmest supporter. His rapid
+movements foiled all opposition. While Henry vainly strove to raise money
+and men, Simon swept the Welsh border, marched through Reading on Dover,
+and finally appeared before London.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Mise of Amiens]
+
+The Earl's triumph was complete. Edward after a brief attempt at resistance
+was forced to surrender Windsor and disband his foreign troops. The rising
+of London in the cause of the barons left Henry helpless. But at the moment
+of triumph the Earl saw himself anew forsaken. The bulk of the nobles again
+drew towards the king; only six of the twelve barons who had formed the
+patriot half of the committee of 1258, only four of the twelve
+representatives of the community at that date, were now with the Earl. The
+dread too of civil war gave strength to the cry for a compromise, and at
+the end of the year it was agreed that the strife should be left to the
+arbitration of the French king, Lewis the Ninth. But saint and just ruler
+as he was, the royal power was in the conception of Lewis a divine thing,
+which no human power could limit or fetter, and his decision, which was
+given in January 1264, annulled the whole of the Provisions. Only the
+Charters granted before the Provisions were to be observed. The appointment
+and removal of all officers of state was to be wholly with the king, and he
+was suffered to call aliens to his councils if he would. The Mise of Amiens
+was at once confirmed by the Pope, and, crushing blow as it was, the barons
+felt themselves bound by the award. It was only the exclusion of aliens--a
+point which they had not purposed to submit to arbitration--which they
+refused to concede. Luckily Henry was as inflexible on this point as on the
+rest, and the mutual distrust prevented any real accommodation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Lewes]
+
+But Henry had to reckon on more than the baronage. Deserted as he was by
+the greater nobles, Simon was far from standing alone. Throughout the
+recent struggle the new city governments of the craft-gilds, which were
+known by the name of "Communes," had shown an enthusiastic devotion to his
+cause. The queen was stopped in her attempt to escape from the Tower by an
+angry mob, who drove her back with stones and foul words. When Henry
+attempted to surprise Leicester in his quarters at Southwark, the Londoners
+burst the gates which had been locked by the richer burghers against him,
+and rescued him by a welcome into the city. The clergy and the universities
+went in sympathy with the towns, and in spite of the taunts of the
+royalists, who accused him of seeking allies against the nobility in the
+common people, the popular enthusiasm gave a strength to the Earl which
+sustained him even in this darkest hour of the struggle. He at once
+resolved on resistance. The French award had luckily reserved the rights of
+Englishmen to the liberties they had enjoyed before the Provisions of
+Oxford, and it was easy for Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave
+to the Crown was as contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions
+themselves. London was the first to reject the decision; in March 1264 its
+citizens mustered at the call of the town-bell at Saint Paul's, seized the
+royal officials, and plundered the royal parks. But an army had already
+mustered in great force at the king's summons, while Leicester found
+himself deserted by the bulk of the baronage. Every day brought news of
+ill. A detachment from Scotland joined Henry's forces. The younger De
+Montfort was taken prisoner. Northampton was captured, the king raised the
+siege of Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl Simon's only saved London
+itself from a surprise by Edward. But, betrayed as he was, the Earl
+remained firm to the cause. He would fight to the end, he said, even were
+he and his sons left to fight alone. With an army reinforced by 15,000
+Londoners, he marched in May to the relief of the Cinque Ports which were
+now threatened by the king. Even on the march he was forsaken by many of
+the nobles who followed him. Halting at Fletching in Sussex, a few miles
+from Lewes, where the royal army was encamped, Earl Simon with the young
+Earl of Gloucester offered the king compensation for all damage if he would
+observe the Provisions. Henry's answer was one of defiance, and though
+numbers were against him, the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a
+soldier reversed the advantages of the ground; marching at dawn on the 14th
+of May he seized the heights eastward of the town, and moved down these
+slopes to an attack. His men with white crosses on back and breast knelt in
+prayer before the battle opened, and all but reached the town before their
+approach was perceived. Edward however opened the fight by a furious charge
+which broke the Londoners on Leicester's left. In the bitterness of his
+hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles,
+slaughtering three thousand men. But he returned to find the battle lost.
+Crowded in the narrow space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space
+broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, the royalist centre
+and left were crushed by Earl Simon. The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the
+Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, "makede him a castel
+of a mulne post" ("he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels" goes on
+the sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.
+Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father's surrender.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's rule]
+
+The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. "Now
+England breathes in the hope of liberty," sang a poet of the time; "the
+English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and
+their foes are vanquished." But the moderation of the terms agreed upon in
+the Mise of Lewes, a convention between the king and his captors, shows
+Simon's sense of the difficulties of his position. The question of the
+Provisions was again to be submitted to arbitration; and a parliament in
+June, to which four knights were summoned from every county, placed the
+administration till this arbitration was complete in the hands of a new
+council of nine to be nominated by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester
+and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester. Responsibility to the community was
+provided for by the declaration of a right in the body of barons and
+prelates to remove either of the Three Electors, who in turn could displace
+or appoint the members of the Council. Such a constitution was of a
+different order from the cumbrous and oligarchical committees of 1258. But
+it had little time to work in. The plans for a fresh arbitration broke
+down. Lewis refused to review his decision, and all schemes for setting
+fresh judges between the king and his people were defeated by a formal
+condemnation of the barons' cause issued by the Pope. Triumphant as he was
+indeed Earl Simon's difficulties thickened every day. The queen with
+Archbishop Boniface gathered an army in France for an invasion; Roger
+Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms and only held in check by
+Llewelyn. It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king,
+yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. The imprisonment
+too gave a shock to public feeling which thinned the Earl's ranks. In the
+new Parliament which he called at the opening of 1265 the weakness of the
+patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only
+twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and
+twenty ecclesiastics.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Summons of the Commons]
+
+But it was just this sense of his weakness which prompted the Earl to an
+act that has done more than any incident of this struggle to immortalize
+his name. Had the strife been simply a strife for power between the king
+and the baronage the victory of either would have been equally fatal in its
+results. The success of the one would have doomed England to a royal
+despotism, that of the other to a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our
+freedom the English baronage had been brought too low by the policy of the
+kings to be able to withstand the crown single-handed. From the first
+moment of the contest it had been forced to make its cause a national one.
+The summons of two knights from each county, elected in its county court,
+to a Parliament in 1254, even before the opening of the struggle, was a
+recognition of the political weight of the country gentry which was
+confirmed by the summons of four knights from every county to the
+Parliament assembled after the battle of Lewes. The Provisions of Oxford,
+in stipulating for attendance and counsel on the part of twelve delegates
+of the "commonalty," gave the first indication of a yet wider appeal to the
+people at large. But it was the weakness of his party among the baronage at
+this great crisis which drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of
+mighty issue in our history. As before, he summoned two knights from every
+county. But he created a new force in English politics when he summoned to
+sit beside them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of
+delegates from the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any
+matter respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ
+issued by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit
+beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the parliament
+of the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's difficulties]
+
+It is only this great event however which enables us to understand the
+large and prescient nature of Earl Simon's designs. Hardly a few months had
+passed away since the victory of Lewes when the burghers took their seats
+at Westminster, yet his government was tottering to its fall. We know
+little of the Parliament's acts. It seems to have chosen Simon as Justiciar
+and to have provided for Edward's liberation, though he was still to live
+under surveillance at Hereford and to surrender his earldom of Chester to
+Simon, who was thus able to communicate with his Welsh allies. The Earl met
+the dangers from without with complete success. In September 1264 a general
+muster of the national forces on Barham Down and a contrary wind put an end
+to the projects of invasion entertained by the mercenaries whom the queen
+had collected in Flanders; the threats of France died away into
+negotiations; the Papal Legate was forbidden to cross the Channel, and his
+bulls of excommunication were flung into the sea. But the difficulties at
+home grew more formidable every day. The restraint upon Henry and Edward
+jarred against the national feeling of loyalty, and estranged the mass of
+Englishmen who always side with the weak. Small as the patriotic party
+among the barons had been from the first, it grew smaller as dissensions
+broke out over the spoils of victory. The Earl's justice and resolve to
+secure the public peace told heavily against him. John Giffard left him
+because he refused to allow him to exact ransom from a prisoner, contrary
+to the agreement made after Lewes. A greater danger opened when the young
+Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the estates of the foreigners,
+held himself aloof from the Justiciar, and resented Leicester's prohibition
+of a tournament, his naming the wardens of the royal castles by his own
+authority, his holding Edward's fortresses on the Welsh marches by his own
+garrisons.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and Gloucester]
+
+Gloucester's later conduct proves the wisdom of Leicester's precautions. In
+the spring Parliament of 1265 he openly charged the Earl with violating the
+Mise of Lewes, with tyranny, and with aiming at the crown. Before its close
+he withdrew to his own lands in the west and secretly allied himself with
+Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Barons. Earl Simon soon followed him to the
+west, taking with him the king and Edward. He moved along the Severn,
+securing its towns, advanced westward to Hereford, and was marching at the
+end of May along bad roads into the heart of South Wales to attack the
+fortresses of Earl Gilbert in Glamorgan when Edward suddenly made his
+escape from Hereford and joined Gloucester at Ludlow. The moment had been
+skilfully chosen, and Edward showed a rare ability in the movements by
+which he took advantage of the Earl's position. Moving rapidly along the
+Severn he seized Gloucester and the bridges across the river, destroyed the
+ships by which Leicester strove to escape across the Channel to Bristol,
+and cut him off altogether from England. By this movement too he placed
+himself between the Earl and his son Simon, who was advancing from the east
+to his father's relief. Turning rapidly on this second force Edward
+surprised it at Kenilworth and drove it with heavy loss within the walls of
+the castle. But the success was more than compensated by the opportunity
+which his absence gave to the Earl of breaking the line of the Severn.
+Taken by surprise and isolated as he was, Simon had been forced to seek for
+aid and troops in an avowed alliance with Llewelyn, and it was with Welsh
+reinforcements that he turned to the east. But the seizure of his ships and
+of the bridges of the Severn held him a prisoner in Edward's grasp, and a
+fierce attack drove him back, with broken and starving forces, into the
+Welsh hills. In utter despair he struck northward to Hereford; but the
+absence of Edward now enabled him on the 2nd of August to throw his troops
+in boats across the Severn below Worcester. The news drew Edward quickly
+back in a fruitless counter-march to the river, for the Earl had already
+reached Evesham by a long night march on the morning of the 4th, while his
+son, relieved in turn by Edward's counter-march, had pushed in the same
+night to the little town of Alcester. The two armies were now but some ten
+miles apart, and their junction seemed secured. But both were spent with
+long marching, and while the Earl, listening reluctantly to the request of
+the King who accompanied him, halted at Evesham for mass and dinner, the
+army of the younger Simon halted for the same purpose at Alcester.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Evesham]
+
+"Those two dinners doleful were, alas!" sings Robert of Gloucester; for
+through the same memorable night Edward was hurrying back from the Severn
+by country cross-lanes to seize the fatal gap that lay between them. As
+morning broke his army lay across the road that led northward from Evesham
+to Alcester. Evesham lies in a loop of the river Avon where it bends to the
+south; and a height on which Edward ranged his troops closed the one outlet
+from it save across the river. But a force had been thrown over the river
+under Mortimer to seize the bridges, and all retreat was thus finally cut
+off. The approach of Edward's army called Simon to the front, and for the
+moment he took it for his son's. Though the hope soon died away a touch of
+soldierly pride moved him as he recognised in the orderly advance of his
+enemies a proof of his own training. "By the arm of St. James," he cried,
+"they come on in wise fashion, but it was from me that they learnt it." A
+glance however satisfied him of the hopelessness of a struggle; it was
+impossible for a handful of horsemen with a mob of half-armed Welshmen to
+resist the disciplined knighthood of the royal army. "Let us commend our
+souls to God," Simon said to the little group around him, "for our bodies
+are the foe's." He bade Hugh Despenser and the rest of his comrades fly
+from the field. "If he died," was the noble answer, "they had no will to
+live." In three hours the butchery was over. The Welsh fled at the first
+onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in the cornfields and
+gardens where they sought refuge. The little group of knights around Simon
+fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. So
+terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but gained the hill-top
+when a lance-thrust brought his horse to the ground, but Simon still
+rejected the summons to yield till a blow from behind felled him mortally
+wounded to the ground. Then with a last cry of "It is God's grace," the
+soul of the great patriot passed away.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Royalist reaction]
+
+The triumphant blare of trumpets which welcomed the rescued king into
+Evesham, "his men weeping for joy," rang out in bitter contrast to the
+mourning of the realm. It sounded like the announcement of a reign of
+terror. The rights and laws for which men had toiled and fought so long
+seemed to have been swept away in an hour. Every town which had supported
+Earl Simon was held to be at the king's mercy, its franchises to be
+forfeited. The Charter of Lynn was annulled; London was marked out as the
+special object of Henry's vengeance, and the farms and merchandise of its
+citizens were seized as first-fruits of its plunder. The darkness which on
+that fatal morning hid their books from the monks of Evesham as they sang
+in choir was but a presage of the gloom which fell on the religious houses.
+From Ramsey, from Evesham, from St. Alban's rose the same cry of havoc and
+rapine. But the plunder of monk and burgess was little to the vast sentence
+of confiscation which the mere fact of rebellion was held to have passed on
+all the adherents of Earl Simon. To "disinherit" these of their lands was
+to confiscate half the estates of the landed gentry of England; but the
+hotter royalists declared them disinherited, and Henry was quick to lavish
+their lands away on favourites and foreigners. The very chroniclers of
+their party recall the pillage with shame. But all thought of resistance
+lay hushed in a general terror. Even the younger Simon "saw no other rede"
+than to release his prisoners. His army, after finishing its meal, was
+again on its march to join the Earl when the news of his defeat met it,
+heralded by a strange darkness that, rising suddenly in the north-west and
+following as it were on Edward's track, served to shroud the mutilations
+and horrors of the battle-field. The news was soon fatally confirmed. Simon
+himself could see from afar his father's head borne off on a spear-point to
+be mocked at Wigmore. But the pursuit streamed away southward and westward
+through the streets of Tewkesbury, heaped with corpses of the panic-struck
+Welshmen whom the townsmen slaughtered without pity; and there was no
+attack as the little force fell back through the darkness and big
+thunder-drops in despair upon Kenilworth. "I may hang up my axe," are the
+bitter words which a poet attributes to their leader, "for feebly have I
+gone"; and once within the castle he gave way to a wild sorrow, day after
+day tasting neither meat nor drink.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward]
+
+He was roused into action again by news of the shameful indignities which
+the Marcher Lords had offered to the body of the great Earl before whom
+they had trembled so long. The knights around him broke out at the tidings
+in a passionate burst of fury, and clamoured for the blood of Richard of
+Cornwall and his son, who were prisoners in the castle. But Simon had
+enough nobleness left to interpose. "To God and him alone was it owing"
+Richard owned afterwards, "that I was snatched from death." The captives
+were not only saved, but set free. A Parliament had been called at
+Winchester at the opening of September, and its mere assembly promised an
+end to the reign of utter lawlessness. A powerful party, too, was known to
+exist in the royal camp which, hostile as it had shown itself to Earl
+Simon, shared his love for English liberties, and the liberation of Richard
+was sure to aid its efforts. At the head of this party stood the young Earl
+of Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, to whose action above all the Earl's
+overthrow was due. And with Gilbert stood Edward himself. The passion for
+law, the instinct of good government, which were to make his reign so
+memorable in our history, had declared themselves from the first. He had
+sided with the barons at the outset of their struggle with Henry; he had
+striven to keep his father true to the Provisions of Oxford. It was only
+when the figure of Earl Simon seemed to tower above that of Henry himself,
+when the Crown seemed falling into bondage, that Edward passed to the royal
+side; and now that the danger which he dreaded was over he returned to his
+older attitude. In the first flush of victory, while the doom of Simon was
+as yet unknown, Edward had stood alone in desiring his captivity against
+the cry of the Marcher Lords for his blood. When all was done he wept over
+the corpse of his cousin and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and followed
+the Earl's body to the tomb. But great as was Edward's position after the
+victory of Evesham, his moderate counsels were as yet of little avail. His
+efforts in fact were met by those of Henry's second son, Edmund, who had
+received the lands and earldom of Earl Simon, and whom the dread of any
+restoration of the house of De Montfort set at the head of the
+ultra-royalists. Nor was any hope of moderation to be found in the
+Parliament which met in September 1265. It met in the usual temper of a
+restoration-Parliament to legalize the outrages of the previous month. The
+prisoners who had been released from the dungeons of the barons poured into
+Winchester to add fresh violence to the demands of the Marchers. The wives
+of the captive loyalists and the widows of the slain were summoned to give
+fresh impulse to the reaction. Their place of meeting added fuel to the
+fiery passions of the throng, for Winchester was fresh from its pillage by
+the younger Simon on his way to Kenilworth, and its stubborn loyalty must
+have been fanned into a flame by the losses it had endured. In such an
+assembly no voice of moderation could find a hearing. The four bishops who
+favoured the national cause, the bishops of London and Lincoln, of
+Worcester and Chichester, were excluded from it, and the heads of the
+religious houses were summoned for the mere purpose of extortion. Its
+measures were but a confirmation of the violence which had been wrought.
+All grants made during the king's "captivity" were revoked. The house of De
+Montfort was banished from the realm. The charter of London was annulled.
+The adherents of Earl Simon were disinherited and seizin of their lands was
+given to the king.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's Miracles]
+
+Henry at once appointed commissioners to survey and take possession of his
+spoil while he moved to Windsor to triumph in the humiliation of London.
+Its mayor and forty of its chief citizens waited in the castle yard only to
+be thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and Henry entered his
+capital in triumph as into an enemy's city. The surrender of Dover came to
+fill his cup of joy, for Richard and Amaury of Montfort had sailed with the
+Earl's treasure to enlist foreign mercenaries, and it was by this port that
+their force was destined to land. But a rising of the prisoners detained
+there compelled its surrender in October, and the success of the royalists
+seemed complete. In reality their difficulties were but beginning. Their
+triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious sentiment of
+the time, and religion avenged itself in its own way. Everywhere the Earl's
+death was looked upon as a martyrdom; and monk and friar united in praying
+for the souls of the men who fell at Evesham as for soldiers of Christ. It
+was soon whispered that heaven was attesting the sanctity of De Montfort by
+miracles at his tomb. How great was the effect of this belief was seen in
+the efforts of King and Pope to suppress the miracles, and in their
+continuance not only through the reign of Edward the First but even in the
+days of his successor. But its immediate result was a sudden revival of
+hope. "Sighs are changed into songs of praise," breaks out a monk of the
+time, "and the greatness of our former joy has come to life again!" Nor was
+it in miracles alone that the "faithful," as they proudly styled
+themselves, began to look for relief "from the oppression of the
+malignants." A monk of St. Alban's who was penning a eulogy of Earl Simon
+in the midst of this uproar saw the rise of a new spirit of resistance in
+the streets of the little town. In dread of war it was guarded and strongly
+closed with bolts and bars, and refused entrance to all strangers, and
+above all to horsemen, who wished to pass through. The Constable of
+Hertford, an old foe of the townsmen, boasted that spite of bolts and bars
+he would enter the place and carry off four of the best villeins captive.
+He contrived to make his way in; but as he loitered idly about a butcher
+who passed by heard him ask his men how the wind stood. The butcher guessed
+his design to burn the town, and felled him to the ground. The blow roused
+the townsmen. They secured the Constable and his followers, struck off
+their heads, and fixed them at the four corners of the borough.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Younger Simon]
+
+The popular reaction gave fresh heart to the younger Simon. Quitting
+Kenilworth, he joined in November John D'Eyvill and Baldewin Wake in the
+Isle of Axholme where the Disinherited were gathering in arms. So fast did
+horse and foot flow in to him that Edward himself hurried into Lincolnshire
+to meet this new danger. He saw that the old strife was just breaking out
+again. The garrison of Kenilworth scoured the country; the men of the
+Cinque Ports, putting wives and children on board their barks, swept the
+Channel and harried the coasts; while Llewelyn, who had brought about the
+dissolution of Parliament by a raid upon Chester, butchered the forces sent
+against him and was master of the border. The one thing needed to link the
+forces of resistance together was a head, and such a head the appearance of
+Simon at Axholme seemed to promise. But Edward was resolute in his plan of
+conciliation. Arriving before the camp at the close of 1265, he at once
+entered into negotiations with his cousin, and prevailed on him to quit the
+island and appear before the king. Richard of Cornwall welcomed Simon at
+the court, he presented him to Henry as the saviour of his life, and on his
+promise to surrender Kenilworth Henry gave him the kiss of peace. In spite
+of the opposition of Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Lords success seemed to
+be crowning this bold stroke of the peace party when the Earl of Gloucester
+interposed. Desirous as he was of peace, the blood of De Montfort lay
+between him and the Earl's sons, and the safety of the one lay in the ruin
+of the other. In the face of this danger Earl Gilbert threw his weight into
+the scale of the ultra-royalists, and peace became impossible. The question
+of restitution was shelved by a reference to arbitrators; and Simon,
+detained in spite of a safe-conduct, moved in Henry's train at Christmas to
+witness the surrender of Kenilworth which had been stipulated as the price
+of his full reconciliation with the king. But hot blood was now stirred
+again on both sides. The garrison replied to the royal summons by a refusal
+to surrender. They had received ward of the castle, they said, not from
+Simon but from the Countess, and to none but her would they give it up. The
+refusal was not likely to make Simon's position an easier one. On his
+return to London the award of the arbitrators bound him to quit the realm
+and not to return save with the assent of king and baronage when all were
+at peace. He remained for a while in free custody at London; but warnings
+that he was doomed to lifelong imprisonment drove him to flight, and he
+finally sought a refuge over sea.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Ban of Kenilworth]
+
+His escape set England again on fire. Llewelyn wasted the border; the
+Cinque Ports held the sea; the garrison of Kenilworth pushed their raids as
+far as Oxford; Baldewin Wake with a band of the Disinherited threw himself
+into the woods and harried the eastern counties; Sir Adam Gurdon, a knight
+of gigantic size and renowned prowess, wasted with a smaller party the
+shires of the south. In almost every county bands of outlaws were seeking a
+livelihood in rapine and devastation, while the royal treasury stood empty
+and the enormous fine imposed upon London had been swept into the coffers
+of French usurers. But a stronger hand than the king's was now at the head
+of affairs, and Edward met his assailants with untiring energy. King
+Richard's son, Henry of Almaine, was sent with a large force to the north;
+Mortimer hurried to hold the Welsh border; Edmund was despatched to Warwick
+to hold Kenilworth in check; while Edward himself marched at the opening of
+March to the south. The Berkshire woods were soon cleared, and at
+Whitsuntide Edward succeeded in dispersing Adam Gurdon's band and in
+capturing its renowned leader in single combat. The last blow was already
+given to the rising in the north, where Henry of Almaine surprised the
+Disinherited at Chesterfield and took their leader, the Earl of Derby, in
+his bed. Though Edmund had done little but hold the Kenilworth knights in
+check, the submission of the rest of the country now enabled the royal army
+to besiege it in force. But the king was penniless, and the Parliament
+which he called to replenish his treasury in August showed the resolve of
+the nation that the strife should cease. They would first establish peace,
+if peace were possible, they said, and then answer the king's demand.
+Twelve commissioners, with Earl Gilbert at their head, were appointed on
+Henry's assent to arrange terms on reconciliation. They at once decided
+that none should be utterly disinherited for their part in the troubles,
+but that liberty of redemption should be left open to all. Furious at the
+prospect of being forced to disgorge their spoil, Mortimer and the
+ultra-royalists broke out in mad threats of violence, even against the life
+of the Papal legate who had pressed for the reconciliation. But the power
+of the ultra-royalists was over. The general resolve was not to be shaken
+by the clamour of a faction, and Mortimer's rout at Brecknock by Llewelyn,
+the one defeat that chequered the tide of success, had damaged that
+leader's influence. Backed by Edward and Earl Gilbert, the legate met their
+opposition with a threat of excommunication, and Mortimer withdrew sullenly
+from the camp. Fresh trouble in the country and the seizure of the Isle of
+Ely by a band of the Disinherited quickened the labours of the Twelve. At
+the close of September they pronounced their award, restoring the lands to
+all who made submission on a graduated scale of redemption, promising
+indemnity for all wrong done during the troubles, and leaving the
+restoration of the house of De Montfort to the royal will. But to these
+provisions was added an emphatic demand that "the king fully keep and
+observe those liberties of the Church, charters of liberties, and forest
+charters, which he is expressly and by his own mouth bound to preserve and
+keep." "Let the King," they add, "establish on a lasting foundation those
+concessions which he has hitherto made of his own will and not on
+compulsion, and those needful ordinances which have been devised by his
+subjects and by his own good pleasure."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Close of the Struggle]
+
+With this Award the struggle came to an end. The garrison of Kenilworth
+held out indeed till November, and the full benefit of the Ban was only
+secured when Earl Gilbert in the opening of the following year suddenly
+appeared in arms and occupied London. But the Earl was satisfied, the
+Disinherited were at last driven from Ely, and Llewelyn was brought to
+submission by the appearance of an army at Shrewsbury. All was over by the
+close of 1267. His father's age and weakness, his own brilliant military
+successes, left Edward practically in possession of the royal power; and
+his influence at once made itself felt. There was no attempt to return to
+the misrule of Henry's reign, to his projects of continental aggrandizement
+or internal despotism. The constitutional system of government for which
+the Barons had fought was finally adopted by the Crown, and the Parliament
+of Marlborough which assembled in November 1267 renewed the provisions by
+which the baronage had remedied the chief abuses of the time in their
+Provisions of Oxford and Westminster. The appointment of all officers of
+state indeed was jealously reserved to the crown. But the royal expenditure
+was brought within bounds. Taxation was only imposed with the assent of the
+Great Council. So utterly was the land at rest that Edward felt himself
+free to take the cross in 1268 and to join the Crusade which was being
+undertaken by St. Lewis of France. He reached Tunis only to find Lewis dead
+and his enterprise a failure, wintered in Sicily, made his way to Acre in
+the spring of 1271, and spent more than a year in exploits which want of
+force prevented from growing into a serious campaign. He was already on his
+way home when the death of Henry the Third in November 1272 called him to
+the throne.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+EDWARD THE FIRST
+1272-1307
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward's Temper]
+
+In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object
+of an almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national
+king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away,
+when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended
+for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger but
+an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair
+or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward's very
+temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the
+typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and
+imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged,
+stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too,
+just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant
+of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. It is
+this oneness with the character of his people which parts the temper of
+Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house. He inherited
+indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his
+punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who
+ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped
+dead from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard
+selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the
+house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered; and for the
+most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful,
+averse from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever asked mercy of me," he
+said in his old age, "and was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of
+his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the
+bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to
+drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. "It is I
+who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty
+fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink."
+Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange
+tenderness and sensitiveness to affection. Every subject throughout his
+realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his
+father's death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of
+vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as
+memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier
+rested. "I loved her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's
+friend, the Abbot of Cluny; "I do not cease to love her now she is dead."
+And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All
+the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign kings disappeared in Edward.
+He was the first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with
+a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them
+we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand
+in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England
+understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels
+between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as
+they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection
+of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene
+during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face
+with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned
+himself frankly in the wrong.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Influence of Chivalry]
+
+But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and
+outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in
+Edward's career. His reign was a time in which a foreign, influence told
+strongly on our manners, our literature, our national spirit, for the
+sudden rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy was now making
+its influence dominant in Western Europe. The "chivalry" so familiar to us
+in the pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of
+heroism, love, and courtesy before which all depth and reality of nobleness
+disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest
+caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially
+of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward's nature from which the
+baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety,
+save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere,
+while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence
+of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of
+his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable
+chivalry of his day. His frame was that of a born soldier--tall,
+deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action, and he
+shared to the full his people's love of venture and hard fighting. When he
+encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he forced him single-handed to beg
+for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting
+in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself
+to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. His fame as a general
+seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. At
+his "Round Table of Kenilworth" a hundred lords and ladies, "clad all in
+silk," renewed the faded glories of Arthur's Court. The false air of
+romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into
+outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when
+rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on
+Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal
+influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its
+exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. "Knight
+without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the
+burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common
+robber.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Influence of Legality]
+
+The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power over Edward's mind than
+the French conception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer
+class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance
+into subjection, loose ties such as commendation into a definite vassalage.
+But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis
+and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman Law were
+brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time. When the "sacred
+majesty" of the Cæsars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head
+of a feudal baronage every constitutional relation was changed. The
+"defiance" by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason,
+his after resistance "sacrilege." That Edward could appreciate what was
+sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of
+our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to
+his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He
+was never wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice,
+fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law.
+The high conception of royalty which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with
+this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or
+liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while
+his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was
+incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which
+made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a
+claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason
+the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their
+fathers had borne.
+
+
+[Sidenote: His Moral Grandeur]
+
+It is in the anomalies of such a character as this, in its strange mingling
+of justice and wrong-doing, of grandeur and littleness, that we must look
+for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in
+Edward's conduct and policy. But what none of these anomalies can hide from
+us is the height of moral temper which shows itself in the tenor of his
+rule. Edward was every inch a king; but his notion of kingship was a lofty
+and a noble one. He loved power; he believed in his sovereign rights and
+clung to them with a stubborn tenacity. But his main end in clinging to
+them was the welfare of his people. Nothing better proves the self-command
+which he drew from the purpose he set before him than his freedom from the
+common sin of great rulers--the lust of military glory. He was the first of
+our kings since William the Conqueror who combined military genius with
+political capacity; but of the warrior's temper, of the temper that finds
+delight in war, he had little or none. His freedom from it was the more
+remarkable that Edward was a great soldier. His strategy in the campaign
+before Evesham marked him as a consummate general. Earl Simon was forced to
+admire the skill of his advance on the fatal field, and the operations by
+which he met the risings that followed it were a model of rapidity and
+military grasp. In his Welsh campaigns he was soon to show a tenacity and
+force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could
+head a furious charge of horse as at Lewes, or organize a commissariat
+which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In
+his old age he was quick to discover the value of the English archery and
+to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But master as he was of the
+art of war, and forced from time to time to show his mastery in great
+campaigns, in no single instance was he the assailant. He fought only when
+he was forced to fight; and when fighting was over he turned back quietly
+to the work of administration and the making of laws.
+
+
+[Sidenote: His Political Genius]
+
+War in fact was with Edward simply a means of carrying out the ends of
+statesmanship, and it was in the character of his statesmanship that his
+real greatness made itself felt. His policy was an English policy; he was
+firm to retain what was left of the French dominion of his race, but he
+abandoned from the first all dreams of recovering the wider dominions which
+his grandfather had lost. His mind was not on that side of the Channel, but
+on this. He concentrated his energies on the consolidation and good
+government of England itself. We can only fairly judge the annexation of
+Wales or his attempt to annex Scotland if we look on his efforts in either
+quarter as parts of the same scheme of national administration to which we
+owe his final establishment of our judicature, our legislation, our
+parliament. The character of his action was no doubt determined in great
+part by the general mood of his age, an age whose special task and aim
+seemed to be that of reducing to distinct form the principles which had
+sprung into a new and vigorous life during the age which preceded it. As
+the opening of the thirteenth century had been an age of founders,
+creators, discoverers, so its close was an age of lawyers, of rulers such
+as St. Lewis of France or Alfonso the Wise of Castille, organizers,
+administrators, framers of laws and institutions. It was to this class that
+Edward himself belonged. He had little of creative genius, of political
+originality, but he possessed in a high degree the passion for order and
+good government, the faculty of organization, and a love of law which broke
+out even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped. In the
+judicial reforms to which so much of his attention was directed he showed
+himself, if not an "English Justinian," at any rate a clear-sighted and
+judicious man of business, developing, reforming, bringing into a shape
+which has borne the test of five centuries' experience the institutions of
+his predecessors. If the excellence of a statesman's work is to be measured
+by its duration and the faculty it has shown of adapting itself to the
+growth and developement of a nation, then the work of Edward rises to the
+highest standard of excellence. Our law courts preserve to this very day
+the form which he gave them. Mighty as has been the growth of our
+Parliament, it has grown on the lines which he laid down. The great roll of
+English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the Statutes of Edward.
+The routine of the first Henry, the administrative changes which had been
+imposed on the nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second,
+were transformed under Edward into a political organization with
+carefully-defined limits, directed not by the king's will alone but by the
+political impulse of the people at large. His social legislation was based
+in the same fashion on principles which had already been brought into
+practical working by Henry the Second. It was no doubt in great measure
+owing to this practical sense of its financial and administrative value
+rather than to any foresight of its political importance that we owe
+Edward's organization of our Parliament. But if the institutions which we
+commonly associate with his name owe their origin to others, they owe their
+form and their perpetuity to him.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Constitutional Aspect of his Reign]
+
+The king's English policy, like his English name, was in fact the sign of a
+new epoch. England was made. The long period of national formation had come
+practically to an end. With the reign of Edward begins the constitutional
+England in which we live. It is not that any chasm separates our history
+before it from our history after it as the chasm of the Revolution divides
+the history of France, for we have traced the rudiments of our constitution
+to the first moment of the English settlement in Britain. But it is with
+these as with our language. The tongue of Ælfred is the very tongue we
+speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it has to be
+learned like the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the English of
+Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the historian
+and philologer can study the origin and developement of our national
+speech, in the last a schoolboy can enjoy the story of Troilus and Cressida
+or listen to the gay chat of the Canterbury Pilgrims. In precisely the same
+way a knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for the right
+understanding of later legislation, its origin and its developement, while
+the principles of our Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in
+the Meetings of Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great Council of barons
+after it. But the Parliaments which Edward gathered at the close of his
+reign are not merely illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they
+are absolutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen's. At
+the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons, the Courts of Justice, the
+forms of public administration, the relations of Church and State, all
+local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, in great measure the
+framework of society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially
+retain. In a word the long struggle of the constitution for actual
+existence has come to an end. The contests which follow are not contests
+that tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual fabric of our
+institutions; they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which
+England has learned and is still learning how best to use and how wisely to
+develope the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the balance
+of its social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms
+to the varying conditions of the time.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Earlier Finance]
+
+The news of his father's death found Edward at Capua in the opening of
+1273; but the quiet of his realm under a regency of which Roger Mortimer
+was the practical head left him free to move slowly homewards. Two of his
+acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his mind was already
+dwelling on the state of English finance and of English law. His visit to
+the Pope at Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission to levy from the
+clergy a tenth of their income for the three coming years, while he drew
+from Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco Accursi, to aid in the task
+of legal reform. At Paris he did homage to Philip the Third for his French
+possessions, and then turning southward he devoted a year to the ordering
+of Gascony. It was not till the summer of 1274 that the king reached
+England. But he had already planned the work he had to do, and the measures
+which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the spirit in
+which he was to set about it. The First Statute of Westminster was rather a
+code than a statute. It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was
+an attempt to summarize a number of previous enactments contained in the
+Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the Statute of Marlborough, as
+well as to embody some of the administrative measures of Henry the Second
+and his son. But a more pressing need than that of a codification of the
+law was the need of a reorganization of finance. While the necessities of
+the Crown were growing with the widening of its range of administrative
+action, the revenues of the Crown admitted of no corresponding expansion.
+In the earliest times of our history the outgoings of the Crown were as
+small as its income. All local expenses, whether for justice or road-making
+or fortress-building, were paid by local funds; and the national "fyrd"
+served at its own cost in the field. The produce of a king's private
+estates with the provisions due to him from the public lands scattered over
+each county, whether gathered by the king himself as he moved over his
+realm, or as in later days fixed at a stated rate and collected by his
+sheriff, were sufficient to defray the mere expenses of the Court. The
+Danish wars gave the first shock to this simple system. To raise a ransom
+which freed the land from the invader, the first land-tax, under the name
+of the Danegeld, was laid on every hide of ground; and to this national
+taxation the Norman kings added the feudal burthens of the new military
+estates created by the Conquest, reliefs paid on inheritance, profits of
+marriages and wardship, and the three feudal aids. But foreign warfare soon
+exhausted these means of revenue; the barons and bishops in their Great
+Council were called on at each emergency for a grant from their lands, and
+at each grant a corresponding demand was made by the king as a landlord on
+the towns, as lying for the most part in the royal demesne. The cessation
+of Danegeld under Henry the Second and his levy of scutage made little
+change in the general incidence of taxation: it still fell wholly on the
+land, for even the townsmen paid as holders of their tenements. But a new
+principle of taxation was disclosed in the tithe levied for a Crusade at
+the close of Henry's reign. Land was no longer the only source of wealth.
+The growth of national prosperity, of trade and commerce, was creating a
+mass of personal property which offered irresistible temptations to the
+Angevin financiers. The old revenue from landed property was restricted and
+lessened by usage and compositions. Scutage was only due for foreign
+campaigns: the feudal aids only on rare and stated occasions: and though
+the fines from the shire-courts grew with the growth of society the dues
+from the public lands were fixed and incapable of developement. But no
+usage fettered the Crown in dealing with personal property, and its growth
+in value promised a growing revenue. From the close of Henry the Second's
+reign therefore this became the most common form of taxation. Grants of
+from a seventh to a thirtieth of moveables, household-property, and stock
+were demanded; and it was the necessity of procuring their assent to these
+demands which enabled the baronage through the reign of Henry the Third to
+bring a financial pressure to bear on the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Indirect Taxation]
+
+But in addition to these two forms of direct taxation indirect taxation
+also was coming more and more to the front. The right of the king to grant
+licences to bring goods into or to trade within the realm, a right
+springing from the need for his protection felt by the strangers who came
+there for purposes of traffic, laid the foundation of our taxes on imports.
+Those on exports were only a part of the general system of taxing personal
+property which we have already noticed. How tempting this source of revenue
+was proving we see from a provision of the Great Charter which forbids the
+levy of more than the ancient customs on merchants entering or leaving the
+realm. Commerce was in fact growing with the growing wealth of the people.
+The crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which date from this period
+shows the prosperity of the country. Christian architecture reached its
+highest beauty in the opening of Edward's reign; a reign marked by the
+completion of the abbey church of Westminster and of the cathedral church
+at Salisbury. An English noble was proud to be styled "an incomparable
+builder," while some traces of the art which was rising into life across
+the Alps flowed in, it may be, with the Italian ecclesiastics whom the
+Papacy forced on the English Church. The shrine of the Confessor at
+Westminster, the mosaic pavement beside the altar of the abbey, the
+paintings on the walls of its chapterhouse remind us of the schools which
+were springing up under Giotto and the Pisans. But the wealth which this
+art progress shows drew trade to English shores. England was as yet simply
+an agricultural country. Gascony sent her wines; her linens were furnished
+by the looms of Ghent and Liége; Genoese vessels brought to her fairs the
+silks, the velvets, the glass of Italy. In the barks of the Hanse merchants
+came fur and amber from the Baltic, herrings, pitch, timber, and naval
+stores from the countries of the north. Spain sent us iron and war-horses.
+Milan sent armour. The great Venetian merchant-galleys touched the southern
+coasts and left in our ports the dates of Egypt, the figs and currants of
+Greece, the silk of Sicily, the sugar of Cyprus and Crete, the spices of
+the Eastern seas. Capital too came from abroad. The bankers of Florence and
+Lucca were busy with loans to the court or vast contracts with the
+wool-growers. The bankers of Cahors had already dealt a death-blow to the
+usury of the Jew. Against all this England had few exports to set. The lead
+supplied by the mines of Derbyshire, the salt of the Worcestershire
+springs, the iron of the Weald, were almost wholly consumed at home. The
+one metal export of any worth was that of tin from the tin-mines of
+Cornwall. But the production of wool was fast becoming a main element of
+the nation's wealth. Flanders, the great manufacturing country of the time,
+lay fronting our eastern coast; and with this market close at hand the
+pastures of England found more and more profit in the supply of wool. The
+Cistercian order which possessed vast ranges of moorland in Yorkshire
+became famous as wool-growers; and their wool had been seized for Richard's
+ransom. The Florentine merchants were developing this trade by their
+immense contracts; we find a single company of merchants contracting for
+the purchase of the Cistercian wool throughout the year. It was after
+counsel with the Italian bankers that Edward devised his scheme for drawing
+a permanent revenue from this source. In the Parliament of 1275 he obtained
+the grant of half a mark, or six shillings and eightpence, on each sack of
+wool exported; and this grant, a grant memorable as forming the first legal
+foundation of our customs-revenue, at once relieved the necessities of the
+Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Welsh Campaign]
+
+The grant of the wool tax enabled Edward in fact to deal with the great
+difficulty of his realm. The troubles of the Barons' war, the need which
+Earl Simon felt of Llewelyn's alliance to hold in check the Marcher Barons,
+had all but shaken off from Wales the last traces of dependence. Even at
+the close of the war the threat of an attack from the now united kingdom
+only forced Llewelyn to submission on a practical acknowledgement of his
+sovereignty. Although the title which Llewelyn ap Jorwerth claimed of
+Prince of North Wales was recognized by the English court in the earlier
+days of Henry the Third, it was withdrawn after 1229 and its claimant known
+only as Prince of Aberffraw. But the loftier title of Prince of Wales which
+Llewelyn ap Gruffydd assumed in 1256 was formally conceded to him in 1267,
+and his right to receive homage from the other nobles of his principality
+was formally sanctioned. Near however as he seemed to the final realization
+of his aims, Llewelyn was still a vassal of the English Crown, and the
+accession of Edward to the throne was at once followed by the demand of
+homage. But the summons was fruitless; and the next two years were wasted
+in as fruitless negotiation. The kingdom, however, was now well in hand.
+The royal treasury was filled again, and in 1277 Edward marched on North
+Wales. The fabric of Welsh greatness fell at a single blow. The chieftains
+who had so lately sworn fealty to Llewelyn in the southern and central
+parts of the country deserted him to join his English enemies in their
+attack; an English fleet reduced Anglesea; and the Prince was cooped up in
+his mountain fastnesses and forced to throw himself on Edward's mercy. With
+characteristic moderation the conqueror contented himself with adding to
+the English dominions the coast-district as far as Conway and with
+providing that the title of Prince of Wales should cease at Llewelyn's
+death. A heavy fine which he had incurred by his refusal to do homage was
+remitted; and Eleanor, a daughter of Earl Simon of Montfort whom he had
+sought as his wife but who had been arrested on her way to him, was wedded
+to the Prince at Edward's court.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Judicial Reforms]
+
+For four years all was quiet across the Welsh Marches, and Edward was able
+again to turn his attention to the work of internal reconstruction. It is
+probably to this time, certainly to the earlier years of his reign, that we
+may attribute his modification of our judicial system. The King's Court was
+divided into three distinct tribunals, the Court of Exchequer which took
+cognizance of all causes in which the royal revenue was concerned; the
+Court of Common Pleas for suits between private persons; and the King's
+Bench, which had jurisdiction in all matters that affected the sovereign as
+well as in "pleas of the crown" or criminal causes expressly reserved for
+his decision. Each court was now provided with a distinct staff of judges.
+
+Of yet greater importance than this change, which was in effect but the
+completion of a process of severance that had long been going on, was the
+establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side with that of the
+common law. In his reform of 1178 Henry the Second broke up the older
+King's Court, which had till then served as the final Court of Appeal, by
+the severance of the purely legal judges who had been gradually added to it
+from the general body of his councillors. The judges thus severed from the
+Council retained the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of "the King's
+Court," but the mere fact of their severance changed in an essential way
+the character of the justice they dispensed. The King in Council wielded a
+power which was not only judicial but executive; his decisions though based
+upon custom were not fettered by it, they wore the expressions of his will,
+and it was as his will that they were carried out by officers of the Crown.
+But the separate bench of judges had no longer this unlimited power at
+their command. They had not the king's right as representative of the
+community to make the law for the redress of a wrong. They professed simply
+to declare what the existing law was, even if it was insufficient for the
+full purpose of redress. The authority of their decision rested mainly on
+their adhesion to ancient custom or as it was styled the "common law" which
+had grown up in the past. They could enforce their decisions only by
+directions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and here again their
+right was soon rigidly bounded by set form and custom. These bonds in fact
+became tighter every day, for their decisions were now beginning to be
+reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities
+for their successors. It is plain that such a state of things has the
+utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that
+impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force
+on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of
+precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power. But it threw
+a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress of wrong. The
+increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped
+the efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a
+wrong which sprang from modern circumstances. Sometimes the very pedantry
+and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases the highest
+injustice.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Equitable Jurisdiction]
+
+It was the consciousness of this that made men cling even from the first
+moment of the independent existence of these courts to the judicial power
+which still remained inherent in the Crown itself. If his courts fell short
+in any matter the duty of the king to do justice to all still remained, and
+it was this obligation which was recognized in the provision of Henry the
+Second by which all cases in which his judges failed to do justice were
+reserved for the special cognizance of the royal Council itself. To this
+final jurisdiction of the King in Council Edward gave a wide developement.
+His assembly of the ministers, the higher permanent officials, and the law
+officers of the Crown for the first time reserved to itself in its judicial
+capacity the correction of all breaches of the law which the lower courts
+had failed to repress, whether from weakness, partiality, or corruption,
+and especially of those lawless outbreaks of the more powerful baronage
+which defied the common authority of the judges. Such powers were of course
+capable of terrible abuse, and it shows what real need there was felt to be
+for their exercise that though regarded with jealousy by Parliament the
+jurisdiction of the royal Council appears to have been steadily put into
+force through the two centuries which followed. In the reign of Henry the
+Seventh it took legal and statutory form in the shape of the Court of Star
+Chamber, and its powers are still exercised in our own day by the Judicial
+Committee of the Privy Council. But the same duty of the Crown to do
+justice where its courts fell short of giving due redress for wrong
+expressed itself in the jurisdiction of the Chancellor. This great officer
+of State, who had perhaps originally acted only as President of the Council
+when discharging its judicial functions, acquired at a very early date an
+independent judicial position of the same nature. It is by remembering this
+origin of the Court of Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers
+it gradually acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially those
+which sprang from the misconduct of government officials or of powerful
+oppressors, fell within its cognizance as they fell within that of the
+Royal Council, and to these were added disputes respecting the wardship of
+infants, dower, rent-charges, or tithes. Its equitable jurisdiction sprang
+from the defective nature and the technical and unbending rules of the
+common law. As the Council had given redress in cases where law became
+injustice, so the Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the rules
+of procedure adopted by the common law courts on the petition of a party
+for whose grievance the common law provided no adequate remedy. An
+analogous extension of his powers enabled the Chancellor to afford relief
+in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse of trust, and this side of his
+jurisdiction was largely extended at a later time by the results of
+legislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical bodies. The separate
+powers of the Chancellor, whatever was the original date at which they were
+first exercised, seem to have been thoroughly established under Edward the
+First.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Law and the Baronage]
+
+What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers such as these by the
+Crown and its council was the need which was still to exist for centuries
+of an effective means of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law.
+Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had now become
+established. A king could no longer make laws or levy taxes or even make
+war without their assent. The nation reposed in them an unwavering trust,
+for they were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose violence the
+strong hand of a Norman ruler had been needed to protect his subjects; they
+were as English as the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty
+by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound them to look on
+themselves as its natural guardians. The close of the Barons' War solved
+the problem which had so long troubled the realm, the problem how to ensure
+the government of the realm in accordance with the provisions of the Great
+Charter, by the transfer of the business of administration into the hands
+of a standing committee of the greater barons and prelates, acting as chief
+officers of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers of the
+Crown. The body thus composed was known as the Continual Council; and the
+quiet government of the kingdom by this body in the long interval between
+the death of Henry the Third and his son's return shows how effective this
+rule of the nobles was. It is significant of the new relation which they
+were to strive to establish between themselves and the Crown that in the
+brief which announced Edward's accession the Council asserted that the new
+monarch mounted his throne "by the will of the peers." But while the
+political influence of the baronage as a leading element in the whole
+nation thus steadily mounted, the personal and purely feudal power of each
+individual baron on his own estates as steadily fell. The hold which the
+Crown gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage,
+the circuits of the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds within which
+baronial justice saw itself circumscribed, the blow dealt by scutage at
+their military power, the prompt intervention of the Council in their
+feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to the common level of their fellow
+subjects. Much yet remained to be done; for within the general body of the
+baronage there existed side by side with the nobles whose aims were purely
+national nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal despotism simply a
+chance of setting up again their feudal privileges; and different as the
+English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a feudal _noblesse_ like that
+of Germany or France there is in every military class a natural drift
+towards violence and lawlessness. Throughout Edward's reign his strong hand
+was needed to enforce order on warring nobles. Great earls, such as those
+of Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in Shropshire the Earl
+of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and poorer
+nobles the wealth of the trader, the long wain of goods as it passed along
+the highway, remained a tempting prey. Once, under cover of a mock
+tournament of monks against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded
+in introducing themselves into the great merchant fair at Boston; at
+nightfall every booth was on fire, the merchants robbed and slaughtered,
+and the booty carried off to ships which lay ready at the quay. Streams of
+gold and silver, ran the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down the
+gutters to the sea; "all the money in England could hardly make good the
+loss." Even at the close of Edward's reign lawless bands of
+"trail-bastons," or club-men, maintained themselves by general outrage,
+aided the country nobles in their feuds, and wrested money and goods from
+the great tradesmen.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Baronage]
+
+The king was strong enough to face and imprison the warring earls, to hang
+the chiefs of the Boston marauders, and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous
+commissions. But the repression of baronial outrage was only a part of
+Edward's policy in relation to the Baronage. Here, as elsewhere, he had to
+carry out the political policy of his house, a policy defined by the great
+measures of Henry the Second, his institution of scutage, his general
+assize of arms, his extension of the itinerant judicature of the royal
+judges. Forced by the first to an exact discharge of their military duties
+to the Crown, set by the second in the midst of a people trained equally
+with the nobles to arms, their judicial tyranny curbed and subjected to the
+king's justice by the third, the barons had been forced from their old
+standpoint of an isolated class to the new and nobler position of a
+people's leaders. Edward watched jealously over the ground which the Crown
+had gained. Immediately after his landing he appointed a commission of
+enquiry into the judicial franchises then existing, and on its report (of
+which the existing "Hundred-Rolls" are the result) itinerant justices were
+sent in 1278 to discover by what right these franchises were held. The
+writs of "quo warranto" were roughly met here and there. Earl Warenne bared
+a rusty sword and flung it on the justices' table. "This, sirs," he said,
+"is my warrant. By the sword our fathers won their lands when they came
+over with the Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep them." But the king
+was far from limiting himself to the mere carrying out of the plans of
+Henry the Second. Henry had aimed simply at lowering the power of the great
+feudatories; Edward aimed rather at neutralizing their power by raising the
+whole body of landowners to the same level. We shall see at a later time
+the measures which were the issues of this policy, but in the very opening
+of his reign a significant step pointed to the king's drift. In the summer
+of 1278 a royal writ ordered all freeholders who held lands to the value of
+twenty pounds to receive knighthood at the king's hands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Church]
+
+Acts as significant announced Edward's purpose of carrying out another side
+of Henry's policy, that of limiting in the same way the independent
+jurisdiction of the Church. He was resolute to force it to become
+thoroughly national by bearing its due part of the common national
+burthens, and to break its growing dependence upon Rome. But the
+ecclesiastical body was jealous of its position as a power distinct from
+the power of the Crown, and Edward's policy had hardly declared itself when
+in 1279 Archbishop Peckham obtained a canon from the clergy by which copies
+of the Great Charter, with its provisions in favour of the liberties of the
+Church, were to be affixed to the doors of churches. The step was meant as
+a defiant protest against all interference, and it was promptly forbidden.
+An order issued by the Primate to the clergy to declare to their flocks the
+sentences of excommunication directed against all who obtained royal writs
+to obstruct suits in church courts, or who, whether royal officers or no,
+neglected to enforce their sentences, was answered in a yet more emphatic
+way. By falling into the "dead hand" or "mortmain" of the Church land
+ceased to render its feudal services; and in 1279 the Statute "de
+Religiosis," or as it is commonly called "of Mortmain," forbade any further
+alienation of land to religious bodies in such wise that it should cease to
+render its due service to the king. The restriction was probably no
+beneficial one to the country at large, for Churchmen were the best
+landlords, and it was soon evaded by the ingenuity of the clerical lawyers;
+but it marked the growing jealousy of any attempt to set aside what was
+national from serving the general need and profit of the nation. Its
+immediate effect was to stir the clergy to a bitter resentment. But Edward
+remained firm, and when the bishops proposed to restrict the royal courts
+from dealing with cases of patronage or causes which touched the chattels
+of Churchmen he met their proposals by an instant prohibition.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of Wales]
+
+The resentment of the clergy had soon the means of showing itself during a
+new struggle with Wales. The persuasions of his brother David, who had
+deserted him in the previous war but who deemed his desertion
+insufficiently rewarded by an English lordship, roused Llewelyn to a fresh
+revolt. A prophecy of Merlin was said to promise that when English money
+became round a Prince of Wales should be crowned in London; and at this
+moment a new coinage of copper money, coupled with a prohibition to break
+the silver penny into halves and quarters, as had been commonly done, was
+supposed to fulfil the prediction. In 1282 Edward marched in overpowering
+strength into the heart of Wales. But Llewelyn held out in Snowdon with the
+stubbornness of despair, and the rout of an English force which had crossed
+into Anglesea prolonged the contest into the winter. The cost of the war
+fell on the king's treasury. Edward had called for but one general grant
+through the past eight years of his reign; but he was now forced to appeal
+to his people, and by an expedient hitherto without precedent two
+provincial Councils were called for this purpose. That for Southern England
+met at Northampton, that for Northern at York; and clergy and laity were
+summoned, though in separate session, to both. Two knights came from every
+shire, two burgesses from every borough, while the bishops brought their
+archdeacons, abbots, and the proctors of their cathedral clergy. The grant
+of the laity was quick and liberal. But both at York and Northampton the
+clergy showed their grudge at Edward's measures by long delays in supplying
+his treasury. Pinched however as were his resources and terrible as were
+the sufferings of his army through the winter Edward's firmness remained
+unbroken; and rejecting all suggestions of retreat he issued orders for the
+formation of a new army at Caermarthen to complete the circle of investment
+round Llewelyn. But the war came suddenly to an end. The Prince sallied
+from his mountain hold for a raid upon Radnorshire and fell in a petty
+skirmish on the banks of the Wye. With him died the independence of his
+race. After six months of flight his brother David was made prisoner; and a
+Parliament summoned at Shrewsbury in the autumn of 1283, to which each
+county again sent its two knights and twenty boroughs their two burgesses,
+sentenced him to a traitor's death. The submission of the lesser chieftains
+soon followed: and the country was secured by the building of strong
+castles at Conway and Caernarvon, and the settlement of English barons on
+the confiscated soil. The Statute of Wales which Edward promulgated at
+Rhuddlan in 1284 proposed to introduce English law and the English
+administration of justice and government into Wales. But little came of the
+attempt; and it was not till the time of Henry the Eighth that the country
+was actually incorporated with England and represented in the English
+Parliament. What Edward had really done was to break the Welsh resistance.
+The policy with which he followed up his victory (for the "massacre of the
+bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and though two later
+rebellions and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English towns in
+their midst showed that the country was still far from being reconciled to
+its conquest, it ceased to be any serious danger to England for a hundred
+years.
+
+
+[Sidenote: New Legislation]
+
+From the work of conquest Edward again turned to the work of legislation.
+In the midst of his struggle with Wales he had shown his care for the
+commercial classes by a Statute of Merchants in 1283, which provided for
+the registration of the debts of leaders and for their recovery by
+distraint of the debtor's goods and the imprisonment of his person. The
+close of the war saw two measures of even greater importance. The second
+Statute of Westminster which appeared in 1285 is a code of the same sort as
+the first, amending the Statutes of Mortmain, of Merton, and of Gloucester,
+as well as the laws of dower and advowson, remodelling the system of
+justices of assize, and curbing the abuses of manorial jurisdiction. In the
+same year appeared the greatest of Edward's measures for the enforcement of
+public order. The Statute of Winchester revived and reorganized the old
+institutions of national police and national defence. It regulated the
+action of the hundred, the duty of watch and ward, and the gathering of the
+fyrd or militia of the realm as Henry the Second had moulded it into form
+in his Assize of Arms. Every man was bound to hold himself in readiness,
+duly armed, for the king's service in case of invasion or revolt, and to
+pursue felons when hue and cry was made after them. Every district was held
+responsible for crimes committed within its bounds; the gates of each town
+were to be shut at nightfall; and all strangers were required to give an
+account of themselves to the magistrates of any borough which they entered.
+By a provision which illustrates at once the social and physical condition
+of the country at the time all brushwood was ordered to be destroyed within
+a space of two hundred feet on either side of the public highway as a
+security for travellers against sudden attacks from robbers. To enforce the
+observance of this act knights were appointed in every shire under the name
+of Conservators of the Peace, a name which as the benefit of these local
+magistrates was more sensibly felt and their powers were more largely
+extended was changed into that which they still retain of Justices of the
+Peace. So orderly however was the realm that Edward was able in 1286 to
+pass over sea to his foreign dominions, and to spend the next three years
+in reforming their government. But the want of his guiding hand was at last
+felt; and the Parliament of 1289 refused a new tax till the king came home
+again.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "Quia Emptores"]
+
+He returned to find the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford at war, and his
+judges charged with violence and corruption. The two Earls were brought to
+peace, and Earl Gilbert allied closely to the royal house by a marriage
+with the king's daughter Johanna. After a careful investigation the
+judicial abuses were recognized and amended. Two of the chief justices were
+banished from the realm and their colleagues imprisoned and fined. But
+these administrative measures were only preludes to a great legislative act
+which appeared in 1290. The Third Statute of Westminster, or, to use the
+name by which it is more commonly known, the Statute "Quia Emptores," is
+one of those legislative efforts which mark the progress of a wide social
+revolution in the country at large. The number of the greater barons was
+diminishing every day, while the number of the country gentry and of the
+more substantial yeomanry was increasing with the increase of the national
+wealth. The increase showed itself in a growing desire to become
+proprietors of land. Tenants of the barons received under-tenants on
+condition of their rendering them similar services to those which they
+themselves rendered to their lords; and the baronage, while duly receiving
+the services in compensation for which they had originally granted their
+lands in fee, saw with jealousy the feudal profits of these new
+under-tenants, the profits of wardships or of reliefs and the like, in a
+word the whole increase in the value of the estate consequent on its
+subdivision and higher cultivation, passing into other hands than their
+own. The purpose of the statute "Quia Emptores" was to check this process
+by providing that in any case of alienation the sub-tenant should
+henceforth hold, not of the tenant, but directly of the superior lord. But
+its result was to promote instead of hindering the transfer and subdivision
+of land. The tenant who was compelled before the passing of the statute to
+retain in any case so much of the estate as enabled him to discharge his
+feudal services to the overlord of whom he held it, was now enabled by a
+process analogous to the modern sale of "tenant-right," to transfer both
+land and services to new holders. However small the estates thus created
+might be, the bulk were held directly of the Crown; and this class of
+lesser gentry and freeholders grew steadily from this time in numbers and
+importance.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Crown and the Jews]
+
+The year which saw "Quia Emptores" saw a step which remains the great blot
+upon Edward's reign. The work abroad had exhausted the royal treasury, and
+he bought a grant from his Parliament by listening to their wishes in the
+matter of the Jews. Jewish traders had followed William the Conqueror from
+Normandy, and had been enabled by his protection to establish themselves in
+separate quarters or "Jewries" in all larger English towns. The Jew had no
+right or citizenship in the land. The Jewry in which he lived was exempt
+from the common law. He was simply the king's chattel, and his life and
+goods were at the king's mercy. But he was too valuable a possession to be
+lightly thrown away. If the Jewish merchant had no standing-ground in the
+local court the king enabled him to sue before a special justiciary; his
+bonds were deposited for safety in a chamber of the royal palace at
+Westminster; he was protected against the popular hatred in the free
+exercise of his religion and allowed to build synagogues and to manage his
+own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi. The royal protection
+was dictated by no spirit of tolerance or mercy. To the kings the Jew was a
+mere engine of finance. The wealth which he accumulated was wrung from him
+whenever the crown had need, and torture and imprisonment were resorted to
+when milder means failed. It was the gold of the Jew that filled the royal
+treasury at the outbreak of war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers
+that the foreign kings found strength, to hold their baronage at bay.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Popular Hatred of the Jews]
+
+That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier years of his
+settlement, beneficial to the nation at large there can be little doubt.
+His arrival was the arrival of a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he
+necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time his loans gave an
+impulse to industry. The century which followed the Conquest witnessed an
+outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with castles and
+cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed their erection to the loans
+of the Jew. His own example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture. The
+buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmund's, still retain their
+name of "Jews' Houses" were almost the first houses of stone which
+superseded the mere hovels of the English burghers. Nor was their influence
+simply industrial. Through their connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain
+and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences. A
+Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself
+studied under English rabbis. But the general progress of civilization now
+drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and
+Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial finance. He fell
+back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily
+accompanied with much of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the
+religious hatred against their race. Wild stories floated about of children
+carried off to be circumcised or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was found
+slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as "St. Hugh."
+The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish quarters and
+attempt their conversion, but the popular fury rose too fast for these
+gentler means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews
+from hanging by their prayer to Henry the Third the populace angrily
+refused the brethren alms.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Jewish Defiance]
+
+But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance. The picture which
+is commonly drawn of the Jew as timid, silent, crouching under oppression,
+however truly it may represent the general position of his race throughout
+mediæval Europe, is far from being borne out by historical fact on this
+side the Channel. In England the attitude of the Jew, almost to the very
+end, was an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. He knew that the
+royal policy exempted him from the common taxation, the common justice, the
+common obligations of Englishmen. Usurer, extortioner as the realm held him
+to be, the royal justice would secure him the repayment of his bonds. A
+royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence
+against the king's "chattels." The Red King actually forbade the conversion
+of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a poor exchange, he said, that
+would rid him of a valuable property and give him only a subject. We see in
+such a case as that of Oxford the insolence that grew out of this
+consciousness of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a
+town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its
+peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could penetrate into
+the square of little alleys which lay behind the present Town Hall; the
+Church itself was powerless to prevent a synagogue from rising in haughty
+rivalry over against the cloister of St. Frideswide. Prior Philip of St.
+Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at his door as
+the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles which were
+said to be wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his
+feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open
+his fingers, the Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd that
+flocked to St. Frideswide's shrine on the ground that such recoveries of
+life and limb were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever wrought.
+Sickness and death in the prior's story avenge the saint on her blasphemer,
+but no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to
+deal with him. A more daring act of fanaticism showed the temper of the
+Jews even at the close of Henry the Third's reign. As the usual procession
+of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's on the Ascension
+Day of 1268 a Jew suddenly burst from a group of his comrades in front of
+the synagogue, and wrenching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under
+foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the
+Crown sheltered the Oxford Jews from any burst of popular vengeance. The
+sentence of the king condemned them to set up a cross of marble on the spot
+where the crime was committed, but even this sentence was in part remitted,
+and a less offensive place was found for the cross in an open plot by
+Merton College.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Expulsion of the Jews]
+
+Up to Edward's day indeed the royal protection had never wavered. Henry the
+Second granted the Jews a right of burial outside every city where they
+dwelt. Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and
+organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration of
+their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself, though he
+once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The
+troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater than even the royal
+greed could reap; the Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates; and only
+a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would have
+enabled them to own freeholds. But the sack of Jewry after Jewry showed the
+popular hatred during the Barons' war, and at its close fell on the Jews
+the more terrible persecution of the law. To the cry against usury and the
+religious fanaticism which threatened them was now added the jealousy with
+which the nation that had grown up round the Charter regarded all
+exceptional jurisdictions or exemptions from the common law and the common
+burthens of the realm. As Edward looked on the privileges of the Church or
+the baronage, so his people looked on the privileges of the Jews. The
+growing weight of the Parliament told against them. Statute after statute
+hemmed them in. They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ
+Christian servants, to move through the streets without the two white
+tablets of wool on their breasts which distinguished their race. They were
+prohibited from building new synagogues or eating with Christians or acting
+as physicians to them. Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the
+bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order which bade them
+renounce usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do no more,
+and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies for his treasury and
+himself swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects, bought the grant of a
+fifteenth from clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his
+realm. No share of the enormities which accompanied this expulsion can fall
+upon the king, for he not only suffered the fugitives to take their
+personal wealth with them but punished with the halter those who plundered
+them at sea. But the expulsion was none the less cruel. Of the sixteen
+thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few reached the shores of France.
+Many were wrecked, others robbed and flung overboard. One shipmaster turned
+out a crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank and bade them call a new
+Moses to save them from the sea.
+
+[Illustration: Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland]
+
+From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his nobler schemes of legal and
+administrative reforms, Edward was suddenly called away to face complex
+questions which awaited him in the North. At the moment which we have
+reached the kingdom of the Scots was still an aggregate of four distinct
+countries, each with its different people, its different tongue, its
+different history. The old Pictish kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the
+original Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or Strathclyde,
+and the Lowlands which stretched from the Firth of Forth to the English
+border, had become united under the kings of the Scots; Pictland by
+inheritance, Cumbria by a grant from the English king Eadmund, the Lowlands
+by conquest, confirmed as English tradition alleged by a grant from Cnut.
+The shadowy claim of dependence on the English Crown which dated from the
+days when a Scotch king "commended" himself and his people to Ælfred's son
+Eadward, a claim strengthened by the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm as a
+"fellow worker" of the English sovereign "by sea and land," may have been
+made more real through this last convention. But whatever change the
+acquisition of the Lowlands made in the relation of the Scot kings to the
+English sovereigns, it certainly affected in a very marked way their
+relation both to England and to their own realm. Its first result was the
+fixing of the royal residence in their new southern dominion at Edinburgh;
+and the English civilization which surrounded them from the moment of this
+settlement on what was purely English ground changed the Scot kings in all
+but blood into Englishmen. The marriage of King Malcolm with Margaret, the
+sister of Eadgar Ætheling, not only hastened this change but opened a way
+to the English crown. Their children were regarded by a large party within
+England as representatives of the older royal race and as claimants of the
+throne, and this danger grew as William's devastation of the North not only
+drove fresh multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the Lowlands but filled
+the Scotch court with English nobles who fled thither for refuge. So
+formidable indeed became the pretensions of the Scot kings that they forced
+the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into a complete change of policy. The
+Conqueror and William the Red had met the threats of the Scot sovereigns by
+invasions which ended again and again in an illusory homage, but the
+marriage of Henry the First with the Scottish Matilda robbed the claims of
+the Scottish line of much of their force while it enabled him to draw their
+kings into far closer relations with the Norman throne. King David not only
+abandoned the ambitious dreams of his predecessors to place himself at the
+head of his niece Matilda's party in her contest with Stephen, but as
+Henry's brother-in-law he figured as the first noble of the English Court
+and found English models and English support in the work of organization
+which he attempted within his own dominions. As the marriage with Margaret
+had changed Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain into an English king, so that
+of Matilda brought about the conversion of David into a Norman and feudal
+sovereign. His court was filled with Norman nobles from the South, such as
+the Balliols and Bruces who were destined to play so great a part
+afterwards but who now for the first time obtained fiefs in the Scottish
+realm, and a feudal jurisprudence modelled on that of England was
+introduced into the Lowlands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotch and English Crowns]
+
+A fresh connexion between Scotland and the English sovereigns began with
+the grant of lordships within England itself to the Scot kings or their
+sons. The Earldom of Northumberland was held by David's son Henry, that of
+Huntingdon by David, brother of William the Lion. Homage was sometimes
+rendered, whether for these lordships, for the Lowlands, or for the whole
+Scottish realm, but it was the capture of William the Lion during the
+revolt of the English baronage which first suggested to the ambition of
+Henry the Second the project of a closer dependence of Scotland on the
+English Crown. To gain his freedom William consented to hold his kingdom of
+Henry and his heirs. The prelates and lords of Scotland did homage to Henry
+as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in all Scotch causes was
+allowed to the superior court of the English suzerain. From this bondage
+however Scotland was freed by the prodigality of Richard who allowed her to
+buy back the freedom she had forfeited. Both sides fell into their old
+position, but both were ceasing gradually to remember the distinctions
+between the various relations in which the Scot king stood for his
+different provinces to the English Crown. Scotland had come to be thought
+of as a single country; and the court of London transferred to the whole of
+it those claims of direct feudal suzerainty which at most applied only to
+Strathclyde, while the court of Edinburgh looked on the English Lowlands as
+holding no closer relation to England than the Pictish lands beyond the
+Forth. Any difficulties which arose were evaded by a legal compromise. The
+Scot kings repeatedly did homage to the English sovereign but with a
+reservation of rights which were prudently left unspecified. The English
+king accepted the homage on the assumption that it was rendered to him as
+overlord of the Scottish realm, and this assumption was neither granted nor
+denied. For nearly a hundred years the relations of the two countries were
+thus kept peaceful and friendly, and the death of Alexander the Third
+seemed destined to remove even the necessity of protests by a closer union
+of the two kingdoms. Alexander had wedded his only daughter to the King of
+Norway, and after long negotiation the Scotch Parliament proposed the
+marriage of Margaret, "The Maid of Norway," the girl who was the only issue
+of this marriage and so heiress of the kingdom, with the son of Edward the
+First. It was however carefully provided in the marriage treaty which was
+concluded at Brigham in 1290 that Scotland should remain a separate and
+free kingdom, and that its laws and customs should be preserved inviolate.
+No military aid was to be claimed by the English king, no Scotch appeal to
+be carried to an English court. But this project was abruptly frustrated by
+the child's death during her voyage to Scotland in the following October,
+and with the rise of claimant after claimant of the vacant throne Edward
+was drawn into far other relations to the Scottish realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch Succession]
+
+Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland only three could be
+regarded as serious claimants. By the extinction of the line of William the
+Lion the right of succession passed to the daughters of his brother David.
+The claim of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, rested on his descent from the
+elder of these; that of Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, on his descent
+from the second; that of John Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, on his descent
+from the third. It is clear that at this crisis every one in Scotland or
+out of it recognized some sort of overlordship in Edward, for the Norwegian
+king, the Primate of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch Earls had already
+appealed to him before Margaret's death; and her death was followed by the
+consent both of the claimants and the Council of Regency to refer the
+question of the succession to his decision in a Parliament at Norham. But
+the overlordship which the Scots acknowledged was something far less direct
+and definite than the superiority which Edward claimed at the opening of
+this conference in May 1291. His claim was supported by excerpts from
+monastic chronicles and by the slow advance of an English army; while the
+Scotch lords, taken by surprise, found little help in the delay which was
+granted them. At the opening of June therefore in common with nine of the
+claimants they formally admitted Edward's direct suzerainty. To the nobles
+in fact the concession must have seemed a small one, for like the principal
+claimants they were for the most part Norman in blood, with estates in both
+countries, and looking for honours and pensions from the English Court.
+From the Commons who were gathered with the nobles at Norham no such
+admission of Edward's claims could be extorted; but in Scotland, feudalized
+as it had been by David, the Commons were as yet of little weight and their
+opposition was quietly passed by. All the rights of a feudal suzerain were
+at once assumed by the English king; he entered into the possession of the
+country as into that of a disputed fief to be held by its overlord till the
+dispute was settled, his peace was sworn throughout the land, its castles
+delivered into his charge, while its bishops and nobles swore homage to him
+directly as their lord superior. Scotland was thus reduced to the
+subjection which she had experienced under Henry the Second; but the full
+discussion which followed over the various claims to the throne showed that
+while exacting to the full what he believed to be his right Edward desired
+to do justice to the country itself. The body of commissioners which the
+king named to report on the claims to the throne were mainly Scotch. A
+proposal for the partition of the realm among the claimants was rejected as
+contrary to Scotch law. On the report of the commissioners after a
+twelvemonth's investigation in favour of Balliol as representative of the
+elder branch at the close of the year 1292, his homage was accepted for the
+whole kingdom of Scotland with a full acknowledgement of the services due
+from him to its overlord. The castles were at once delivered to the new
+monarch, and for a time there was peace.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and Scotland]
+
+With the accession of Balliol and the rendering of his homage for the
+Scottish realm the greatness of Edward reached its height. He was lord of
+Britain as no English king had been before. The last traces of Welsh
+independence were trodden under foot. The shadowy claims of supremacy over
+Scotland were changed into a direct overlordship. Across the one sea Edward
+was lord of Guienne, across the other of Ireland, and in England itself a
+wise and generous policy had knit the whole nation round his throne. Firmly
+as he still clung to prerogatives which the baronage were as firm not to
+own, the main struggle for the Charter was over. Justice and good
+government were secured. The personal despotism which John had striven to
+build up, the imperial autocracy which had haunted the imagination of Henry
+the Third, were alike set aside. The rule of Edward, vigorous and effective
+as it was, was a rule of law, and of law enacted not by the royal will, but
+by the common council of the realm. Never had English ruler reached a
+greater height of power, nor was there any sign to warn the king of the
+troubles which awaited him. France, jealous as it was of his greatness and
+covetous of his Gascon possessions, he could hold at bay. Wales was growing
+tranquil. Scotland gave few signs of discontent or restlessness in the
+first year that followed the homage of its king. Under John Balliol it had
+simply fallen back into the position of dependence which it held under
+William the Lion; and Edward had no purpose of pushing further his rights
+as suzerain than Henry the Second had done. One claim of the English Crown
+indeed was soon a subject of dispute between the lawyers of the Scotch and
+of the English Council boards. Edward would have granted as freely as
+Balliol himself that though Scotland was a dependent kingdom it was far
+from being an ordinary fief of the English Crown. By feudal custom a
+distinction had always been held to exist between the relations of a
+dependent king to a superior lord and those of a vassal noble to his
+sovereign. At Balliol's homage indeed Edward had disclaimed any right to
+the ordinary feudal incidents of a fief, those of wardship or marriage, and
+in this disclaimer he was only repeating the reservations of the marriage
+treaty of Brigham. There were other customs of the Scotch realm as
+incontestable as these. Even after the treaty of Falaise the Scotch king
+had not been held bound to attend the council of the English baronage, to
+do service in English warfare, or to contribute on the part of his Scotch
+realm to English aids. If no express acknowledgement of these rights had
+been made by Edward, for some time after his acceptance of Balliol's homage
+they were practically observed. The claim of independent justice was more
+doubtful, as it was of higher import than these. The judicial independence
+of Scotland had been expressly reserved in the marriage treaty. It was
+certain that no appeal from a Scotch King's Court to that of his overlord
+had been allowed since the days of William the Lion. But in the
+jurisprudence of the feudal lawyers the right of ultimate appeal was the
+test of sovereignty, and Edward regarded Balliol's homage as having placed
+him precisely in the position of William the Lion and subjected his
+decisions to those of his overlord. He was resolute therefore to assert the
+supremacy of his court and to receive Scotch appeals.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The French Attack]
+
+Even here however the quarrel seemed likely to end only in legal bickering.
+Balliol at first gave way, and it was not till 1293 that he alleged himself
+forced by the resentment both of his Baronage and his people to take up an
+attitude of resistance. While appearing therefore formally at Westminster
+he refused to answer an appeal before the English courts save by advice of
+his Council. But real as the resentment of his barons may have been, it was
+not Scotland which really spurred Balliol to this defiance. His wounded
+pride had made him the tool of a power beyond the sea. The keenness with
+which France had watched every step of Edward's success in the north sprang
+not merely from a natural jealousy of his greatness but from its bearing on
+a great object of French ambition. One fragment of Eleanor's inheritance
+still remained to her descendants, Guienne and Gascony, the fair lands
+along the Garonne and the territory which stretched south of that river to
+the Pyrenees. It was this territory that now tempted the greed of Philip
+the Fair, and it was in feeding the strife between England and the Scotch
+king that Philip saw an opening for winning it. French envoys therefore
+brought promises of aid to the Scotch Court; and no sooner had these
+intrigues moved Balliol to resent the claims of his overlord than Philip
+found a pretext for open quarrel with Edward in the frays which went
+constantly on in the Channel between the mariners of Normandy and those of
+the Cinque Ports. They culminated at this moment in a great sea-fight which
+proved fatal to eight thousand Frenchmen, and for this Philip haughtily
+demanded redress. Edward saw at once the danger of his position. He did his
+best to allay the storm by promise of satisfaction to France, and by
+addressing threats of punishment to the English seamen. But Philip still
+clung to his wrong, while the national passion which was to prove for a
+hundred years to come strong enough to hold down the royal policy of peace
+showed itself in a characteristic defiance with which the seamen of the
+Cinque Ports met Edward's menaces. "Be the King's Council well advised,"
+ran this remonstrance, "that if wrong or grievance be done them in any
+fashion against right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and all
+that they have, and go seek through the seas where they shall think to make
+their profit." In spite therefore of Edward's efforts the contest
+continued, and Philip found in it an opportunity to cite the king before
+his court at Paris for wrongs done to him as suzerain. It was hard for
+Edward to dispute the summons without weakening the position which his own
+sovereign courts had taken up towards the Scotch king, and in a final
+effort to avert the conflict the king submitted to a legal decision of the
+question, and to a formal cession of Guienne into Philip's hands for forty
+days in acknowledgement of his supremacy. Bitter as the sacrifice must have
+been it failed to win peace. The forty days had no sooner passed than
+Philip refused to restore the fortresses which had been left in pledge. In
+February 1294 he declared the English king contumacious, and in May
+declared his fiefs forfeited to the French Crown. Edward was driven to take
+up arms, but a revolt in Wales deferred the expedition to the following
+year. No sooner however was it again taken in hand than it became clear
+that a double danger had to be met. The summons which Edward addressed to
+the Scotch barons to follow him in arms to Guienne was disregarded. It was
+in truth, as we have seen, a breach of customary law, and was probably
+meant to force Scotland into an open declaration of its connexion with
+France. A second summons was followed by a more formal refusal. The
+greatness of the danger threw Edward on England itself. For a war in
+Guienne and the north he needed supplies; but he needed yet more the firm
+support of his people in a struggle which, little as he foresaw its
+ultimate results, would plainly be one of great difficulty and danger. In
+1295 he called a Parliament to counsel with him on the affairs of the
+realm, but with the large statesmanship which distinguished him he took
+this occasion of giving the Parliament a shape and organization which has
+left its assembly the most important event in English history.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Council]
+
+To realize its importance we must briefly review the changes by which the
+Great Council of the Norman kings had been gradually transforming itself
+into what was henceforth to be known as the English Parliament. Neither the
+Meeting of the Wise Men before the Conquest nor the Great Council of the
+Barons after it had been in any legal or formal way representative bodies.
+The first theoretically included all free holders of land, but it shrank at
+an early time into a gathering of earls, higher nobles, and bishops, with
+the officers and thegns of the royal household. Little change was made in
+the composition of this assembly by the Conquest, for the Great Council of
+the Norman kings was supposed to include all tenants who held directly of
+the Crown, the bishops and greater abbots (whose character as independent
+spiritual members tended more and more to merge in their position as
+barons), and the high officers of the Court. But though its composition
+remained the same, the character of the assembly was essentially altered;
+from a free gathering of "Wise Men" it sank to a Royal Court of feudal
+vassals. Its functions too seem to have become almost nominal and its
+powers to have been restricted to the sanctioning, without debate or
+possibility of refusal, all grants demanded from it by the Crown. But
+nominal as such a sanction might be, the "counsel and consent" of the Great
+Council was necessary for the legal validity of every considerable fiscal
+or political measure. Its existence therefore remained an effectual protest
+against the imperial theories advanced by the lawyers of Henry the Second
+which declared all legislative power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It
+was in fact under Henry that these assemblies became more regular, and
+their functions more important. The reforms which marked his reign were
+issued in the Great Council, and even financial matters were suffered to be
+debated there. But it was not till the grant of the Great Charter that the
+powers of this assembly over taxation were formally recognized, and the
+principle established that no burthen beyond the customary feudal aids
+might be imposed "save by the Common Council of the Realm."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Greater and Lesser Barons]
+
+The same document first expressly regulated its form. In theory, as we have
+seen, the Great Council consisted of all who held land directly of the
+Crown. But the same causes which restricted attendance at the Witenagemot
+to the greater nobles told on the actual composition of the Council of
+Barons. While the attendance of the ordinary tenants in chief, the Knights
+or "Lesser Barons" as they were called, was burthensome from its expense to
+themselves, their numbers and their dependence on the higher nobles made
+the assembly of these knights dangerous to the Crown. As early therefore as
+the time of Henry the First we find a distinction recognized between the
+"Greater Barons," of whom the Council was usually composed, and the "Lesser
+Barons" who formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown. But though the
+attendance of the latter had become rare their right of attendance remained
+intact. While enacting that the prelates and greater barons should be
+summoned by special writs to each gathering of the Council a remarkable
+provision of the Great Charter orders a general summons to be issued
+through the Sheriff to all direct tenants of the Crown. The provision was
+probably intended to rouse the lesser Baronage to the exercise of rights
+which had practically passed into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted
+in later issues of the Charter we may doubt whether the principle it
+embodied ever received more than a very limited application. There are
+traces of the attendance of a few of the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps
+of the neighbourhood where the assembly was held, in some of its meetings
+under Henry the Third, but till a late period in the reign of his successor
+the Great Council practically remained a gathering of the greater barons,
+the prelates, and the high officers of the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Constitutional Influence of Finance]
+
+The change which the Great Charter had failed to accomplish was now however
+brought about by the social circumstances of the time. One of the most
+remarkable of these was a steady decrease in the number of the greater
+nobles. The bulk of the earldoms had already lapsed to the Crown through
+the extinction of the families of their possessors; of the greater
+baronies, many had practically ceased to exist by their division among
+female co-heiresses, many through the constant struggle of the poorer
+nobles to rid themselves of their rank by a disclaimer so as to escape the
+burthen of higher taxation and attendance in Parliament which it involved.
+How far this diminution had gone we may see from the fact that hardly more
+than a hundred barons sat in the earlier Councils of Edward's reign. But
+while the number of those who actually exercised the privilege of assisting
+in Parliament was rapidly diminishing, the numbers and wealth of the
+"lesser baronage," whose right of attendance had become a mere
+constitutional tradition, was as rapidly increasing. The long peace and
+prosperity of the realm, the extension of its commerce and the increased
+export of wool, were swelling the ranks and incomes of the country gentry
+as well as of the freeholders and substantial yeomanry. We have already
+noticed the effects of the increase of wealth in begetting a passion for
+the possession of land which makes this reign so critical a period in the
+history of the English freeholder; but the same tendency had to some extent
+existed in the preceding century, and it was a consciousness of the growing
+importance of this class of rural proprietors which induced the barons at
+the moment of the Great Charter to make their fruitless attempt to induce
+them to take part in the deliberations of the Great Council. But while the
+barons desired their presence as an aid against the Crown, the Crown itself
+desired it as a means of rendering taxation more efficient. So long as the
+Great Council remained a mere assembly of magnates it was necessary for the
+King's ministers to treat separately with the other orders of the state as
+to the amount and assessment of their contributions. The grant made in the
+Great Council was binding only on the barons and prelates who made it; but
+before the aids of the boroughs, the Church, or the shires could reach the
+royal treasury, a separate negotiation had to be conducted by the officers
+of the Exchequer with the reeves of each town, the sheriff and shire-court
+of each county, and the archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of this sort
+would be the more tedious and disappointing as the necessities of the Crown
+increased in the later years of Edward, and it became a matter of fiscal
+expediency to obtain the sanction of any proposed taxation through the
+presence of these classes in the Great Council itself.
+
+The effort however to revive the old personal attendance of the lesser
+baronage which had broken down half a century before could hardly be
+renewed at a time when the increase of their numbers made it more
+impracticable than ever; but a means of escape from this difficulty was
+fortunately suggested by the very nature of the court through which alone a
+summons could be addressed to the landed knighthood. Amidst the many
+judicial reforms of Henry or Edward the Shire Court remained unchanged. The
+haunted mound or the immemorial oak round which the assembly gathered (for
+the court was often held in the open air) were the relics of a time before
+the free kingdom had sunk into a shire and its Meetings of the Wise into a
+County Court. But save that the king's reeve had taken the place of the
+king and that the Norman legislation had displaced the Bishop and set four
+Coroners by the Sheriff's side, the gathering of the freeholders remained
+much as of old. The local knighthood, the yeomanry, the husbandmen of the
+county, were all represented in the crowd that gathered round the Sheriff,
+as guarded by his liveried followers he published the king's writs,
+announced his demand of aids, received the presentment of criminals and the
+inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or
+listened solemnly to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who
+held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke.
+It was in the County Court alone that the Sheriff could legally summon the
+lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, and it was in the actual
+constitution of this assembly that the Crown found a solution of the
+difficulty which we have stated. For the principle of representation by
+which it was finally solved was coeval with the Shire Court itself. In all
+cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the
+Sheriff, as members of a class, though not formally deputed for that
+purpose, practically represented the judicial opinion of the county at
+large. From every hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the
+"jurors" through whom the presentments of the district were made to the
+royal officer and with whom the assessment of its share in the general
+taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on the outskirts of the crowd, clad
+in the brown smock frock which still lingers in the garb of our carters and
+ploughmen, were broken up into little knots of five, a reeve and four
+assistants, each of which knots formed the representative of a rural
+township. If in fact we regard the Shire Courts as lineally the descendants
+of our earliest English Witenagemots, we may justly claim the principle of
+parliamentary representation as among the oldest of our institutions.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Knights of the Shire]
+
+It was easy to give this principle a further extension by the choice of
+representatives of the lesser barons in the shire courts to which they were
+summoned; but it was only slowly and tentatively that this process was
+applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council. As early as the close
+of John's reign there are indications of the approaching change in the
+summons of "four discreet knights" from every county. Fresh need of local
+support was felt by both parties in the conflict of the succeeding reign,
+and Henry and his barons alike summoned knights from each shire "to meet on
+the common business of the realm." It was no doubt with the same purpose
+that the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights in each shire
+for his famous Parliament of 1265. Something like a continuous attendance
+may be dated from the accession of Edward, but it was long before the
+knights were regarded as more than local deputies for the assessment of
+taxation or admitted to a share in the general business of the Great
+Council. The statute "Quia Emptores," for instance, was passed in it before
+the knights who had been summoned could attend. Their participation in the
+deliberative power of Parliament, as well as their regular and continuous
+attendance, dates only from the Parliament of 1295. But a far greater
+constitutional change in their position had already taken place through the
+extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large. The one class
+entitled to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the
+lesser baronage; and it was of the lesser baronage alone that the knights
+were in theory the representatives. But the necessity of holding their
+election in the County Court rendered any restriction of the electoral body
+physically impossible. The court was composed of the whole body of
+freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish the "aye, aye" of the yeoman
+from the "aye, aye" of the lesser baron. From the first moment therefore of
+their attendance we find the knights regarded not as mere representatives
+of the baronage but as knights of the shire, and by this silent revolution
+the whole body of the rural freeholders were admitted to a share in the
+government of the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Boroughs and the Crown]
+
+The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far more radical
+revolution in the admission into the Great Council of representatives from
+the boroughs. The presence of knights from each shire was the recognition
+of an older right, but no right of attendance or share in the national
+"counsel and assent" could be pleaded for the burgesses of the towns. On
+the other hand the rapid developement of their wealth made them every day
+more important as elements in the national taxation. From all payment of
+the dues or fines exacted by the king as the original lord of the soil on
+which they had in most cases grown up the towns had long since freed
+themselves by what was called the purchase of the "farm of the borough"; in
+other words, by the commutation of these uncertain dues for a fixed sum
+paid annually to the Crown and apportioned by their own magistrates among
+the general body of the burghers. All that the king legally retained was
+the right enjoyed by every great proprietor of levying a corresponding
+taxation on his tenants in demesne under the name of "a free aid" whenever
+a grant was made for the national necessities by the barons of the Great
+Council. But the temptation of appropriating the growing wealth of the
+mercantile class proved stronger than legal restrictions, and we find both
+Henry the Third and his son assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure
+and without any authority from the Council even over London itself. The
+burgesses could refuse indeed the invitation to contribute to the "free
+aids" demanded by the royal officers, but the suspension of their markets
+or trading privileges brought them in the end to submission. Each of these
+"free aids" however had to be extorted after a long wrangle between the
+borough and the officers of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven to
+comply with what they considered an extortion they could generally force
+the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise and abatement of its
+original demands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Burgesses in Parliament]
+
+The same financial reasons therefore existed for desiring the presence of
+borough representatives in the Great Council as existed in the case of the
+shires; but it was the genius of Earl Simon which first broke through the
+older constitutional tradition and summoned two burgesses from each town to
+the Parliament of 1265. Time had indeed to pass before the large and
+statesmanlike conception of the great patriot could meet with full
+acceptance. Through the earlier part of Edward's reign we find a few
+instances of the presence of representatives from the towns, but their
+scanty numbers and the irregularity of their attendance show that they were
+summoned rather to afford financial information to the Great Council than
+as representatives in it of an Estate of the Realm. But every year pleaded
+stronger and stronger for their inclusion, and in the Parliament of 1295
+that of 1265 found itself at last reproduced. "It was from me that he
+learnt it," Earl Simon had cried, as he recognized the military skill of
+Edward's onset at Evesham; "it was from me that he learnt it," his spirit
+might have exclaimed as he saw the king gathering at last two burgesses
+"from every city, borough, and leading town" within his realm to sit side
+by side with the knights, nobles, and barons of the Great Council. To the
+Crown the change was from the first an advantageous one. The grants of
+subsidies by the burgesses in Parliament proved more profitable than the
+previous extortions of the Exchequer. The proportions of their grant
+generally exceeded that of the other estates. Their representatives too
+proved far more compliant with the royal will than the barons or knights of
+the shire; only on one occasion during Edward's reign did the burgesses
+waver from their general support of the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Reluctance to attend]
+
+It was easy indeed to control them, for the selection of boroughs to be
+represented remained wholly in the king's hands, and their numbers could be
+increased or diminished at the king's pleasure. The determination was left
+to the sheriff, and at a hint from the royal Council a sheriff of Wilts
+would cut down the number of represented boroughs in his shire from eleven
+to three, or a sheriff of Bucks declare he could find but a single borough,
+that of Wycombe, within the bounds of his county. Nor was this exercise of
+the prerogative hampered by any anxiety on the part of the towns to claim
+representative privileges. It was hard to suspect that a power before which
+the Crown would have to bow lay in the ranks of soberly-clad traders,
+summoned only to assess the contributions of their boroughs, and whose
+attendance was as difficult to secure as it seemed burthensome to
+themselves and the towns who sent them. The mass of citizens took little or
+no part in their choice, for they were elected in the county court by a few
+of the principal burghers deputed for the purpose; but the cost of their
+maintenance, the two shillings a day paid to the burgess by his town as
+four were paid to the knight by his county, was a burden from which the
+boroughs made desperate efforts to escape. Some persisted in making no
+return to the sheriff. Some bought charters of exemption from the
+troublesome privilege. Of the 165 who were summoned by Edward the First
+more than a third ceased to send representatives after a single compliance
+with the royal summons. During the whole time from the reign of Edward the
+Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the sheriff of Lancashire declined to
+return the names of any boroughs at all within that county "on account of
+their poverty." Nor were the representatives themselves more anxious to
+appear than their boroughs to send them. The busy country squire and the
+thrifty trader were equally reluctant to undergo the trouble and expense of
+a journey to Westminster. Legal measures were often necessary to ensure
+their presence. Writs still exist in abundance such as that by which Walter
+le Rous is "held to bail in eight oxen and four cart-horses to come before
+the King on the day specified" for attendance in Parliament. But in spite
+of obstacles such as these the presence of representatives from the
+boroughs may be regarded as continuous from the Parliament of 1295. As the
+representation of the lesser barons had widened through a silent change
+into that of the shire, so that of the boroughs--restricted in theory to
+those in the royal demesne--seems practically from Edward's time to have
+been extended to all who were in a condition to pay the cost of their
+representatives' support. By a change as silent within the Parliament
+itself the burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters of
+taxation, was at last admitted to a full share in the deliberations and
+authority of the other orders of the State.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the Clergy]
+
+The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire to the assembly of
+1295 completed the fabric of our representative constitution. The Great
+Council of the Barons became the Parliament of the Realm. Every order of
+the state found itself represented in this assembly, and took part in the
+grant of supplies, the work of legislation, and in the end the control of
+government. But though in all essential points the character of Parliament
+has remained the same from that time to this, there were some remarkable
+particulars in which the assembly of 1295 differed widely from the present
+Parliament at St. Stephen's. Some of these differences, such as those which
+sprang from the increased powers and changed relations of the different
+orders among themselves, we shall have occasion to consider at a later
+time. But a difference of a far more startling kind than these lay in the
+presence of the clergy. If there is any part in the parliamentary scheme of
+Edward the First which can be regarded as especially his own, it is his
+project for the representation of the ecclesiastical order. The King had
+twice at least summoned its "proctors" to Great Councils before 1295, but
+it was then only that the complete representation of the Church was
+definitely organized by the insertion of a clause in the writ which
+summoned a bishop to Parliament requiring the personal attendance of all
+archdeacons, deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for each
+cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy within his diocese. The clause is
+repeated in the writs of the present day, but its practical effect was
+foiled almost from the first by the resolute opposition of those to whom it
+was addressed. What the towns failed in doing the clergy actually did. Even
+when forced to comply with the royal summons, as they seem to have been
+forced during Edward's reign, they sat jealously by themselves, and their
+refusal to vote supplies in any but their own provincial assemblies, or
+convocations, of Canterbury and York left the Crown without a motive for
+insisting on their continued attendance. Their presence indeed, though
+still at times granted on some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality
+that by the end of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into desuetude.
+In their anxiety to preserve their existence as an isolated and privileged
+order the clergy flung away a power which, had they retained it, would have
+ruinously hampered the healthy developement of the state. To take a single
+instance, it is difficult to see how the great changes of the Reformation
+could have been brought about had a good half of the House of Commons
+consisted purely of churchmen, whose numbers would have been backed by the
+weight of their property as possessors of a third of the landed estates of
+the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament at Westminster]
+
+A hardly less important difference may be found in the gradual restriction
+of the meetings of Parliament to Westminster. The names of Edward's
+statutes remind us of its convocation at the most various quarters, at
+Winchester, Acton Burnell, Northampton. It was at a later time that
+Parliament became settled in the straggling village which had grown up in
+the marshy swamp of the Isle of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled
+pile towered over the Thames and the new Westminster which was still rising
+in Edward's day on the site of the older church of the Confessor. It is
+possible that, while contributing greatly to its constitutional importance,
+this settlement of the Parliament may have helped to throw into the
+background its character as a supreme court of appeal. The proclamation by
+which it was called together invited "all who had any grace to demand of
+the King in Parliament, or any plaint to make of matters which could not be
+redressed or determined by ordinary course of law, or who had been in any
+way aggrieved by any of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or
+their bailiffs, or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated,
+charged, or surcharged to aids, subsidies, or taxes," to deliver their
+petitions to receivers who sat in the Great Hall of the Palace of
+Westminster. The petitions were forwarded to the King's Council, and it was
+probably the extension of the jurisdiction of that body and the rise of the
+Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient right of the subject to the
+formal election of "Triers of Petitions" at the opening of every new
+Parliament by the House of Lords, a usage which is still continued. But it
+must have been owing to some memory of the older custom that the subject
+always looked for redress against injuries from the Crown or its ministers
+to the Parliament of the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of Scotland]
+
+The subsidies granted by the Parliament of 1295 furnished the king with the
+means of warfare with both Scotland and France while they assured him of
+the sympathy of his people in the contest. But from the first the
+reluctance of Edward to enter on the double war was strongly marked. The
+refusal of the Scotch baronage to obey his summons had been followed on
+Balliol's part by two secret steps which made a struggle inevitable, by a
+request to Rome for absolution from his oath of fealty and by a treaty of
+alliance with Philip the Fair. As yet however no open breach had taken
+place, and while Edward in 1296 summoned his knighthood to meet him in the
+north he called a Parliament at Newcastle in the hope of bringing about an
+accommodation with the Scot king. But all thought of accommodation was
+roughly ended by the refusal of Balliol to attend the Parliament, by the
+rout of a small body of English troops, and by the Scotch investment of
+Carlisle. Taken as he was by surprise, Edward showed at once the vigour and
+rapidity of his temper. His army marched upon Berwick. The town was a rich
+and well-peopled one, and although a wooden stockade furnished its only
+rampart the serried ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope of an easy
+conquest. Their taunts indeed stung the king to the quick. As his engineers
+threw up rough entrenchments for the besieging army the burghers bade him
+wait till he won the town before he began digging round it. "Kynge Edward,"
+they shouted, "waune thou havest Berwick, pike thee; waune thou havest
+geten, dike thee." But the stockade was stormed with the loss of a single
+knight, nearly eight thousand of the citizens were mown down in a ruthless
+carnage, and a handful of Flemish traders who held the town-hall stoutly
+against all assailants were burned alive in it. The massacre only ceased
+when a procession of priests bore the host to the king's presence, praying
+for mercy. Edward with a sudden and characteristic burst of tears called
+off his troops; but the town was ruined for ever, and the greatest merchant
+city of northern Britain sank from that time into a petty seaport.
+
+At Berwick Edward received Balliol's formal defiance. "Has the fool done
+this folly?" the king cried in haughty scorn; "if he will not come to us,
+we will come to him." The terrible slaughter however had done its work, and
+his march northward was a triumphal progress. Edinburgh, Stirling, and
+Perth opened their gates, Bruce joined the English army, and Balliol
+himself surrendered and passed without a blow from his throne to an English
+prison. No further punishment however was exacted from the prostrate realm.
+Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared its forfeiture to be the
+legal consequence of Balliol's treason. It lapsed in fact to its suzerain;
+and its earls, barons, and gentry swore homage in Parliament at Berwick to
+Edward as their king. The sacred stone on which its older sovereigns had
+been installed, an oblong block of limestone which legend asserted to have
+been the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended upon him, was
+removed from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the
+Confessor. It was enclosed by Edward's order in a stately seat, which
+became from that hour the coronation chair of English kings. To the king
+himself the whole business must have seemed another and easier conquest of
+Wales, and the mercy and just government which had followed his first
+success followed his second also. The government of the new dependency was
+entrusted to John of Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English
+Council of Regency. Pardon was freely extended to all who had resisted the
+invasion, and order and public peace were rigidly enforced.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Confirmation of the Charters]
+
+But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had more than exhausted the
+aids granted by the Parliament. The treasury was utterly drained. The
+struggle indeed widened as every month went on; the costly fight with the
+French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward was planning a yet
+costlier attack on northern France with the aid of Flanders. Need drove him
+on his return from Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion
+which seemed to recall the times of John. His first blow fell on the
+Church. At the close of 1294 he had already demanded half their annual
+income from the clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance
+that the Dean of St. Paul's, who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead
+of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose the King's demand," said a
+royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that he may
+be noted as an enemy to the King's peace." The outraged Churchmen fell back
+on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the
+bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a
+bull which forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their
+ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for refusing to comply with further
+taxation. In 1297 Archbishop Winchelsey refused on the ground of this bull
+to make any grant, and Edward met his refusal by a general outlawry of the
+whole order. The King's Courts were closed, and all justice denied to those
+who refused the king aid. By their actual plea the clergy had put
+themselves formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon forced them to
+submission; but their aid did little to recruit the exhausted treasury. The
+pressure of the war steadily increased, and far wider measures of arbitrary
+taxation were needful to equip an expedition which Edward prepared to lead
+in person to Flanders. The country gentlemen were compelled to take up
+knighthood or to compound for exemption from the burthensome honour, and
+forced contributions of cattle and corn were demanded from the counties.
+Edward no doubt purposed to pay honestly for these supplies, but his
+exactions from the merchant class rested on a deliberate theory of his
+royal rights. He looked on the customs as levied absolutely at his
+pleasure, and the export duty on wool--now the staple produce of the
+country--was raised to six times its former amount. Although he infringed
+no positive provision of charter or statute in his action, it was plain
+that his course really undid all that had been gained by the Barons' war.
+But the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward found stout resistance
+within his realm. The barons drew together and called a meeting for the
+redress of their grievances. The two greatest of the English nobles,
+Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk,
+placed themselves at the head of the opposition. The first was Constable,
+the second Earl Marshal, and Edward bade them lead a force to Gascony as
+his lieutenants while he himself sailed to Flanders. Their departure would
+have left the Baronage without leaders, and the two earls availed
+themselves of a plea that they were not bound to foreign service save in
+attendance on the king to refuse obedience to the royal orders. "By God,
+Sir Earl," swore the king to the Earl Marshal, "you shall either go or
+hang!" "By God, Sir King," was the cool reply, "I will neither go nor
+hang!" Both parties separated in bitter anger; the king to seize fresh
+wool, to outlaw the clergy, and to call an army to his aid; the barons to
+gather in arms, backed by the excommunication of the Primate. But the
+strife went no further than words. Ere the Parliament he had convened could
+meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness; Winchelsey offered his
+mediation; and Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of
+Forests as the price of a grant from the clergy and a subsidy from the
+Commons. With one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of which his nature
+was capable the king stood before his people in Westminster Hall and owned
+with a burst of tears that he had taken their substance without due warrant
+of law. His passionate appeal to their loyalty wrested a reluctant assent
+to the prosecution, of the war, and in August Edward sailed for Flanders,
+leaving his son regent of the realm. But the crisis had taught the need of
+further securities against the royal power, and as Edward was about to
+embark the barons demanded his acceptance of additional articles to the
+Charter, expressly renouncing his right of taxing the nation without its
+own consent. The king sailed without complying, but Winchelsey joined the
+two earls and the citizens of London in forbidding any levy of supplies
+till the Great Charter with these clauses was again confirmed, and the
+trouble in Scotland as well as the still pending strife with France left
+Edward helpless in the barons' hands. The Great Charter and the Charter of
+the Forests were solemnly confirmed by him at Ghent in November; and formal
+pardon was issued to the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Revolt of Scotland]
+
+The confirmation of the Charter, the renunciation of any right to the
+exactions by which the people were aggrieved, the pledge that the king
+would no more take "such aids, tasks, and prizes but by common assent of
+the realm," the promise not to impose on wool any heavy customs or
+"maltôte" without the same assent, was the close of the great struggle
+which had begun at Runnymede. The clauses so soon removed from the Great
+Charter were now restored; and, evade them as they might, the kings were
+never able to free themselves from the obligation to seek aid solely from
+the general consent of their subjects. It was Scotland which had won this
+victory for English freedom. At the moment when Edward and the earls stood
+face to face the king saw his work in the north suddenly undone. Both the
+justice and injustice of the new rule proved fatal to it. The wrath of the
+Scots, already kindled by the intrusion of English priests into Scotch
+livings and by the grant of lands across the border to English barons, was
+fanned to fury by the strict administration of law and the repression of
+feuds and cattle-lifting. The disbanding too of troops, which was caused by
+the penury of the royal exchequer, united with the licence of the soldiery
+who remained to quicken the national sense of wrong. The disgraceful
+submission of their leaders brought the people themselves to the front. In
+spite of a hundred years of peace the farmer of Fife or the Lowlands and
+the artizan of the towns remained stout-hearted Northumbrian Englishmen.
+They had never consented to Edward's supremacy, and their blood rose
+against the insolent rule of the stranger. The genius of an outlaw knight,
+William Wallace, saw in their smouldering discontent a hope of freedom for
+his country, and his daring raids on outlying parties of the English
+soldiery roused the country at last into revolt.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wallace]
+
+Of Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we know little or nothing; the
+very traditions of his gigantic stature and enormous strength are dim and
+unhistorical. But the instinct of the Scotch people has guided it aright in
+choosing him for its national hero. He was the first to assert freedom as a
+national birthright, and amidst the despair of nobles and priests to call
+the people itself to arms. At the head of an army drawn principally from
+the coast districts north of the Tay, which were inhabited by a population
+of the same blood as that of the Lowlands, Wallace in September 1297
+encamped near Stirling, the pass between the north and the south, and
+awaited the English advance. It was here that he was found by the English
+army. The offers of John of Warenne were scornfully rejected: "We have
+come," said the Scottish leader, "not to make peace, but to free our
+country." The position of Wallace behind a loop of Forth was in fact chosen
+with consummate skill. The one bridge which crossed the river was only
+broad enough to admit two horsemen abreast; and though the English army had
+been passing from daybreak but half its force was across at noon when
+Wallace closed on it and cut it after a short combat to pieces in sight of
+its comrades. The retreat of the Earl of Surrey over the border left
+Wallace head of the country he had freed, and for a few months he acted as
+"Guardian of the Realm" in Balliol's name, and headed a wild foray into
+Northumberland in which the barbarous cruelties of his men left a bitter
+hatred behind them which was to wreak its vengeance in the later bloodshed
+of the war. His reduction of Stirling Castle at last called Edward to the
+field. In the spring of 1298 the king's diplomacy had at last wrung a truce
+for two years from Philip the Fair; and he at once returned to England to
+face the troubles in Scotland. Marching northward with a larger host than
+had ever followed his banner, he was enabled by treachery to surprise
+Wallace as he fell back to avoid an engagement, and to force him on the
+twenty-second of July to battle near Falkirk. The Scotch force consisted
+almost wholly of foot, and Wallace drew up his spearmen in four great
+hollow circles or squares, the outer ranks kneeling and the whole supported
+by bowmen within, while a small force of horse were drawn up as a reserve
+in the rear. It was the formation of Waterloo, the first appearance in our
+history since the day of Senlac of "that unconquerable British infantry"
+before which chivalry was destined to go down. For a moment it had all
+Waterloo's success. "I have brought you to the ring, hop (dance) if you
+can," are words of rough humour that reveal the very soul of the patriot
+leader, and the serried ranks answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of
+Durham who led the English van shrank wisely from the look of the squares.
+"Back to your mass, Bishop," shouted the reckless knights behind him, but
+the body of horse dashed itself vainly on the wall of spears. Terror spread
+through the English army, and its Welsh auxiliaries drew off in a body from
+the field. But the generalship of Wallace was met by that of the king.
+Drawing his bowmen to the front, Edward riddled the Scottish ranks with
+arrows and then hurled his cavalry afresh on the wavering line. In a moment
+all was over, the maddened knights rode in and out of the broken ranks,
+slaying without mercy. Thousands fell on the field, and Wallace himself
+escaped with difficulty, followed by a handful of men.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Second Conquest of Scotland]
+
+But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his work was done. He had roused
+Scotland into life, and even a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered.
+Edward remained master only of the ground he stood on: want of supplies
+forced him at last to retreat; and in the summer of the following year,
+1299, when Balliol, released from his English prison, withdrew into France,
+a regency of the Scotch nobles under Robert Bruce and John Comyn continued
+the struggle for independence. Troubles at home and danger from abroad
+stayed Edward's hand. The barons still distrusted his sincerity, and though
+at their demand he renewed the Confirmation in the spring of 1299, his
+attempt to add an evasive clause saving the right of the Crown proved the
+justice of their distrust. In spite of a fresh and unconditional renewal of
+it a strife over the Forest Charter went on till the opening of 1301 when a
+new gathering of the barons in arms with the support of Archbishop
+Winchelsey wrested from him its full execution. What aided freedom within
+was as of old the peril without. France was still menacing, and a claim
+advanced by Pope Boniface the Eighth at its suggestion to the feudal
+superiority over Scotland arrested a new advance of the king across the
+border. A quarrel however which broke out between Philip le Bel and the
+Papacy removed all obstacles. It enabled Edward to defy Boniface and to
+wring from France a treaty in which Scotland was abandoned. In 1304 he
+resumed the work of invasion, and again the nobles flung down their arms as
+he marched to the North. Comyn, at the head of the Regency, acknowledged
+his sovereignty, and the surrender of Stirling completed the conquest of
+Scotland. But the triumph of Edward was only the prelude to the carrying
+out of his designs for knitting the two countries together by a generosity
+and wisdom which reveal the greatness of his statesmanship. A general
+amnesty was extended to all who had shared in the resistance. Wallace, who
+refused to avail himself of Edward's mercy, was captured and condemned to
+death at Westminster on charges of treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The
+head of the great patriot, crowned in mockery with a circlet of laurel, was
+placed upon London Bridge. But the execution of Wallace was the one blot on
+Edward's clemency. With a masterly boldness he entrusted the government of
+the country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of whom were freshly
+pardoned for their share in the war, and anticipated the policy of Cromwell
+by allotting ten representatives to Scotland in the Common Parliament of
+his realm. A Convocation was summoned at Perth for the election of these
+representatives, and a great judicial scheme which was promulgated in this
+assembly adopted the amended laws of King David as the base of a new
+legislation, and divided the country for judicial purposes into four
+districts, Lothian, Galloway, the Highlands, and the land between the
+Highlands and the Forth, at the head of each of which were placed two
+justiciaries, the one English and the other Scotch.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Rising of Bruce]
+
+With the conquest and settlement of Scotland the glory of Edward seemed
+again complete. The bitterness of his humiliation at home indeed still
+preyed upon him, and in measure after measure we see his purpose of
+renewing the strife with the baronage. In 1303 he found a means of evading
+his pledge to levy no new taxes on merchandise save by assent of the realm
+in a consent of the foreign merchants, whether procured by royal pressure
+or no, to purchase by stated payments certain privileges of trading. In
+this "New Custom" lay the origin of our import duties. A formal absolution
+from his promises which he obtained from Pope Clement the Fifth in 1305
+showed that he looked on his triumph in the North as enabling him to reopen
+the questions which he had yielded. But again Scotland stayed his hand.
+Only four months had passed since its submission, and he was preparing for
+a joint Parliament of the two nations at Carlisle, when the conquered
+country suddenly sprang again to arms. Its new leader was Robert Bruce, a
+grandson of one of the original claimants of the crown. The Norman house of
+Bruce formed a part of the Yorkshire baronage, but it had acquired through
+intermarriages the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale. Both
+the claimant and his son had been pretty steadily on the English side in
+the contest with Balliol and Wallace, and Robert had himself been trained
+in the English court and stood high in the king's favour. But the
+withdrawal of Balliol gave a new force to his claims upon the crown, and
+the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on foot with the Bishop of
+St. Andrews so roused Edward's jealousy that Bruce fled for his life across
+the border. Early in 1306 he met Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to whose
+treachery he attributed the disclosure of his plans, in the church of the
+Grey Friars at Dumfries, and after the interchange of a few hot words
+struck him with his dagger to the ground. It was an outrage that admitted
+of no forgiveness, and Bruce for very safety was forced to assume the crown
+six weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. The news roused Scotland again to
+arms, and summoned Edward to a fresh contest with his unconquerable foe.
+But the murder of Comyn had changed the king's mood to a terrible
+pitilessness. He threatened death against all concerned in the outrage, and
+exposed the Countess of Buchan, who had set the crown on Bruce's head, in a
+cage or open chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers of Berwick.
+At the solemn feast which celebrated his son's knighthood Edward vowed on
+the swan which formed the chief dish at the banquet to devote the rest of
+his days to exact vengeance from the murderer himself. But even at the
+moment of the vow Bruce was already flying for his life to the western
+islands. "Henceforth" he said to his wife at their coronation "thou art
+Queen of Scotland and I King." "I fear" replied Mary Bruce "we are only
+playing at royalty like children in their games." The play was soon turned
+into bitter earnest. A small English force under Aymer de Valence sufficed
+to rout the disorderly levies which gathered round the new monarch, and the
+flight of Bruce left his followers at Edward's mercy. Noble after noble was
+sent to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred with royalty. "His
+only privilege," burst forth the king, "shall be that of being hanged on a
+higher gallows than the rest." Knights and priests were strung up side by
+side by the English justiciaries; while the wife and daughters of Robert
+Bruce were flung into Edward's prisons. Bruce himself had offered to
+capitulate to Prince Edward. But the offer only roused the old king to
+fury. "Who is so bold," he cried, "as to treat with our traitors without
+our knowledge?" and rising from his sick-bed he led his army northwards in
+the summer of 1307 to complete the conquest. But the hand of death was upon
+him, and in the very sight of Scotland the old man breathed his last at
+Burgh-upon-Sands.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+THE PARLIAMENT
+1307-1461
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV
+
+
+For Edward the Second we have three important contemporaries: Thomas de la
+More, Trokelowe's Annals, and the life by a monk of Malmesbury printed by
+Hearne. The sympathies of the first are with the King, those of the last
+two with the Barons. Murimuth's short Chronicle is also contemporary. John
+Barbour's "Bruce," the great legendary storehouse for his hero's
+adventures, is historically worthless.
+
+Important as it is, the reign of Edward the Third is by no means fortunate
+in its annalists. The concluding part of the Chronicle of Walter of
+Hemingford or Heminburgh seems to have been jotted down as news of the
+passing events reached its author: it ends at the battle of Crécy. Hearne
+has published another contemporary account, that of Robert of Avesbury,
+which closes in 1356. A third account by Knyghton, a canon of Leicester,
+will be found in the collection of Twysden. At the end of this century and
+the beginning of the next the annals which had been carried on in the Abbey
+of St. Albans were thrown together by Walsingham in the "Historia
+Anglicana" which bears his name, a compilation whose history may be found
+in the prefaces to the "Chronica Monasterii S. Albani" issued in the Rolls
+Series. An anonymous chronicler whose work is printed in the 22nd volume of
+the "Archæologia" has given us the story of the Good Parliament, another
+account is preserved in the "Chronica Angliæ from 1328 to 1388," published
+in the Rolls Series, and fresh light has been recently thrown on the time
+by the publication of a Chronicle by Adam of Usk which extends from 1377 to
+1404. Fortunately the scantiness of historical narrative is compensated by
+the growing fulness and abundance of our State papers. Rymer's Foedera is
+rich in diplomatic and other documents for this period, and from this time
+we have a storehouse of political and social information in the
+Parliamentary Rolls.
+
+For the French war itself our primary authority is the Chronicle of Jehan
+le Bel, a canon of the church of St. Lambert of Liége, who himself served
+in Edward's campaign against the Scots and spent the rest of his life at
+the court of John of Hainault. Up to the Treaty of Brétigny, where it
+closes, Froissart has done little more than copy this work, making however
+large additions from his own enquiries, especially in the Flemish and
+Breton campaigns and in the account of Crécy. Froissart was himself a
+Hainaulter of Valenciennes; he held a post in Queen Philippa's household
+from 1361 to 1369, and under this influence produced in 1373 the first
+edition of his well-known Chronicle. A later edition is far less English in
+tone, and a third version, begun by him in his old age after long absence
+from England, is distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity
+and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of his details; as an
+historical authority he is of little value. The "Fasciculi Zizaniorum" in
+the Rolls Series with the documents appended to it is a work of primary
+authority for the history of Wyclif and his followers: a selection from his
+English tracts has been made by Mr. T. Arnold for the University of Oxford,
+which has also published his "Trias." The version of the Bible that bears
+his name has been edited with a valuable preface by the Rev. J. Forshall
+and Sir F. Madden. William Langland's poem, "The Complaint of Piers the
+Ploughman" (edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society), throws
+a flood of light on the social state of England after the Treaty of
+Brétigny.
+
+The "Annals of Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth," now published by
+the Master of the Rolls, are our main authority for the period which
+follows Edward's death. They serve as the basis of the St. Albans
+compilation which bears the name of Walsingham, and from which the "Life of
+Richard" by a monk of Evesham is for the most part derived. The same
+violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through Walsingham and the fifth book of
+Knyghton's Chronicle. The French authorities on the other hand are
+vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is
+supplemented by the metrical history of Creton ("Archæologia," vol. xx.),
+and by the "Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart" (English Historical
+Society), both works of French authors and published in France in the time
+of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French feeling
+against the House of Lancaster and the war-policy which it had revived. The
+popular feeling in England may be seen in "Political Songs from Edward III.
+to Richard III." (Rolls Series). A poem on "The Deposition of Richard II."
+which has been published by the Camden Society is now ascribed to William
+Langland.
+
+With Henry the Fifth our historic materials become more abundant. We have
+the "Gesta Henrici Quinti" by Titus Livius, a chaplain in the royal army; a
+life by Elmham, prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical in
+arrangement and facts with the former work; a biography by Robert Redman; a
+metrical chronicle by Elmham (published in Rolls Series in "Memorials of
+Henry the Fifth"); and the meagre chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne.
+The King's Norman campaigns may be studied in M. Puiseux's "Siége de Rouen"
+(Caen, 1867). The "Wars of the English in France" and Blondel's work "De
+Reductione Normanniæ" (both in Rolls Series) give ample information on the
+military side of this and the next reign. But with the accession of Henry
+the Sixth we again enter on a period of singular dearth in its historical
+authorities. The "Procès de Jeanne d'Arc" (published by the Société de
+l'Histoire de France) is the only real authority for her history. For
+English affairs we are reduced to the meagre accounts of William of
+Worcester, of the Continuator of the Crowland Chronicle, and of Fabyan.
+Fabyan is a London alderman with a strong bias in favour of the House of
+Lancaster, and his work is useful for London only. The Continuator is one
+of the best of his class; and though connected with the house of York, the
+date of his work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field, makes him
+fairly impartial; but he is sketchy and deficient in information. The more
+copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in literary
+ability, but of later date, and strongly Lancastrian in tone. For the
+struggle between Edward and Warwick, the valuable narrative of "The Arrival
+of Edward the Fourth" (Camden Society) may be taken as the official account
+on the royal side. The Paston Letters are the first instance in English
+history of a family correspondence, and throw great light on the social
+condition of the time.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+EDWARD II
+1307-1327
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the Kings]
+
+In his calling together the estates of the realm Edward the First
+determined the course of English history. From the first moment of its
+appearance the Parliament became the centre of English affairs. The hundred
+years indeed which follow its assembly at Westminster saw its rise into a
+power which checked and overawed the Crown.
+
+Of the kings in whose reigns the Parliament gathered this mighty strength
+not one was likely to look with indifference on the growth of a rival
+authority, and the bulk of them were men who in other times would have
+roughly checked it. What held their hand was the need of the Crown. The
+century and a half that followed the gathering of the estates at
+Westminster was a time of almost continual war, and of the financial
+pressure that springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered them.
+In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought mainly an effective means
+of procuring supplies for that policy of national consolidation which had
+triumphed in Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. But the
+triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one, and the strife brought
+wider strifes in its train. When Edward wrung from Balliol an
+acknowledgement of his suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France,
+the war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the upgrowth of social, of
+political, of religious revolution within England itself, of which that
+acknowledgement was to be the prelude. But the thicker troubles gathered
+round England the more the royal treasury was drained, and now that
+arbitrary taxation was impossible the one means of filling it lay in a
+summons of the Houses. The Crown was chained to the Parliament by a tie of
+absolute need. From the first moment of parliamentary existence the life
+and power of the estates assembled at Westminster hung on the question of
+supplies. So long as war went on no ruler could dispense with the grants
+which fed the war and which Parliament alone could afford. But it was
+impossible to procure supplies save by redressing the grievances of which
+Parliament complained and by granting the powers which Parliament demanded.
+It was in vain that king after king, conscious that war bound them to the
+Parliament, strove to rid themselves of the war. So far was the ambition of
+our rulers from being the cause of the long struggle that, save in the one
+case of Henry the Fifth, the desperate effort of every ruler was to arrive
+at peace. Forced as they were to fight, their restless diplomacy strove to
+draw from victory as from defeat a means of escape from the strife that was
+enslaving the Crown. The royal Council, the royal favourites, were always
+on the side of peace. But fortunately for English freedom peace was
+impossible. The pride of the English people, the greed of France, foiled
+every attempt at accommodation. The wisest ministers sacrificed themselves
+in vain. King after king patched up truces which never grew into treaties,
+and concluded marriages which brought fresh discord instead of peace. War
+went ceaselessly on, and with the march of war went on the ceaseless growth
+of the Parliament.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Robert Bruce]
+
+The death of Edward the First arrested only for a moment the advance of his
+army to the north. The Earl of Pembroke led it across the border, and found
+himself master of the country without a blow. Bruce's career became that of
+a desperate adventurer, for even the Highland chiefs in whose fastnesses he
+found shelter were bitterly hostile to one who claimed to be king of their
+foes in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that transformed the murderer
+of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation's cause. Strong and of
+commanding presence, brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships
+of his career with a courage and hopefulness that never failed. In the
+legends that clustered round his name we see him listening in Highland
+glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass
+single-handed against a crowd of savage clansmen. Sometimes the small band
+which clung to him were forced to support themselves by hunting and
+fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their enemies tracked them to
+their lair. Bruce himself had more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail
+and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags. Little by little,
+however, the dark sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed. James Douglas,
+the darling of Scottish story, was the first of the Lowland Barons to rally
+to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the king's cause. Once he
+surprised his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the
+dinner which was prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed
+their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate. Then he staved in the
+wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house and
+wood-pile on fire.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward the Second]
+
+A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of freedom; but the
+revival of the country went steadily on. Pembroke and the English forces
+were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had broken out in England between
+the new king and his baronage. The moral purpose which had raised his
+father to grandeur was wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy,
+idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being destitute of the
+intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in the Plantagenets. He had no
+love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign
+struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to
+taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses
+added to the Charter. The son's purpose was the same, that of throwing off
+what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the means by which he
+designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a minister wholly
+dependent on the Crown. We have already noticed the change by which the
+"clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary
+government under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly
+superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the close
+of the late reign a direct demand on the part of the barons to nominate the
+great officers of state had been curtly rejected, but the royal choice had
+been practically limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of
+prelates and nobles, and however closely connected with royalty they might
+be such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and opinions
+of their order. The aim of the young king seems to have been to undo the
+change which had been silently brought about, and to imitate the policy of
+the contemporary sovereigns of France by choosing as his ministers men of
+an inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown for their power, and
+representatives of nothing but the policy and interests of their master.
+Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from a family of Guienne, had been his
+friend and companion during his father's reign, at the close of which he
+had been banished from the realm for his share in intrigues which divided
+Edward from his son. At the accession of the new king he was at once
+recalled, created Earl of Cornwall, and placed at the head of the
+administration. When Edward crossed the sea to wed Isabella of France, the
+daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage planned by his father to provide
+against any further intervention of France in his difficulties with
+Scotland, the new minister was left as Regent in his room. The offence
+given by this rapid promotion was embittered by his personal temper. Gay,
+genial, thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the quickness and
+audacity of Southern Gaul. The older ministers were dismissed, all claims
+of precedence or inheritance were set aside in the distribution of offices
+at the coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud baronage to
+fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and his lance unhorsed his
+opponents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit flung nicknames about
+the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was "the Actor," Pembroke "the Jew,"
+Warwick "the Black Dog." But taunt and defiance broke helplessly against
+the iron mass of the baronage. After a few months of power the formal
+demand of the Parliament for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in
+May 1308 Gaveston was formally banished from the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Thomas of Lancaster]
+
+But Edward was far from abandoning his favourite. In Ireland he was
+unfettered by the baronage, and here Gaveston found a refuge as the King's
+Lieutenant while Edward sought to obtain his recall by the intervention of
+France and the Papacy. But the financial pressure of the Scotch war again
+brought the king and his Parliament together in the spring of 1309. It was
+only by conceding the rights which his father had sought to establish of
+imposing import duties on the merchants by their own assent that he
+procured a subsidy. The firmness of the baronage sprang from their having
+found a head. In no point had the policy of Henry the Third more utterly
+broken down than in his attempt to weaken the power of the nobles by
+filling the great earldoms with kinsmen of the royal house. He had made
+Simon of Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to the nation
+in the Barons' war. In loading his second son, Edmund Crouchback, with
+honours and estates he raised a family to greatness which overawed the
+Crown. Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham he had
+received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of Derby
+on the extinction of the house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lancaster,
+was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these lordships
+the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the weight of these great baronies was added
+his royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a titular king of Sicily.
+His mother was dowager queen of Navarre. His half-sister by the mother's
+side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel and mother of the English
+queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not far
+from the succession to the throne. Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a
+nobler man, his adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided the
+king into a really national policy. As it was his weight proved
+irresistible. When Edward at the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston
+the Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament
+which met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the realm
+should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-one "Ordainers" with
+Archbishop Winchelsey at their head.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Ordainers]
+
+Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North. A triumph in Scotland
+would have given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of
+his father's military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep an
+army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his southern
+realm to meet the Parliament of 1311 and the "Ordinances" which the
+twenty-one laid before it. By this long and important statute Gaveston was
+banished, other advisers were driven from the Council, and the Florentine
+bankers whose loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out
+of the realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First were declared
+to be illegal. Its administrative provisions showed the relations which the
+barons sought to establish between the new Parliament and the Crown.
+Parliaments were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the
+king's servants were to be brought, if need were, to justice. The great
+officers of state were to be appointed with the counsel and consent of the
+baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament. The same consent of the barons in
+Parliament was to be needful ere the king could declare war or absent
+himself from the realm. As the Ordinances show, the baronage still looked
+on Parliament rather as a political organization of the nobles than as a
+gathering of the three Estates of the realm. The lower clergy pass
+unnoticed; the Commons are regarded as mere taxpayers whose part was still
+confined to the presentation of petitions of grievances and the grant of
+money. But even in this imperfect fashion the Parliament was a real
+representation of the country. The barons no longer depended for their
+force on the rise of some active leader, or gathered in exceptional
+assemblies to wrest reforms from the Crown by threat of war. Their action
+was made regular and legal. Even if the Commons took little part in forming
+decisions, their force when formed hung on the assent of the knights and
+burgesses to them; and the grant which alone could purchase from the Crown
+the concessions which the Baronage demanded lay absolutely within the
+control of the Third Estate. It was this which made the king's struggles so
+fruitless. He assented to the Ordinances, and then withdrawing to the North
+recalled Gaveston and annulled them. But Winchelsey excommunicated the
+favourite, and the barons, gathering in arms, besieged him in Scarborough.
+His surrender in May 1312 ended the strife. The "Black Dog" of Warwick had
+sworn that the favourite should feel his teeth; and Gaveston flung himself
+in vain at the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, praying for pity "from his
+gentle lord." In defiance of the terms of his capitulation he was beheaded
+on Blacklow Hill.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Bannockburn]
+
+The king's burst of grief was as fruitless as his threats of vengeance; a
+feigned submission of the conquerors completed the royal humiliation, and
+the barons knelt before Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon
+which seemed the deathblow of the royal power. But if Edward was powerless
+to conquer the baronage he could still by evading the observance of the
+Ordinances throw the whole realm into confusion. The two years that follow
+Gaveston's death are among the darkest in our history. A terrible
+succession of famines intensified the suffering which sprang from the utter
+absence of all rule as dissension raged between the barons and the king. At
+last a common peril drew both parties together. The Scots had profited by
+the English troubles, and Bruce's "harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of
+its Earl, who had joined the English army, fairly turned the tide of
+success in his favour. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and most of the Scotch
+fortresses fell one by one into King Robert's hands. The clergy met in
+council and owned him as their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who
+still held to the English cause were coerced into submission, and Bruce
+found himself strong enough to invest Stirling, the last and the most
+important of the Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward. Stirling was
+in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused England out of its civil
+strife to an effort for the recovery of its prey. At the close of 1313
+Edward recognized the Ordinances, and a liberal grant from the Parliament
+enabled him to take the field. Lancaster indeed still held aloof on the
+ground that the king had not sought the assent of Parliament to the war,
+but thirty thousand men followed Edward to the North, and a host of wild
+marauders were summoned from Ireland and Wales. The army which Bruce
+gathered to oppose this inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen, and was
+stationed to the south of Stirling on a rising ground flanked by a little
+brook, the Bannockburn, which gave its name to the engagement. The battle
+took place on the twenty-fourth of June 1314. Again two systems of warfare
+were brought face to face as they had been brought at Falkirk, for Robert
+like Wallace drew up his forces in hollow squares or circles of spearmen.
+The English were dispirited at the very outset by the failure of an attempt
+to relieve Stirling and by the issue of a single combat between Bruce and
+Henry de Bohun, a knight who bore down upon him as he was riding peacefully
+along the front of his army. Robert was mounted on a small hackney and held
+only a light battle-axe in his hand, but warding off his opponent's spear
+he cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the handle of his axe was
+shattered in his grasp. At the opening of the battle the English archers
+were thrown forward to rake the Scottish squares, but they were without
+support and were easily dispersed by a handful of horse whom Bruce held in
+reserve for the purpose. The body of men-at-arms next flung themselves on
+the Scottish front, but their charge was embarrassed by the narrow space
+along which the line was forced to move, and the steady resistance of the
+squares soon threw the knighthood into disorder. "The horses that were
+stickit," says an exulting Scotch writer, "rushed and reeled right rudely."
+In the moment of failure the sight of a body of camp-followers, whom they
+mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, spread panic through the English
+host. It broke in a headlong rout. Its thousands of brilliant horsemen were
+soon floundering in pits which guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or
+riding in wild haste for the border. Few however were fortunate enough to
+reach it. Edward himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded in
+escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of his knighthood fell into
+the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and the footmen were ruthlessly
+cut down by the country folk as they fled. For centuries to come the rich
+plunder of the English camp left its traces on the treasure-rolls and the
+vestment-rolls of castle and abbey throughout the Lowlands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Lancaster]
+
+Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland: but terrible as the blow was
+England could not humble herself to relinquish her claim on the Scottish
+crown. Edward was eager indeed for a truce, but with equal firmness Bruce
+refused all negotiation while the royal title was withheld from him and
+steadily pushed on the recovery of his southern dominions. His progress was
+unhindered. Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and Lancaster at the head of
+the Ordainers became supreme. But it was still impossible to trust the king
+or to act with him, and in the dead-lock of both parties the Scots
+plundered as they would. Their ravages in the North brought shame on
+England such as it had never known. At last Bruce's capture of Berwick in
+the spring of 1318 forced the king to give way. The Ordinances were
+formally accepted, an amnesty granted, and a small number of peers
+belonging to the barons' party added to the great officers of state. Had a
+statesman been at the head of the baronage the weakness of Edward might
+have now been turned to good purpose. But the character of the Earl of
+Lancaster seems to have fallen far beneath the greatness of his position.
+Distrustful of his cousin, yet himself incapable of governing, he stood
+sullenly aloof from the royal Council and the royal armies, and Edward was
+able to lay his failure in recovering Berwick during the campaign of 1319
+to the Earl's charge. His influence over the country was sensibly weakened;
+and in this weakness the new advisers on whom the king was leaning saw a
+hope of destroying his power. These were a younger and elder Hugh Le
+Despenser, son and grandson of the Justiciar who had fallen beside Earl
+Simon at Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they may have been, they were
+able men, and their policy was of a higher stamp than the wilful defiance
+of Gaveston. It lay, if we may gather it from the faint indications which
+remain, in a frank recognition of the power of the three Estates as opposed
+to the separate action of the baronage. The rise of the younger Hugh, on
+whom the king bestowed the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of its
+coheiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, was rapid enough to
+excite general jealousy; and in 1321 Lancaster found little difficulty in
+extorting by force of arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of
+popular sympathy was already wavering, and it was turned to the royal cause
+by an insult offered to the queen, against whom Lady Badlesmere closed the
+doors of Ledes Castle. The unexpected energy shown by Edward in avenging
+this insult gave fresh strength to his cause. At the opening of 1322 he
+found himself strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lancaster
+convoked the baronage to force him again into exile, the weakness of their
+party was shown by some negotiations into which the Earl entered with the
+Scots and by his precipitate retreat to the north on the advance of the
+royal army. At Boroughbridge his forces were arrested and dispersed, and
+Thomas himself, brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, was tried and
+condemned to death as a traitor. "Have mercy on me, King of Heaven," cried
+Lancaster, as, mounted on a grey pony without a bridle, he was hurried to
+execution, "for my earthly king has forsaken me." His death was followed by
+that of a number of his adherents and by the captivity of others; while a
+Parliament at York annulled the proceedings against the Despensers and
+repealed the Ordinances.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Despensers]
+
+It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence
+of the royalists, that we owe the famous provision which reveals the policy
+of the Despensers, the provision that all laws concerning "the estate of
+our Lord the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm and the
+people shall be treated, accorded, and established in Parliaments by our
+Lord the King and by the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and
+commonalty of the realm according as hath been hitherto accustomed." It
+would seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that much of the
+sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the assumption of all
+legislative action by the baronage alone. The same policy was seen in a
+reissue in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most beneficial
+provisions of the Ordinances which had been formally repealed. But the
+arrogance of the Despensers gave new offence; and the utter failure of a
+fresh campaign against Scotland again weakened the Crown. The barbarous
+forays in which the borderers under Earl Douglas were wasting
+Northumberland woke a general indignation; and a grant from the Parliament
+at York enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North. But Bruce
+as of old declined an engagement till the wasted Lowlands starved the
+invaders into a ruinous retreat. The failure forced England in the spring
+of 1323 to stoop to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which
+Bruce was suffered to take the royal title. We see in this act of the
+Despensers the first of a series of such attempts by which minister after
+minister strove to free the Crown from the bondage under which the
+war-pressure laid it to the growing power of Parliament; but it ended, as
+these after attempts ended, only in the ruin of the counsellors who planned
+it. The pride of the country had been roused by the struggle, and the
+humiliation of such a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.
+It led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed this disastrous
+reign.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Isabella]
+
+In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his father, had been hampered
+not only by internal divisions but by the harassing intervention of France.
+The rising under Bruce had been backed by French aid as well as by a
+revival of the old quarrel over Guienne, and on the accession of Charles
+the Fourth in 1322 a demand of homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called
+Edward over sea. But the Despensers dared not let him quit the realm, and a
+fresh dispute as to the right of possession in the Agénois brought about
+the seizure of the bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the part of the
+French. The quarrel verged upon open war, and to close it Edward's queen,
+Isabella, a sister of the French king, undertook in 1325 to revisit her
+home and bring about a treaty of peace between the two countries. Isabella
+hated the Despensers; she was alienated from her husband; but hatred and
+alienation were as yet jealously concealed. At the close of the year the
+terms of peace seemed to be arranged; and though declining to cross the
+sea, Edward evaded the difficulty created by the demand for personal homage
+by investing his son with the Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and
+despatching him to join his mother at Paris. The boy did homage to King
+Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the Agénois being reserved for
+legal decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and son to England.
+Neither threats nor prayers however could induce either wife or child to
+return to his court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher
+barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and
+his influence over the queen made her the centre of a vast conspiracy. With
+the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the
+Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter; the Italian
+bankers supplied funds; and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail
+in the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed
+when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at
+Orwell. Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he
+implored, the king fled hastily to the west and embarked with the
+Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible
+refuge; but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he
+fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl
+whom they had slain. The younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at
+once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the king placed in ward at
+Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that
+purpose at Westminster in January 1327.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Deposition of Edward]
+
+The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the
+earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king who had
+proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in Edward's behalf,
+and only four prelates protested when the young Prince was proclaimed king
+by acclamation and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes without.
+The revolution took legal form in a bill which charged the captive monarch
+with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his
+coronation oath and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the
+approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had
+ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor. A
+deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent
+of the discrowned king to his own deposition, and Edward "clad in a plain
+black gown" bowed quietly to his fate. Sir William Trussel at once
+addressed him in words which better than any other mark the nature of the
+step which the Parliament had taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor of the
+earls, barons, and others, having for this full and sufficient power, do
+render and give back to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and
+fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and acquit and discharge them
+thereof in the best manner that law and custom will give. And I now make
+protestation in their name that they will no longer be in your fealty and
+allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as king, but will account you
+hereafter as a private person, without any manner of royal dignity." A
+significant act followed these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount, the
+steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony used only
+at a king's death, and declared that all persons engaged in the royal
+service were discharged. The act of Blount was only an omen of the fate
+which awaited the miserable king. In the following September he was
+murdered in Berkeley Castle.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+EDWARD THE THIRD
+1327-1347
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Estate of the Commons]
+
+The deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed to the world the power which
+the English Parliament had gained. In thirty years from their first
+assembly at Westminster the Estates had wrested from the Crown the last
+relic of arbitrary taxation, had forced on it new ministers and a new
+system of government, had claimed a right of confirming the choice of its
+councillors and of punishing their misconduct, and had established the
+principle that redress of grievances precedes a grant of supply. Nor had
+the time been less important in the internal growth of Parliament. Step by
+step the practical sense of the Houses themselves completed the work of
+Edward by bringing about change after change in its composition. The very
+division into a House of Lords and a House of Commons formed no part of the
+original plan of Edward the First; in the earlier Parliaments each of the
+four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses met, deliberated, and
+made their grants apart from each other. This isolation however of the
+Estates soon showed signs of breaking down. Though the clergy held steadily
+aloof from any real union with its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire
+were drawn by the similarity of their social position into a close
+connexion with the lords. They seem in fact to have been soon admitted by
+the baronage to an almost equal position with themselves, whether as
+legislators or counsellors of the Crown. The burgesses on the other hand
+took little part at first in Parliamentary proceedings, save in those which
+related to the taxation of their class. But their position was raised by
+the strifes of the reign of Edward the Second when their aid was needed by
+the baronage in its struggle with the Crown; and their right to share fully
+in all legislative action was asserted in the statute of 1322. From this
+moment no proceedings can have been considered as formally legislative save
+those conducted in full Parliament of all the estates. In subjects of
+public policy however the barons were still regarded as the sole advisers
+of the Crown, though the knights of the shire were sometimes consulted with
+them. But the barons and knighthood were not fated to be drawn into a
+single body whose weight would have given an aristocratic impress to the
+constitution. Gradually, through causes with which we are imperfectly
+acquainted, the knights of the shire drifted from their older connexion
+with the baronage into so close and intimate a union with the
+representatives of the towns that at the opening of the reign of Edward the
+Third the two orders are found grouped formally together, under the name of
+"The Commons." It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this
+change. Had Parliament remained broken up into its four orders of clergy,
+barons, knights, and citizens, its power would have been neutralized at
+every great crisis by the jealousies and difficulty of co-operation among
+its component parts. A permanent union of the knighthood and the baronage
+on the other hand would have converted Parliament into the mere
+representative of an aristocratic caste, and would have robbed it of the
+strength which it has drawn from its connexion with the great body of the
+commercial classes. The new attitude of the knighthood, their social
+connexion as landed gentry with the baronage, their political union with
+the burgesses, really welded the three orders into one, and gave that unity
+of feeling and action to our Parliament on which its power has ever since
+mainly depended.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotch War]
+
+The weight of the two Houses was seen in their settlement of the new
+government by the nomination of a Council with Earl Henry of Lancaster at
+its head. The Council had at once to meet fresh difficulties in the North.
+The truce so recently made ceased legally with Edward's deposition; and the
+withdrawal of his royal title in further offers of peace warned Bruce of
+the new temper of the English rulers. Troops gathered on either side, and
+the English Council sought to pave the way for an attack by dividing
+Scotland against itself. Edward Balliol, a son of the former king John, was
+solemnly received as a vassal-king of Scotland at the English court. Robert
+was disabled by leprosy from taking the field in person, but the insult
+roused him to hurl his marauders again over the border under Douglas and
+Sir Thomas Randolph. The Scotch army has been painted for us by an
+eye-witness whose description is embodied in the work of Jehan le Bel. "It
+consisted of four thousand men-at-arms, knights, and esquires, well
+mounted, besides twenty thousand men bold and hardy, armed after the manner
+of their country, and mounted upon little hackneys that are never tied up
+or dressed, but turned immediately after the day's march to pasture on the
+heath or in the fields.... They bring no carriages with them on account of
+the mountains they have to pass in Northumberland, neither do they carry
+with them any provisions of bread or wine, for their habits of sobriety are
+such in time of war that they will live for a long time on flesh
+half-sodden without bread, and drink the river water without wine. They
+have therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress the flesh of
+the cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, and being sure to
+find plenty of them in the country which they invade they carry none with
+them. Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries a broad piece of
+metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of
+the sodden flesh and their stomach appears weak and empty, they set this
+plate over the fire, knead the meal with water, and when the plate is hot
+put a little of the paste upon it in a thin cake like a biscuit, which they
+eat to warm their stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they perform a
+longer day's march than other soldiers." Though twenty thousand horsemen
+and forty thousand foot marched under their boy-king to protect the border,
+the English troops were utterly helpless against such a foe as this. At one
+time the whole army lost its way in the border wastes: at another all
+traces of the enemy disappeared, and an offer of knighthood and a hundred
+marks was made to any who could tell where the Scots were encamped. But
+when they were found their position behind the Wear proved unassailable,
+and after a bold sally on the English camp Douglas foiled an attempt at
+intercepting him by a clever retreat. The English levies broke hopelessly
+up, and a fresh foray into Northumberland forced the English Court in 1328
+to submit to peace. By the treaty of Northampton which was solemnly
+confirmed by Parliament in September the independence of Scotland was
+recognized, and Robert Bruce owned as its king. Edward formally abandoned
+his claim of feudal superiority over Scotland; while Bruce promised to make
+compensation for the damage done in the North, to marry his son David to
+Edward's sister Joan, and to restore their forfeited estates to those
+nobles who had sided with the English king.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Mortimer]
+
+But the pride of England had been too much roused by the struggle with the
+Scots to bear this defeat easily, and the first result of the treaty of
+Northampton was the overthrow of the government which concluded it. This
+result was hastened by the pride of Roger Mortimer, who was now created
+Earl of March, and who had made himself supreme through his influence over
+Isabella and his exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all practical
+share in the administration of the realm. The first efforts to shake
+Roger's power were unsuccessful. The Earl of Lancaster stood, like his
+brother, at the head of the baronage; the parliamentary settlement at
+Edward's accession had placed him first in the royal Council; and it was to
+him that the task of defying Mortimer naturally fell. At the close of 1328
+therefore Earl Henry formed a league with the Archbishop of Canterbury and
+with the young king's uncles, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent, to bring
+Mortimer to account for the peace with Scotland and the usurpation of the
+government as well as for the late king's murder, a murder which had been
+the work of his private partizans and which had profoundly shocked the
+general conscience. But the young king clave firmly to his mother, the
+Earls of Norfolk and Kent deserted to Mortimer, and powerful as it seemed
+the league broke up without result. A feeling of insecurity however spurred
+the Earl of March to a bold stroke at his opponents. The Earl of Kent, who
+was persuaded that his brother, Edward the Second, still lived a prisoner
+in Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to restore him to
+the throne, tried before a Parliament filled with Mortimer's adherents, and
+sent to the block. But the death of a prince of the royal blood roused the
+young king to resentment at the greed and arrogance of a minister who
+treated Edward himself as little more than a state-prisoner. A few months
+after his uncle's execution the king entered the Council chamber in
+Nottingham Castle with a force which he had introduced through a secret
+passage in the rock on which it stands, and arrested Mortimer with his own
+hands. A Parliament which was at once summoned condemned the Earl of March
+to a traitor's death, and in November 1330 he was beheaded at Tyburn, while
+the queen-mother was sent for the rest of her life into confinement at
+Castle Rising.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and France]
+
+Young as he was, and he had only reached his eighteenth year, Edward at
+once assumed the control of affairs. His first care was to restore good
+order throughout the country, which under the late government had fallen
+into ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with France for further
+enterprises in the North. A formal peace had been concluded by Isabella
+after her husband's fall; but the death of Charles the Fourth soon brought
+about new jealousies between the two courts. The three sons of Philip the
+Fair had followed him on the throne in succession, but all had now died
+without male issue, and Isabella, as Philip's daughter, claimed the crown
+for her son. The claim in any case was a hard one to make out. Though her
+brothers had left no sons, they had left daughters, and if female
+succession were admitted these daughters of Philip's sons would precede a
+son of Philip's daughter. Isabella met this difficulty by a contention that
+though females could transmit the right of succession they could not
+themselves possess it, and that her son, as the nearest living male
+descendant of Philip the Fair, and born in the lifetime of the king from
+whom he claimed, could claim in preference to females who were related to
+Philip in as near a degree. But the bulk of French jurists asserted that
+only male succession gave right to the French throne. On such a theory the
+right inheritable from Philip the Fair was exhausted; and the crown passed
+to the son of Philip's younger brother, Charles of Valois, who in fact
+peacefully mounted the throne as Philip the Sixth. Purely formal as the
+claim which Isabella advanced seems to have been, it revived the irritation
+between the two courts, and though Edward's obedience to a summons which
+Philip addressed to him to do homage for Aquitaine brought about an
+agreement that both parties should restore the gains they had made since
+the last treaty the agreement was never carried out. Fresh threats of war
+ended in the conclusion of a new treaty of peace, but the question whether
+liege or simple homage was due for the duchies remained unsettled when the
+fall of Mortimer gave the young king full mastery of affairs. His action
+was rapid and decisive. Clad as a merchant, and with but fifteen horsemen
+at his back, Edward suddenly made his appearance in 1331 at the French
+court and did homage as fully as Philip required. The question of the
+Agénois remained unsettled, though the English Parliament insisted that its
+decision should rest with negotiation and not with war, but on all other
+points a complete peace was made; and the young king rode back with his
+hands free for an attack which he was planning on the North.
+
+
+[Sidenote: New Scotch War]
+
+The provisions of the Treaty of Northampton for the restitution of estates
+had never been fully carried out. Till this was done the English court held
+that the rights of feudal superiority over Scotland which it had yielded in
+the treaty remained in force; and at this moment an opening seemed to
+present itself for again asserting these rights with success. Fortune
+seemed at last to have veered to the English side. The death of Robert
+Bruce only a year after the Treaty of Northampton left the Scottish throne
+to his son David, a child of but eight years old. The death of the king was
+followed by the loss of Randolph and Douglas; and the internal difficulties
+of the realm broke out in civil strife. To the great barons on either side
+the border the late peace involved serious losses, for many of the Scotch
+houses held large estates in England as many of the English lords held
+large estates in Scotland, and although the treaty had provided for their
+claims they had in each case been practically set aside. It is this
+discontent of the barons at the new settlement which explains the sudden
+success of Edward Balliol in a snatch which he made at the Scottish throne.
+Balliol's design was known at the English court, where he had found shelter
+for some years; and Edward, whether sincerely or no, forbade his barons
+from joining him and posted troops on the border to hinder his crossing it.
+But Balliol found little difficulty in making his attack by sea. He sailed
+from England at the head of a body of nobles who claimed estates in the
+North, landed in August 1332 on the shores of Fife, and after repulsing
+with immense loss an army which attacked him near Perth was crowned at
+Scone two months after his landing, while David Bruce fled helplessly to
+France. Edward had given no open aid to this enterprise, but the crisis
+tempted his ambition, and he demanded and obtained from Balliol an
+acknowledgement of the English suzerainty. The acknowledgement however was
+fatal to Balliol himself. Surprised at Annan by a party of Scottish nobles,
+their sudden attack drove him in December over the border after a reign of
+but five months; and Berwick, which he had agreed to surrender to Edward,
+was strongly garrisoned against an English attack. The sudden breakdown of
+his vassal-king left Edward face to face with a new Scotch war. The
+Parliament which he summoned to advise on the enforcement of his claim
+showed no wish to plunge again into the contest and met him only with
+evasions and delays. But Edward had gone too far to withdraw. In March 1333
+he appeared before Berwick, and besieged the town. A Scotch army under the
+regent, Sir Archibald Douglas, brother to the famous Sir James, advanced to
+its relief in July and attacked a covering force which was encamped on the
+strong position of Halidon Hill. The English bowmen however vindicated the
+fame they had first won at Falkirk and were soon to crown in the victory of
+Crécy. The Scotch only struggled through the marsh which covered the
+English front to be riddled with a storm of arrows and to break in utter
+rout. The battle decided the fate of Berwick. From that time the town has
+remained English territory. It was in fact the one part of Edward's
+conquests which was preserved in the end by the English crown. But fragment
+as it was, it was always viewed legally as representing the realm of which
+it once formed a part. As Scotland, it had its chancellor, chamberlain, and
+other officers of State: and the peculiar heading of Acts of Parliament
+enacted for England "and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed" still preserves
+the memory of its peculiar position. But the victory did more than give
+Berwick to England. The defeat of Douglas was followed by the submission of
+a large part of the Scotch nobles, by the flight of the boy-king David, and
+by the return of Balliol unopposed to the throne. Edward exacted a heavy
+price for his aid. All Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded to
+England, and Balliol did homage as vassal-king for the rest.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland freed]
+
+It was at the moment of this submission that the young king reached the
+climax of his success. A king at fourteen, a father at seventeen, he had
+carried out at eighteen a political revolution in the overthrow of
+Mortimer, and restored at twenty-two the ruined work of his grandfather.
+The northern frontier was carried to its old line under the Northumbrian
+kings. His kingdom within was peaceful and orderly; and the strife with
+France seemed at an end. During the next three years Edward persisted in
+the line of policy he had adopted, retaining his hold over Southern
+Scotland, aiding his sub-king Balliol in campaign after campaign against
+the despairing efforts of the nobles who still adhered to the house of
+Bruce, a party who were now headed by Robert the Steward of Scotland and by
+Earl Randolph of Moray. His perseverance was all but crowned with success,
+when Scotland was again saved by the intervention of France. The successes
+of Edward roused anew the jealousy of the French court. David Bruce found a
+refuge with Philip; French ships appeared off the Scotch coast and brought
+aid to the patriot nobles; and the old legal questions about the Agénois
+and Aquitaine were mooted afresh by the French council. For a time Edward
+staved off the contest by repeated embassies; but his refusal to accept
+Philip as a mediator between England and the Scots stirred France to
+threats of war. In 1335 fleets gathered on its coast; descents were made on
+the English shores; and troops and galleys were hired in Italy and the
+north for an invasion of England. The mere threat of war saved Scotland.
+Edward's forces there were drawn to the south to meet the looked-for attack
+from across the Channel; and the patriot party freed from their pressure at
+once drew together again. The actual declaration of war against France at
+the close of 1337 was the knell of Balliol's greatness; he found himself
+without an adherent and withdrew two years later to the court of Edward,
+while David returned to his kingdom in 1342 and won back the chief
+fastnesses of the Lowlands. From that moment the freedom of Scotland was
+secured. From a war of conquest and patriotic resistance the struggle died
+into a petty strife between two angry neighbours, which became a mere
+episode in the larger contest which it had stirred between England and
+France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Hundred Years War]
+
+Whether in its national or in its European bearings it is difficult to
+overestimate the importance of the contest which was now to open between
+these two nations. To England it brought a social, a religious, and in the
+end a political revolution. The Peasant Revolt, Lollardry, and the New
+Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred Years War. With it began the
+military renown of England; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of
+the seas. The pride begotten by great victories and a sudden revelation of
+warlike prowess roused the country not only to a new ambition, a new
+resolve to assert itself as a European power, but to a repudiation of the
+claims of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical independence
+both of Church and Crown which paved the way for and gave its ultimate form
+to the English Reformation. The peculiar shape which English warfare
+assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and archer over noble and knight, gave
+new force to the political advance of the Commons. On the other hand the
+misery of the war produced the first great open feud between labour and
+capital. The glory of Crécy or Poitiers was dearly bought by the upgrowth
+of English pauperism. The warlike temper nursed on foreign fields begot at
+home a new turbulence and scorn of law, woke a new feudal spirit in the
+baronage, and sowed in the revolution which placed a new house on the
+throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the succession which troubled
+England to the days of Elizabeth. Nor was the contest of less import in the
+history of France. If it struck her for the moment from her height of
+pride, it raised her in the end to the front rank among the states of
+Europe. It carried her boundaries to the Rhone and the Pyrenees. It wrecked
+alike the feudal power of her _noblesse_ and the hopes of constitutional
+liberty which might have sprung from the emancipation of the peasant or the
+action of the burgher. It founded a royal despotism which reached its
+height in Richelieu and finally plunged France into the gulf of the
+Revolution.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Imperial Alliance]
+
+Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the moment when Philip
+and Edward declared war. But from the very first the war took European
+dimensions. The young king saw clearly the greater strength of France. The
+weakness of the Empire, the captivity of the Papacy at Avignon, left her
+without a rival among European powers. The French chivalry was the envy of
+the world, and its military fame had just been heightened by a victory over
+the Flemish communes at Cassel. In numbers, in wealth, the French people
+far surpassed their neighbours over the Channel. England can hardly have
+counted more than four millions of inhabitants, France boasted of twenty.
+The clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the
+fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have
+equalled in number their subjects in England. There was the same
+disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in
+their military resources. Edward could bring only eight thousand
+men-at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force was busy
+elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty thousand. Of the revolution in
+warfare which was to reverse this superiority, to make the footman rather
+than the horseman the strength of an army, the world and even the English
+king, in spite of Falkirk and Halidon, as yet recked little. Edward's whole
+energy was bent on meeting the strength of France by a coalition of powers
+against her, and his plans were helped by the dread which the great
+feudatories of the empire who lay nearest to him, the Duke of Brabant, the
+Counts of Hainault and Gelders, the Markgrave of Juliers, felt of French
+annexation. They listened willingly enough to his offers. Sixty thousand
+crowns purchased the alliance of Brabant. Lesser subsidies bought that of
+the two counts and the Markgrave. The king's work was helped indeed by his
+domestic relations. The Count of Hainault was Edward's father-in-law; he
+was also the father-in-law of the Count of Gelders. But the marriage of a
+third of the Count's daughters brought the English king a more important
+ally. She was wedded to the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, and the connexion
+that thus existed between the English and Imperial Courts facilitated the
+negotiations which ended in a formal alliance.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Relation to the Papacy]
+
+But the league had a more solid ground. The Emperor, like Edward, had his
+strife with France. His strife sprang from the new position of the Papacy.
+The removal of the Popes to Avignon which followed on the quarrel of
+Boniface the Eighth with Philip le Bel and the subjection to the French
+court which resulted from it affected the whole state of European politics.
+In the ever-recurring contest between the Papacy and the Empire France had
+of old been the lieutenant of the Roman See. But with the settlement at
+Avignon the relation changed, and the Pope became the lieutenant of France.
+Instead of the Papacy using the French kings in its war of ideas against
+the Empire the French kings used the Papacy as an instrument in their
+political rivalry with the Emperors. But if the position of the Pope drew
+Lewis to the side of England, it had much to do with drawing Edward to the
+side of Lewis. It was this that made the alliance, fruitless as it proved
+in a military sense, so memorable in its religious results. Hitherto
+England had been mainly on the side of the Popes in their strife against
+the Emperors. Now that the Pope had become a tool in the hands of a power
+which was to be its great enemy, the country was driven to close alliances
+with the Empire and to an evergrowing alienation from the Roman See. In
+Scotch affairs the hostility of the Popes had been steady and vexatious
+ever since Edward the First's time, and from the moment that this fresh
+struggle commenced they again showed their French partizanship. When Lewis
+made a last appeal for peace, Philip of Valois made Benedict XII. lay down
+as a condition that the Emperor should form no alliance with an enemy of
+France. The quarrel of both England and Germany with the Papacy at once
+grew ripe. The German Diet met to declare that the Imperial power came from
+God alone, and that the choice of an Emperor needed no Papal confirmation,
+while Benedict replied by a formal excommunication of Lewis. England on the
+other hand entered on a religious revolution when she stood hand in hand
+with an excommunicated power. It was significant that though worship ceased
+in Flanders on the Pope's interdict, the English priests who were brought
+over set the interdict at nought.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Failure of the Alliance]
+
+The negotiation of this alliance occupied the whole of 1337; it ended in a
+promise of the Emperor on payment of 3000 gold florins to furnish two
+thousand men-at-arms. In the opening of 1338 an attack of Philip on the
+Agénois forced Edward into open war. His profuse expenditure however
+brought little fruit. Though Edward crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the
+year was spent in negotiations with the princes of the Lower Rhine and in
+an interview with the Emperor at Coblentz, where Lewis appointed him
+Vicar-General of the Emperor for all territories on the left bank of the
+Rhine. The occupation of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French king gave
+a formal ground for calling the princes of this district to Edward's
+standard. But already the great alliance showed signs of yielding. Edward,
+uneasy at his connexion with an Emperor under the ban of the Church and
+harassed by vehement remonstrances from the Pope, entered again into
+negotiations with France in the winter of 1338; and Lewis, alarmed in his
+turn, listened to fresh overtures from Benedict, who held out vague hopes
+of reconciliation while he threatened a renewed excommunication if Lewis
+persisted in invading France. The non-arrival of the English subsidy
+decided the Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and the attitude
+of Lewis told on the temper of Edward's German allies. Though all joined
+him in the summer of 1339 on his formal summons of them as Vicar-General of
+the Empire, and his army when it appeared before Cambray numbered forty
+thousand men, their ardour cooled as the town held out. Philip approached
+it from the south, and on Edward's announcing his resolve to cross the
+river and attack him he was at once deserted by the two border princes who
+had most to lose from a contest with France, the Counts of Hainault and
+Namur. But the king was still full of hope. He pushed forward to the
+country round St. Quentin between the head waters of the Somme and the Oise
+with the purpose of forcing a decisive engagement. But he found Philip
+strongly encamped, and declaring their supplies exhausted his allies at
+once called for a retreat. It was in vain that Edward moved slowly for a
+week along the French border. Philip's position was too strongly guarded by
+marshes and entrenchments to be attacked, and at last the allies would stay
+no longer. At the news that the French king had withdrawn to the south the
+whole army in turn fell back upon Brussels.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Papacy]
+
+The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes which Edward had drawn from
+his alliance with the Empire. With the exhaustion of his subsidies the
+princes of the Low Countries became inactive. The Duke of Brabant became
+cooler in his friendship. The Emperor himself, still looking to an
+accommodation with the Pope and justly jealous of Edward's own intrigues at
+Avignon, wavered and at last fell away. But though the alliance ended in
+disappointment it had given a new impulse to the grudge against the Papacy
+which began with its extortions in the reign of Henry the Third. The hold
+of Rome on the loyalty of England was sensibly weakening. Their transfer
+from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed the Popes of half the awe which
+they had inspired among Englishmen. Not only did it bring them nearer and
+more into the light of common day, but it dwarfed them into mere agents of
+French policy. The old bitterness at their exactions was revived by the
+greed to which they were driven through their costly efforts to impose a
+French and Papal Emperor on Germany as well as to secure themselves in
+their new capital on the Rhone. The mighty building, half fortress, half
+palace, which still awes the traveller at Avignon has played its part in
+our history. Its erection was to the rise of Lollardry what the erection of
+St. Peter's was to the rise of Lutheranism. Its massive walls, its stately
+chapel, its chambers glowing with the frescoes of Simone Memmi, the garden
+which covered its roof with a strange verdure, called year by year for
+fresh supplies of gold; and for this as for the wider and costlier schemes
+of Papal policy gold could be got only by pressing harder and harder on the
+national churches the worst claims of the Papal court, by demands of
+first-fruits and annates from rectory and bishoprick, by pretensions to the
+right of bestowing all benefices which were in ecclesiastical patronage and
+by the sale of these presentations, by the direct taxation of the clergy,
+by the intrusion of foreign priests into English livings, by opening a mart
+for the disposal of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, and by
+encouraging appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the Papal
+court. No grievance was more bitterly felt than this grievance of appeals.
+Cases of the most trifling importance were called for decision out of the
+realm to a tribunal whose delays were proverbial and whose fees were
+enormous. The envoy of an Oxford College which sought only a formal licence
+to turn a vicarage into a rectory had not only to bear the expense and toil
+of a journey which then occupied some eighteen days but was kept dangling
+at Avignon for three-and-twenty weeks. Humiliating and vexatious however as
+these appeals were, they were but one among the means of extortion which
+the Papal court multiplied as its needs grew greater. The protest of a
+later Parliament, exaggerated as its statements no doubt are, shows the
+extent of the national irritation, if not of the grievances which produced
+it. It asserted that the taxes levied by the Pope amounted to five times
+the amount of those levied by the king; that by reservations during the
+life of actual holders the Pope disposed of the same bishoprick four or
+five times over, receiving each time the first-fruits. "The brokers of the
+sinful city of Rome promote for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to
+benefices to the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned
+hardly obtain one of twenty. So decays sound learning. They present aliens
+who neither see nor care to see their parishioners, despise God's services,
+convey away the treasure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens.
+The Pope's revenue from England alone is larger than that of any prince in
+Christendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and
+shorn." At the close of this reign indeed the deaneries of Lichfield,
+Salisbury, and York, the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was reputed the
+wealthiest English benefice, together with a host of prebends and
+preferments, were held by Italian cardinals and priests, while the Pope's
+collector from his office in London sent twenty thousand marks a year to
+the Papal treasury.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Protest of the Parliament]
+
+But the greed of the Popes was no new grievance, though the increase of
+these exactions since the removal to Avignon gave it a new force. What
+alienated England most was their connexion with and dependence on France.
+From the first outset of the troubles in the North their attitude had been
+one of hostility to the English projects. France was too useful a supporter
+of the Papal court to find much difficulty in inducing it to aid in
+hampering the growth of English greatness. Boniface the Eighth released
+Balliol from his oath of fealty, and forbade Edward to attack Scotland on
+the ground that it was a fief of the Roman See. His intervention was met by
+a solemn and emphatic protest from the English Parliament; but it none the
+less formed a terrible obstacle in Edward's way. The obstacle was at last
+removed by the quarrel of Boniface with Philip the Fair; but the end of
+this quarrel only threw the Papacy more completely into the hands of
+France. Though Avignon remained imperial soil, the removal of the Popes to
+this city on the verge of their dominions made them mere tools of the
+French kings. Much no doubt of the endless negotiation which the Papal
+court carried on with Edward the Third in his strife with Philip of Valois
+was an honest struggle for peace. But to England it seemed the mere
+interference of a dependant on behalf of "our enemy of France." The people
+scorned a "French Pope," and threatened Papal legates with stoning when
+they landed on English shores. The alliance of Edward with an
+excommunicated Emperor, the bold defiance with which English priests said
+mass in Flanders when an interdict reduced the Flemish priests to silence,
+were significant tokens of the new attitude which England was taking up in
+the face of Popes who were leagued with its enemy. The old quarrel over
+ecclesiastical wrongs was renewed in a formal and decisive way. In 1343 the
+Commons petitioned for the redress of the grievance of Papal appointments
+to vacant livings in despite of the rights of patrons or the Crown; and
+Edward formally complained to the Pope of his appointing "foreigners, most
+of them suspicious persons, who do not reside on their benefices, who do
+not know the faces of the flocks entrusted to them, who do not understand
+their language, but, neglecting the cure of souls, seek as hirelings only
+their worldly hire." In yet sharper words the king rebuked the Papal greed.
+"The successor of the Apostles was set over the Lord's sheep to feed and
+not to shear them." The Parliament declared "that they neither could nor
+would tolerate such things any longer"; and the general irritation moved
+slowly towards those statutes of Provisors and Praemunire which heralded
+the policy of Henry the Eighth.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Flanders]
+
+But for the moment the strife with the Papacy was set aside in the efforts
+which were needed for a new struggle with France. The campaign of 1339 had
+not only ended in failure, it had dispelled the trust of Edward in an
+Imperial alliance. But as this hope faded away a fresh hope dawned on the
+king from another quarter. Flanders, still bleeding from the defeat of its
+burghers by the French knighthood, was his natural ally. England was the
+great wool-producing country of the west, but few woollen fabrics were
+woven in England. The number of weavers' gilds shows that the trade was
+gradually extending, and at the very outset of his reign Edward had taken
+steps for its encouragement. He invited Flemish weavers to settle in his
+country, and took the new immigrants, who chose the eastern counties for
+the seat of their trade, under his royal protection. But English
+manufactures were still in their infancy and nine-tenths of the English
+wool went to the looms of Bruges or of Ghent. We may see the rapid growth
+of this export trade in the fact that the king received in a single year
+more than £30,000 from duties levied on wool alone. The woolsack which
+forms the Chancellor's seat in the House of Lords is said to witness to the
+importance which the government attached to this new source of wealth. A
+stoppage of this export threw half the population of the great Flemish
+towns out of work, and the irritation caused in Flanders by the
+interruption which this trade sustained through the piracies that Philip's
+ships were carrying on in the Channel showed how effective the threat of
+such a stoppage would be in securing their alliance. Nor was this the only
+ground for hoping for aid from the Flemish towns. Their democratic spirit
+jostled roughly with the feudalism of France. If their counts clung to the
+French monarchy, the towns themselves, proud of their immense population,
+their thriving industry, their vast wealth, drew more and more to
+independence. Jacques van Arteveldt, a great brewer of Ghent, wielded the
+chief influence in their councils, and his aim was to build up a
+confederacy which might hold France in check along her northern border.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Flemish Alliance]
+
+His plans had as yet brought no help from the Flemish towns, but at the
+close of 1339 they set aside their neutrality for open aid. The great plan
+of Federation which Van Arteveldt had been devising as a check on the
+aggression of France was carried out in a treaty concluded between Edward,
+the Duke of Brabant, the cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Louvain, Ghent,
+Bruges, Ypres, and seven others. By this remarkable treaty it was provided
+that war should be begun and ended only by mutual consent, free commerce be
+encouraged between Flanders and Brabant, and no change made in their
+commercial arrangements save with the consent of the whole league. By a
+subsequent treaty the Flemish towns owned Edward as King of France, and
+declared war against Philip of Valois. But their voice was decisive on the
+course of the campaign which opened in 1340. As Philip held the Upper
+Scheldt by the occupation of Cambray, so he held the Lower Scheldt by that
+of Tournay, a fortress which broke the line of commerce between Flanders
+and Brabant. It was a condition of the Flemish alliance therefore that the
+war should open with the capture of Tournay. It was only at the cost of a
+fight however that Edward could now cross the Channel to undertake the
+siege. France was as superior in force at sea as on land; and a fleet of
+two hundred vessels gathered at Sluys to intercept him. But the fine
+seamanship of the English sailors justified the courage of their king in
+attacking this fleet with far smaller forces; the French ships were utterly
+destroyed and twenty thousand Frenchmen slain in the encounter. It was with
+the lustre of this great victory about him that Edward marched upon
+Tournay. Its siege however proved as fruitless as that of Cambray in the
+preceding year, and after two months of investment his vast army of one
+hundred thousand men broke up without either capturing the town or bringing
+Philip when he approached it to an engagement. Want of money forced Edward
+to a truce for a year, and he returned beggared and embittered to England.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward's distress]
+
+He had been worsted in war as in diplomacy. One naval victory alone
+redeemed years of failure and expense. Guienne was all but lost, England
+was suffering from the terrible taxation, from the ruin of commerce, from
+the ravages of her coast. Five years of constant reverses were hard blows
+for a king of twenty-eight who had been glorious and successful at
+twenty-three. His financial difficulties indeed were enormous. It was in
+vain that, availing himself of an Act which forbade the exportation of wool
+"till by the King and his Council it is otherwise provided," he turned for
+the time the wool-trade into a royal monopoly and became the sole wool
+exporter, buying at £3 and selling at £20 the sack. The campaign of 1339
+brought with it a crushing debt: that of 1340 proved yet more costly.
+Edward attributed his failure to the slackness of his ministers in sending
+money and supplies, and this to their silent opposition to the war. But
+wroth as he was on his return, a short struggle between the ministers and
+the king ended in a reconciliation, and preparations for renewed
+hostilities went on. Abroad indeed nothing could be done. The Emperor
+finally withdrew from Edward's friendship. A new Pope, Clement the Sixth,
+proved even more French in sentiment than his predecessor. Flanders alone
+held true of all England's foreign allies. Edward was powerless to attack
+Philip in the realm he claimed for his own; what strength he could gather
+was needed to prevent the utter ruin of the English cause in Scotland on
+the return of David Bruce. Edward's soldiers had been driven from the open
+country and confined to the fortresses of the Lowlands. Even these were at
+last reft away. Perth was taken by siege, and the king was too late to
+prevent the surrender of Stirling. Edinburgh was captured by a stratagem.
+Only Roxburgh and Berwick were saved by a truce which Edward was driven to
+conclude with the Scots.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Progress of Parliament]
+
+But with the difficulties of the Crown the weight of the two Houses made
+itself more and more sensibly felt. The almost incessant warfare which had
+gone on since the accession of Edward the Third consolidated and developed
+the power which they had gained from the dissensions of his father's reign.
+The need of continual grants brought about an assembly of Parliament year
+by year, and the subsidies that were accorded to the king showed the
+potency of the financial engine which the Crown could now bring into play.
+In a single year the Parliament granted twenty thousand sacks, or half the
+wool of the realm. Two years later the Commons voted an aid of thirty
+thousand sacks. In 1339 the barons granted the tenth sheep and fleece and
+lamb. The clergy granted two tenths in one year, and a tenth for three
+years in the next. But with each supply some step was made to greater
+political influence. In his earlier years Edward showed no jealousy of the
+Parliament. His policy was to make the struggle with France a national one
+by winning for it the sympathy of the people at large; and with this view
+he not only published in the County Courts the efforts he had made for
+peace, but appealed again and again for the sanction and advice of
+Parliament in his enterprise. In 1331 he asked the Estates whether they
+would prefer negotiation or war: in 1338 he declared that his expedition to
+Flanders was made by the assent of the Lords and at the prayer of the
+Commons. The part of the last in public affairs grew greater in spite of
+their own efforts to remain obscure. From the opening of the reign a crowd
+of enactments for the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, shows
+the influence of the burgesses. But the final division of Parliament into
+two Houses, a change which was completed by 1341, necessarily increased the
+weight of the Commons. The humble trader who shrank from counselling the
+Crown in great matters of policy gathered courage as he found himself
+sitting side by side with the knights of the shire. It was at the moment
+when this great change was being brought about that the disasters of the
+war spurred the Parliament to greater activity. The enormous grants of 1340
+were bought by the king's assent to statutes which provided remedies for
+grievances of which the Commons complained. The most important of these put
+an end to the attempts which Edward had made like his grandfather to deal
+with the merchant class apart from the Houses. No charge or aid was
+henceforth to be made save by the common assent of the Estates assembled in
+Parliament. The progress of the next year was yet more important. The
+strife of the king with his ministers, the foremost of whom was Archbishop
+Stratford, ended in the Primate's refusal to make answer to the royal
+charges save in full Parliament, and in the assent of the king to a
+resolution of the Lords that none of their number, whether ministers of the
+Crown or no, should be brought to trial elsewhere than before his peers.
+The Commons demanded and obtained the appointment of commissioners elected
+in Parliament to audit the grants already made. Finally it was enacted that
+at each Parliament the ministers should hold themselves accountable for all
+grievances; that on any vacancy the king should take counsel with his lords
+as to the choice of the new minister; and that, when chosen, each minister
+should be sworn in Parliament.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Close of the truce]
+
+At the moment which we have reached therefore the position of the
+Parliament had become far more important than at Edward's accession. Its
+form was settled. The third estate had gained a fuller parliamentary power.
+The principle of ministerial responsibility to the Houses had been
+established by formal statute. But the jealousy of Edward was at last
+completely roused, and from this moment he looked on the new power as a
+rival to his own. The Parliament of 1341 had no sooner broken up than he
+revoked by Letters Patent the statutes it had passed as done in prejudice
+of his prerogative and only assented to for the time to prevent worse
+confusion. The regular assembly of the estates was suddenly interrupted,
+and two years passed without a Parliament. It was only the continual
+presence of war which from this time drove Edward to summon the Houses at
+all. Though the truce still held good between England and France a quarrel
+of succession to the Duchy of Britanny which broke out in 1341 and called
+Philip to the support of one claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and
+Edward to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort, dragged on
+year after year. In Flanders things went ill for the English cause. The
+dissensions between the great and the smaller towns, and in the greater
+towns themselves between the weavers and fullers, dissensions which had
+taxed the genius of Van Arteveldt through the nine years of his wonderful
+rule, broke out in 1345 into a revolt at Ghent in which the great statesman
+was slain. With him fell a design for the deposition of the Count of
+Flanders and the reception of the Prince of Wales in his stead which he was
+ardently pressing, and whose political results might have been immense.
+Deputies were at once sent to England to excuse Van Arteveldt's murder and
+to promise loyalty to Edward; but the king's difficulties had now reached
+their height. His loans from the Florentine bankers amounted to half a
+million. His claim on the French crown found not a single adherent save
+among the burghers of the Flemish towns. The overtures which he made for
+peace were contemptuously rejected, and the expiration of the truce in 1345
+found him again face to face with France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward marches on Paris]
+
+But it was perhaps this breakdown of all foreign hope that contributed to
+Edward's success in the fresh outbreak of war. The war opened in Guienne,
+and Henry of Lancaster, who was now known as the Earl of Derby, and who
+with the Hainaulter Sir Walter Maunay took the command in that quarter, at
+once showed the abilities of a great general. The course of the Garonne was
+cleared by his capture of La Réole and Aiguillon, that of the Dordogne by
+the reduction of Bergerac, and a way opened for the reconquest of Poitou by
+the capture of Angoulême. These unexpected successes roused Philip to
+strenuous efforts, and a hundred thousand men gathered under his son, John,
+Duke of Normandy, for the subjugation of the South. Angoulême was won back,
+and Aiguillon besieged when Edward sailed to the aid of his hard-pressed
+lieutenant. It was with an army of thirty thousand men, half English, half
+Irish and Welsh, that he commenced a march which was to change the whole
+face of the war. His aim was simple. Flanders was still true to Edward's
+cause, and while Derby was pressing on in the south a Flemish army besieged
+Bouvines and threatened France from the north. The king had at first
+proposed to land in Guienne and relieve the forces in the south; but
+suddenly changing his design he disembarked at La Hogue and advanced
+through Normandy. By this skilful movement Edward not only relieved Derby
+but threatened Paris, and left himself able to co-operate with either his
+own army in the south or the Flemings in the north. Normandy was totally
+without defence, and after the sack of Caen, which was then one of the
+wealthiest towns in France, Edward marched upon the Seine. His march
+threatened Rouen and Paris, and its strategical value was seen by the
+sudden panic of the French king. Philip was wholly taken by surprise. He
+attempted to arrest Edward's march by an offer to restore the Duchy of
+Aquitaine as Edward the Second had held it, but the offer was fruitless.
+Philip was forced to call his son to the rescue. John at once raised the
+siege of Aiguillon, and the French army moved rapidly to the north, its
+withdrawal enabling Derby to capture Poitiers and make himself thorough
+master of the south. But John was too distant from Paris for his forces to
+avail Philip in his emergency, for Edward, finding the bridges on the Lower
+Seine broken, pushed straight on Paris, rebuilt the bridge of Poissy, and
+threatened the capital.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Crécy]
+
+At this crisis however France found an unexpected help in a body of German
+knights. The long strife between Lewis of Bavaria and the Papacy had ended
+at last in Clement's carrying out his sentence of deposition by the
+nomination and coronation as emperor of Charles of Luxemburg, a son of King
+John of Bohemia, the well-known Charles IV. of the Golden Bull. But against
+this Papal assumption of a right to bestow the German Crown Germany rose as
+one man. Not a town opened its gates to the Papal claimant, and driven to
+seek help and refuge from Philip of Valois he found himself at this moment
+on the eastern frontier of France with his father and 500 knights. Hurrying
+to Paris this German force formed the nucleus of an army which assembled at
+St. Denys; and which was soon reinforced by 15,000 Genoese cross-bowmen who
+had been hired from among the soldiers of the Lord of Monaco on the sunny
+Riviera and arrived at this hour of need. With this host rapidly gathering
+in his front Edward abandoned his march on Paris, which had already served
+its purpose in relieving Derby, and threw himself across the Seine to carry
+out the second part of his programme by a junction with the Flemings at
+Gravelines and a campaign in the north. But the rivers in his path were
+carefully guarded, and it was only by surprising the ford of Blanche-Taque
+on the Somme that the king escaped the necessity of surrendering to the
+vast host which was now hastening in pursuit. His communications however
+were no sooner secured than he halted on the twenty-sixth of August at the
+little village of Crécy in Ponthieu and resolved to give battle. Half of
+his army, which had been greatly reduced in strength by his rapid marches,
+consisted of light-armed footmen from Ireland and Wales; the bulk of the
+remainder was composed of English bowmen. The king ordered his men-at-arms
+to dismount, and drew up his forces on a low rise sloping gently to the
+south-east, with a deep ditch covering its front, and its flanks protected
+by woods and a little brook. From a windmill on the summit of this rise
+Edward could overlook the whole field of battle. Immediately beneath him
+lay his reserve, while at the base of the slope was placed the main body of
+the army in two divisions, that to the right commanded by the young Prince
+of Wales, Edward "the Black Prince," as he was called, that to the left by
+the Earl of Northampton. A small ditch protected the English front, and
+behind it the bowmen were drawn up "in the form of a harrow" with small
+bombards between them "which with fire threw little iron balls to frighten
+the horses," the first instance known of the use of artillery in
+field-warfare.
+
+The halt of the English army took Philip by surprise, and he attempted for
+a time to check the advance of his army. But the attempt was fruitless and
+the disorderly host rolled on to the English front. The sight of his
+enemies indeed stirred Philip's own blood to fury, "for he hated them." The
+fight began at vespers. The Genoese cross-bowmen were ordered to open the
+attack, but the men were weary with their march, a sudden storm wetted and
+rendered useless their bowstrings, and the loud shouts with which they
+leapt forward to the encounter were met with dogged silence in the English
+ranks. Their first arrow-flight however brought a terrible reply. So rapid
+was the English shot "that it seemed as if it snowed." "Kill me these
+scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Genoese fell back; and his men-at-arms
+plunged butchering into their broken ranks while the Counts of Aleniçon and
+Flanders at the head of the French knighthood fell hotly on the Prince's
+line. For an instant his small force seemed lost, and he called his father
+to support him. But Edward refused to send him aid. "Is he dead, or
+unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?" he asked the envoy.
+"No, sir," was the reply, "but he is in a hard passage of arms, and sorely
+needs your help." "Return to those that sent you," said the king, "and bid
+them not send to me again so long as my son lives! Let the boy win his
+spurs, for, if God so order it, I will that the day may be his and that the
+honour may be with him and them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward
+could see in fact from his higher ground that all went well. The English
+bowmen and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while the Welshmen stabbed
+the French horses in the melly and brought knight after knight to the
+ground. Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion. "You are my
+vassals, my friends," cried the blind John of Bohemia to the German nobles
+around him, "I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I
+may strike one good blow with this sword of mine!" Linking their bridles
+together, the little company plunged into the thick of the combat to fall
+as their fellows were falling. The battle went steadily against the French.
+At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat became a
+rout. Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men--a number equal
+to the whole English force--lay dead upon the ground.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Yeoman]
+
+"God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. Denys in a
+passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he
+had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was
+hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a
+system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had
+risen out of that system. Feudalism rested on the superiority of the
+horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl. The
+real fighting power of a feudal army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage
+and landowners who took the field, each with his group of esquires and
+mounted men-at-arms. A host of footmen followed them, but they were ill
+armed, ill disciplined, and seldom called on to play any decisive part on
+the actual battle-field. In France, and especially at the moment we have
+reached, the contrast between the efficiency of these two elements of
+warfare was more striking than elsewhere. Nowhere was the chivalry so
+splendid, nowhere was the general misery and oppression of the poor more
+terribly expressed in the worthlessness of the mob of footmen who were
+driven by their lords to the camp. In England, on the other hand, the
+failure of feudalism to win a complete hold on the country was seen in the
+persistence of the older national institutions which based its defence on
+the general levy of its freemen. If the foreign kings added to this a
+system of warlike organization grounded on the service due from its
+military tenants to the Crown, they were far from regarding this as
+superseding the national "fyrd." The Assize of Arms, the Statute of
+Winchester, show with what care the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency.
+Its force indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between the age of
+Henry the Second and that of Edward the Third. The social changes on which
+we have already dwelt, the facilities given to alienation and the
+subdivision of lands, the transition of the serf into a copyholder and of
+the copyholder by redemption of his services into a freeholder, the rise of
+a new class of "farmers" as the lords ceased to till their demesne by means
+of bailiffs and adopted the practice of leasing it at a rent or "farm" to
+one of the customary tenants, the general increase of wealth which was
+telling on the social position even of those who still remained in
+villenage, undid more and more the earlier process which had degraded the
+free ceorl of the English Conquest into the villein of the Norman Conquest,
+and covered the land with a population of yeomen, some freeholders, some
+with services that every day became less weighty and already left them
+virtually free.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Bow]
+
+Such men, proud of their right to justice and an equal law, called by
+attendance in the county court to a share in the judicial, the financial,
+and the political life of the realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a
+different sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords of the
+Continent; and they were equipped with a weapon which as they wielded it
+was enough of itself to make a revolution in the art of war. The bow,
+identified as it became with English warfare, was the weapon not of
+Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors. It was the Norman arrow-flight
+that decided the day of Senlac. But in the organization of the national
+army it had been assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were
+liable to serve at the king's summons; and we see how closely it had become
+associated with them in the picture of Chaucer's yeoman. "In his hand he
+bore a mighty bow." Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy
+war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but in its force. The
+English archer, taught from very childhood "how to draw, how to lay his
+body to the bow," his skill quickened by incessant practice and constant
+rivalry with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of war.
+Thrown out along the front in a loose order that alone showed their vigour
+and self-dependence, the bowmen faced and riddled the splendid line of
+knighthood as it charged upon them. The galled horses "reeled right
+rudely." Their riders found even the steel of Milan a poor defence against
+the grey-goose shaft. Gradually the bow dictated the very tactics of an
+English battle. If the mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen of
+archers broke to right and left and the men-at-arms who lay in reserve
+behind them made short work of the broken and disordered horsemen, while
+the light troops from Wales and Ireland flinging themselves into the melly
+with their long knives and darts brought steed after steed to the ground.
+It was this new military engine that Edward the Third carried to the fields
+of France. His armies were practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the
+short period of feudal service was insufficient for foreign campaigns, and
+yeoman and baron were alike drawn by a high rate of pay. An archer's daily
+wages equalled some five shillings of our present money. Such payment when
+coupled with the hope of plunder was enough to draw yeomen from thorpe and
+farm; and though the royal treasury was drained as it had never been
+drained before the English king saw himself after the day of Crécy the
+master of a force without rival in the stress of war.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Siege of Calais]
+
+To England her success was the beginning of a career of military glory,
+which fatal as it was destined to prove to the higher sentiments and
+interests of the nation gave it a warlike energy such as it had never known
+before. Victory followed victory. A few months after Crécy a Scotch army
+marched over the border and faced on the seventeenth of October an English
+force at Neville's Cross. But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the
+English archers, and the Scotch king David Bruce was taken prisoner. The
+withdrawal of the French from the Garonne enabled Henry of Derby to recover
+Poitou. Edward meanwhile with a decision which marks his military capacity
+marched from the field of Crécy to form the siege of Calais. No measure
+could have been more popular with the English merchant class, for Calais
+was a great pirate-haven and in a single year twenty-two privateers from
+its port had swept the Channel. But Edward was guided by weightier
+considerations than this. In spite of his victory at Sluys the superiority
+of France at sea had been a constant embarrassment. From this difficulty
+the capture of Calais would do much to deliver him, for Dover and Calais
+together bridled the Channel. Nor was this all. Not only would the
+possession of the town give Edward a base of operations against France, but
+it afforded an easy means of communication with the only sure allies of
+England, the towns of Flanders. Flanders seemed at this moment to be
+wavering. Its Count had fallen at Crécy, but his son Lewis le Mâle, though
+his sympathies were as French as his father's, was received in November by
+his subjects with the invariable loyalty which they showed to their rulers;
+and his own efforts to detach them from England were seconded by the
+influence of the Duke of Brabant. But with Edward close at hand beneath the
+walls of Calais the Flemish towns stood true. They prayed the young Count
+to marry Edward's daughter, imprisoned him on his refusal, and on his
+escape to the French Court in the spring of 1347 they threw themselves
+heartily into the English cause. A hundred thousand Flemings advanced to
+Cassel and ravaged the French frontier.
+
+The danger of Calais roused Philip from the panic which had followed his
+defeat, and with a vast army he advanced to the north. But Edward's lines
+were impregnable. The French king failed in another attempt to dislodge the
+Flemings, and was at last driven to retreat without a blow. Hopeless of
+further succour, the town after a year's siege was starved into surrender
+in August 1347. Mercy was granted to the garrison and the people on
+condition that six of the citizens gave themselves into the English king's
+hands. "On them," said Edward with a burst of bitter hatred, "I will do my
+will." At the sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, the folk of
+Calais gathered round the bearer of these terms, "desiring to hear their
+good news, for they were all mad with hunger. When the said knight told
+them his news, then began they to weep and cry so loudly that it was great
+pity. Then stood up the wealthiest burgess of the town, Master Eustache de
+St. Pierre by name, and spake thus before all: 'My masters, great grief and
+mishap it were for all to leave such a people as this is to die by famine
+or otherwise; and great charity and grace would he win from our Lord who
+could defend them from dying. For me, I have great hope in the Lord that if
+I can save this people by my death I shall have pardon for my faults,
+wherefore will I be the first of the six, and of my own will put myself
+barefoot in my shirt and with a halter round my neck in the mercy of King
+Edward.'" The list of devoted men was soon made up, and the victims were
+led before the king. "All the host assembled together; there was great
+press, and many bade hang them openly, and many wept for pity. The noble
+King came with his train of counts and barons to the place, and the Queen
+followed him, though great with child, to see what there would be. The six
+citizens knelt down at once before the King, and Master Eustache spake
+thus:--'Gentle King, here we be six who have been of the old bourgeoisie of
+Calais and great merchants; we bring you the keys of the town and castle of
+Calais, and render them to you at your pleasure. We set ourselves in such
+wise as you see purely at your will, to save the remnant of the people that
+has suffered much pain. So may you have pity and mercy on us for your high
+nobleness' sake.' Certes there was then in that place neither lord nor
+knight that wept not for pity, nor who could speak for pity; but the King
+had his heart so hardened by wrath that for a long while he could not
+reply; than he commanded to cut off their heads. All the knights and lords
+prayed him with tears, as much as they could, to have pity on them, but he
+would not hear. Then spoke the gentle knight, Master Walter de Maunay, and
+said, 'Ha, gentle sire! bridle your wrath; you have the renown and good
+fame of all gentleness; do not a thing whereby men can speak any villany of
+you! If you have no pity, all men will say that you have a heart full of
+all cruelty to put these good citizens to death that of their own will are
+come to render themselves to you to save the remnant of the people.' At
+this point the King changed countenance with wrath, and said 'Hold your
+peace, Master Walter! it shall be none otherwise. Call the headsman. They
+of Calais have made so many of my men die, that they must die themselves!'
+Then did the noble Queen of England a deed of noble lowliness, seeing she
+was great with child, and wept so tenderly for pity that she could no
+longer stand upright; therefore she cast herself on her knees before her
+lord the King and spake on this wise: 'Ah, gentle sire, from the day that I
+passed over sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked for nothing: now
+pray I and beseech you, with folded hands, for the love of our Lady's Son
+to have mercy upon them.' The gentle King waited a while before speaking,
+and looked on the Queen as she knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then
+began his heart to soften a little, and he said, 'Lady, I would rather you
+had been otherwhere; you pray so tenderly that I dare not refuse you; and
+though I do it against my will, nevertheless take them, I give them to
+you.' Then took he the six citizens by the halters and delivered them to
+the Queen, and released from death all those of Calais for the love of her;
+and the good lady bade them clothe the six burgesses and make them good
+cheer."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE PEASANT REVOLT
+1347-1381
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward the Third]
+
+Still in the vigour of manhood, for he was but thirty-five, Edward the
+Third stood at the height of his renown. He had won the greatest victory of
+his age. France, till now the first of European states, was broken and
+dashed from her pride of place at a single blow. The kingdom seemed to lie
+at Edward's mercy, for Guienne was recovered, Flanders was wholly on his
+side, and Britanny, where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the
+success of his rival and the English party which supported him, opened the
+road to Paris. At home his government was popular, and Scotland, the one
+enemy he had to dread, was bridled by the capture of her king. How great
+his renown was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the death of Lewis of
+Bavaria the electors offered him the Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a
+general of a high order, and he had shown himself as consummate a
+strategist in the campaign as a tactician in the field. But to the world
+about him he was even more illustrious as the foremost representative of
+the showy chivalry of his day. He loved the pomp of tournaments; he revived
+the Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated his victories by the
+creation of a new order of knighthood. He had varied the sterner operations
+of the siege of Calais by a hand-to-hand combat with one of the bravest of
+the French knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches Edward for us as
+he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet which was sweeping the narrow seas. We
+see the king sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head
+covered by a black beaver hat "which became him well," and calling on Sir
+John Chandos to troll out the songs he had brought with him from Germany,
+till the Spanish ships heave in sight and a furious fight begins which ends
+in a victory that leaves Edward "King of the Seas."
+
+But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, busy diplomatist.
+None of our kings was so restless a negotiator. From the first hour of
+Edward's rule the threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost
+inextricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he was equally false
+and tricky. Emperor was played off against Pope and Pope against Emperor,
+the friendship of the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on
+their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of the Roman See was
+employed to bridle the French sympathies of the court of Avignon, and when
+the statutes which it produced had served their purpose they were set aside
+for a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder of the Church
+between them. His temper was as false in his dealings with his people as in
+his dealings with the European powers. Edward aired to country and
+parliament his English patriotism. "Above all other lands and realms," he
+made his chancellor say, "the King had most tenderly at heart his land of
+England, a land more full of delight and honour and profit to him than any
+other." His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the livery of a
+city gild; he dined with a London merchant. His perpetual parliaments, his
+appeals to them and to the country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to
+promise a ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he ruled.
+But when once Edward passed from sheer carelessness and gratification at
+the new source of wealth which the Parliament opened to a sense of what its
+power really was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any
+king that had gone before him. He sold his assent to its demands for heavy
+subsidies, and when he had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes
+he had sanctioned null and void. The constitutional progress which was made
+during his reign was due to his absorption in showy schemes of foreign
+ambition, to his preference for war and diplomatic intrigue over the sober
+business of civil administration. The same shallowness of temper, the same
+showiness and falsehood, ran through his personal character. The king who
+was a model of chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble showed
+himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even the courtesy to
+his Queen which throws its halo over the story of their deliverance went
+hand in hand with a constant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead
+his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mistress as Queen of
+Beauty through the streets of London, and set her in pomp over tournaments
+as the Lady of the Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord's
+example. "In those days," writes a chronicler of the time, "arose a rumour
+and clamour among the people that wherever there was a tournament there
+came a great concourse of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not
+of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in number, as if they
+were a part of the tournament, ladies clad in diverse and wonderful male
+apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound
+cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and
+daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers
+to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed
+their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people
+sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste
+voice of the people."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Black Death]
+
+The "chaste voice of the people" was soon to grow into the stern moral
+protest of the Lollards, but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by the
+king's success. The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a
+mere rest in the career of victories which opened before Edward. England
+was drunk with her glory and with the hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen
+had been brought after the sack of that town to London. "There was no
+woman," says Walsingham, "who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and
+utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign cities." The court
+revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment
+in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle
+that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious
+"Chivalry" of the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole
+colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague the
+world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating
+Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the
+close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and the
+panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been
+amply justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then
+formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its
+repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where
+filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and
+fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased
+for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the
+Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been
+interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the
+living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the
+villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the
+priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich
+two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization
+of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands produced by the
+terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to perform the services
+due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by
+the landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to refrain from the
+abandonment of their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. "The
+sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary,
+"and there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst
+of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous
+diminution in the supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding
+rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial
+employments. Harvests rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled
+not merely from scarcity of hands but from the strife which now for the
+first time revealed itself between capital and labour.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Social Results]
+
+Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly felt as in its bearing
+on the social revolution which had been steadily going on for a century
+past throughout the country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a
+manor had been reduced over a large part of England to the position of a
+modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants and supplying
+their place in the cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers. He
+was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely for the purposes of
+cultivation on the supply of hired labour, and hitherto this supply had
+been abundant and cheap. But with the ravages of the Black Death and the
+decrease of population labour at once became scarce and dear. There was a
+general rise of wages, and the farmers of the country as well as the
+wealthier craftsmen of the town saw themselves threatened with ruin by what
+seemed to their age the extravagant demands of the labour class. Meanwhile
+the country was torn with riot and disorder. An outbreak of lawless
+self-indulgence which followed everywhere in the wake of the plague told
+especially upon the "landless men," workers wandering in search of work who
+found themselves for the first time masters of the labour market; and the
+wandering labourer or artizan turned easily into the "sturdy beggar," or
+the bandit of the woods. A summary redress for these evils was at once
+provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation. "Because a great part of the
+people," runs this ordinance, "and principally of labourers and servants,
+is dead of the plague, some, seeing the need of their lords and the
+scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive
+wages, and others are rather begging in idleness than supporting themselves
+by labour, we have ordained that any able-bodied man or woman, of
+whatsoever condition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of
+merchandise nor following a trade nor having of his own wherewithal to
+live, either his own land with the culture of which he could occupy
+himself, and not serving another, shall if so required serve another for
+such wages as was the custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or
+six years before."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Statute of Labourers]
+
+It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends which brought about
+at the close of 1349 the passing of the Statute of Labourers. "Every man or
+woman," runs this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond,
+able in body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of
+his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which
+he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve
+the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages
+which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood where he is bound to
+serve" two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by
+imprisonment. But sterner measures were soon found to be necessary. Not
+only was the price of labour fixed by the Parliament of 1351 but the labour
+class was once more tied to the soil. The labourer was forbidden to quit
+the parish where he lived in search of better paid employment; if he
+disobeyed he became a "fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the hands
+of justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally must have been
+impossible, for corn rose to so high a price that a day's labour at the old
+wages would not have purchased wheat enough for a man's support. But the
+landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The repeated re-enactment of
+the law shows the difficulty of applying it and the stubbornness of the
+struggle which it brought about. The fines and forfeitures which were
+levied for infractions of its provisions formed a large source of royal
+revenue, but so ineffectual were the original penalties that the runaway
+labourer was at last ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead,
+while the harbouring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. Nor was it
+merely the existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this
+reactionary movement. The increase of their numbers by a commutation of
+labour services for money payments was suddenly checked, and the ingenuity
+of the lawyers who were employed as stewards of each manor was exercised in
+striving to restore to the landowners that customary labour whose loss was
+now severely felt. Manumissions and exemptions which had passed without
+question were cancelled on grounds of informality, and labour services from
+which they held themselves freed by redemption were again demanded from the
+villeins. The attempt was the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded
+in the manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer whose
+interest it was to give judgement in favour of his lord. We can see the
+growth of a fierce spirit of resistance through the statutes which strove
+in vain to repress it. In the towns, where the system of forced labour was
+applied with even more rigour than in the country, strikes and combinations
+became frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the country the free
+labourers found allies in the villeins whose freedom from manorial service
+was questioned. These were often men of position and substance, and
+throughout the eastern counties the gatherings of "fugitive serfs" were
+supported by an organized resistance and by large contributions of money on
+the part of the wealthier tenantry.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Renewal of the War]
+
+With plague, famine, and social strife in the land, it was no time for
+reaping the fruits even of such a victory as Crécy. Luckily for England the
+pestilence had fallen as heavily on her foe as on herself. A common
+suffering and exhaustion forced both countries to a truce, and though
+desultory fighting went on along the Breton and Aquitanian borders, the
+peace which was thus secured lasted with brief intervals of fighting for
+seven years. It was not till 1355 that the failure of a last effort to turn
+the truce into a final peace again drove Edward into war. The campaign
+opened with a brilliant prospect of success. Charles the Bad, King of
+Navarre, held as a prince of descent from the house of Valois large fiefs
+in Normandy; and a quarrel springing suddenly up between him and John, who
+had now succeeded his father Philip on the throne of France, Charles
+offered to put his fortresses into Edward's hands. Master of Cherbourg,
+Avranches, Pontaudemer, Evreux and Meulan, Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise,
+Charles held in his hands the keys of France; and Edward grasped at the
+opportunity of delivering a crushing blow. Three armies were prepared to
+act in Normandy, Britanny, and Guienne. But the first two, with Edward and
+Henry of Derby, who had been raised to the dukedom of Lancaster, at their
+head, were detained by contrary winds, and Charles, despairing of their
+arrival, made peace with John. Edward made his way to Calais to meet the
+tidings of this desertion and to be called back to England by news of a
+recapture of Berwick by the Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation
+were revived in 1356. The treachery of John, his seizure of the King of
+Navarre, and his execution of the Count of Harcourt who was looked upon as
+the adviser of Charles in his policy of intrigue, stirred a general rising
+throughout Normandy. Edward at once despatched troops under the Duke of
+Lancaster to its support. But the insurgents were soon forced to fall back.
+Conscious of the danger to which an English occupation of Normandy would
+expose him, John hastened with a large army to the west, drove Lancaster to
+Cherbourg, took Evreux, and besieged Breteuil.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Black Prince]
+
+Here however his progress was suddenly checked by news from the south. The
+Black Prince, as the hero of Crécy was called, had landed in Guienne during
+the preceding year and won a disgraceful success. Unable to pay his troops,
+he staved off their demands by a campaign of sheer pillage. While plague
+and war and the anarchy which sprang up under the weak government of John
+were bringing ruin on the northern and central provinces of France, the
+south remained prosperous and at peace. The young prince led his army of
+freebooters up the Garonne into "what was before one of the fat countries
+of the world, the people good and simple, who did not know what war was;
+indeed no war had been waged against them till the Prince came. The English
+and Gascons found the country full and gay, the rooms adorned with carpets
+and draperies, the caskets and chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was
+safe from these robbers. They, and especially the Gascons, who are very
+greedy, carried off everything." Glutted by the sack of Carcassonne and
+Narbonne the plunderers fell back to Bordeaux, "their horses so laden with
+spoil that they could hardly move." Worthier work awaited the Black Prince
+in the following year. In the plan of campaign for 1356 it had been
+arranged that he should march upon the Loire, and there unite with a force
+under the Duke of Lancaster which was to land in Britanny and push rapidly
+into the heart of France. Delays however hindered the Prince from starting
+from Bordeaux till July, and when his march brought him to the Loire the
+plan of campaign had already broken down. The outbreak in Normandy had
+tempted the English Council to divert the force under Lancaster from
+Britanny to that province; and the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed
+by the French army under John. But if its original purpose was foiled, the
+march of the Black Prince on the Loire served still more effectively the
+English cause. His advance pointed straight upon Paris, and again as in the
+Crécy campaign John was forced to leave all for the protection of the
+capital. Hasty marches brought the king to the Loire while Prince Edward
+still lay at Vierzon on the Cher. Unconscious of John's designs, he wasted
+some days in the capture of Romorantin while the French troops were
+crossing the Loire along its course from Orleans to Tours and John with the
+advance was hurrying through Loches upon Poitiers in pursuit, as he
+supposed, of the retreating Englishmen. But the movement of the French
+army, near as it was, was unknown in the English camp; and when the news of
+it forced the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy was already far
+ahead of him. Edward reached the fields north of Poitiers to find his line
+of retreat cut off and a French army of sixty thousand men interposed
+between his forces and Bordeaux.
+
+If the Prince had shown little ability in his management of the campaign,
+he showed tactical skill in the fight which was now forced on him. On the
+nineteenth of September he took a strong position in the fields of
+Maupertuis, where his front was covered by thick hedges and approachable
+only by a deep and narrow lane which ran between vineyards. The vineyards
+and hedges he lined with bowmen, and drew up his small body of men-at-arms
+at the point where the lane opened upon the higher plain on which he was
+himself encamped. Edward's force numbered only eight thousand men, and the
+danger was great enough to force him to offer in exchange for a free
+retreat the surrender of his prisoners and of the places he had taken, with
+an oath not to fight against France for seven years to come. His offers
+however were rejected, and the battle opened with a charge of three hundred
+French knights up the narrow lane. But the lane was soon choked with men
+and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing army fell back before a
+galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In this moment of confusion a
+body of English horsemen, posted unseen by their opponents on a hill to the
+right, charged suddenly on the French flank, and the Prince watching the
+disorder which was caused by the repulse and surprise fell boldly on their
+front. The steady shot of the English archers completed the panic produced
+by this sudden attack. The first French line was driven in, and on its rout
+the second, a force of sixteen thousand men, at once broke in wild terror
+and fled from the field. John still held his ground with the knights of the
+reserve, whom he had unwisely ordered to dismount from their horses, till a
+charge of the Black Prince with two thousand lances threw this last body
+into confusion. The French king was taken, desperately fighting; and when
+his army poured back at noon in utter rout to the gates of Poitiers eight
+thousand of their number had fallen on the field, three thousand in the
+flight, and two thousand men-at-arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken
+prisoners. The royal captive entered London in triumph, mounted on a big
+white charger, while the Prince rode by his side on a little black hackney
+to the palace of the Savoy, which was chosen as John's dwelling, and a
+truce for two years seemed to give healing-time to France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Scots]
+
+With the Scots Edward the Third had less good fortune. Recalled from Calais
+by their seizure of Berwick, the king induced Balliol to resign into his
+hands his shadowy sovereignty, and in the spring of 1356 marched upon
+Edinburgh with an overpowering army, harrying and burning as he marched.
+But the Scots refused an engagement, a fleet sent with provisions was
+beaten off by a storm, and the famine-stricken army was forced to fall
+rapidly back on the border in a disastrous retreat. The trial convinced
+Edward that the conquest of Scotland was impossible, and by a rapid change
+of policy which marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship of the
+country he had wasted so long. David Bruce was released on promise of
+ransom, a truce concluded for ten years, and the prohibition of trade
+between the two kingdoms put an end to. But the fulness of this
+reconciliation screened a dexterous intrigue. David was childless, and
+Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the young king experienced
+in finding means of providing the sum demanded for his ransom to bring him
+over to a proposal which would have united the two countries for ever. The
+scheme however was carefully concealed; and it was not till 1363 that David
+proposed to his Parliament to set aside on his death the claims of the
+Steward of Scotland to his crown, and to choose Edward's third son, Lionel,
+Duke of Clarence, as his successor. Though the proposal was scornfully
+rejected, negotiations were still carried on between the two kings for the
+realization of this project, and were probably only put an end to by the
+calamities of Edward's later years.
+
+[Illustration: France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Peace of Brétigny]
+
+In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be doing Edward's work more
+effectively than arms. The miserable country found no rest in itself. Its
+routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the lords
+captured at Crécy or Poitiers procured the sums needed for their ransom by
+extortion from the peasantry. The reforms demanded by the States-General
+which met in this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery of the
+Regent, John's eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till Paris, impatient
+of his weakness and misrule, rose in arms against the Crown. The peasants
+too, driven mad by oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection,
+butchering their lords and firing their castles over the whole face of
+France. Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising was called, were at
+last crushed by treachery and the sword: and, exhausted as it was, France
+still backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which John in
+1359 proposed to buy his release. By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and
+Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west
+were ceded to the English king. On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured
+ravaging over the wasted land. Famine however proved its best defence. "I
+could not believe," said Petrarch of this time, "that this was the same
+France which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself
+to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated,
+houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of
+desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown
+with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude." The utter desolation forced
+Edward to carry with him an immense train of provisions, and thousands of
+baggage waggons with mills, ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed a long
+train which streamed for six miles behind his army. After a fruitless
+attempt upon Reims he forced the Duke of Burgundy to conclude a treaty with
+him by pushing forward to Tonnerre, and then descending the Seine appeared
+with his army before Paris. But the wasted country forbade a siege, and
+Edward after summoning the town in vain was forced to fall back for
+subsistence on the Loire. It was during this march that the Duke of
+Normandy's envoys overtook him with proposals of peace. The misery of the
+land had at last bent Charles to submission, and in May a treaty was
+concluded at Brétigny, a small place to the eastward of Chartres. By this
+treaty the English king waived his claims on the crown of France and on the
+Duchy of Normandy. On the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which
+included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, the Limousin and the
+Angoumois, Périgord and the counties of Bigorre and Rouergue, was not only
+restored but freed from its obligations as a French fief and granted in
+full sovereignty with Ponthieu, Edward's heritage from the second wife of
+Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and his new conquest of Calais.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Misery of England]
+
+The Peace of Brétigny set its seal upon Edward's glory. But within England
+itself the misery of the people was deepening every hour. Men believed the
+world to be ending, and the judgement day to be near. A few months after
+the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the Duke of
+Lancaster. The repressive measures of Parliament and the landowners only
+widened the social chasm which parted employer from employed. We can see
+the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both to the reactionary efforts
+which were being made to bring back labour services and to the enactments
+which again bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to
+repress the strikes and combinations which became frequent in the towns and
+the more formidable gatherings of villeins and "fugitive serfs" in the
+country at large. A statute of later date throws light on the nature of the
+resistance of the last. It tells us that "villeins and holders of land in
+villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having
+attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and
+who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and
+villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services
+either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or
+other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their
+maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life
+and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each
+other." It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the
+reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service
+but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder
+was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be
+recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John Ball]
+
+A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was seen in a new revolt
+against the whole system of social inequality which had till then passed
+unquestioned as the divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly signed
+when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the words of "a mad
+priest of Kent" as the courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to
+come found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment
+in the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.
+"Mad" as the landowners held him to be, it was in the preaching of John
+Ball that England first listened to a declaration of the natural equality
+and rights of man. "Good people," cried the preacher, "things will never be
+well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
+villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater
+folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in
+serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how
+can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they
+make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
+clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are
+covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we
+oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses;
+we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is
+of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny
+of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism. A spirit
+fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime
+which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball:
+
+                      "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+                       Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+
+[Sidenote: William Langland]
+
+More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone,
+is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody
+with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time,
+its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the
+poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich. Nothing brings more
+vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed
+the rich from the poor than the contrast between his "Complaint of Piers
+the Ploughman" and the "Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and
+laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in
+a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the
+gaunt poet of the poor. Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put
+to school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long Will," as Langland
+was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to
+London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing "placebos" and
+"diriges" in the stately funerals of his day. Men took the moody clerk for
+a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made him
+loth, as he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in
+silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a "God save you" with
+the law sergeants as he passed their new house in the Temple. His world is
+the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man's life, on his hunger and
+toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man
+who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of
+the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and
+there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his
+rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of
+Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of
+the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest
+contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous
+allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form
+the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of
+a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad
+Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of
+sadness: the world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently
+along the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Piers Ploughman]
+
+Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the
+great city to a May-morning in the Malvern Hills. "I was weary forwandered
+and went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and
+leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved
+(sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the
+world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a wide
+field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of
+minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen that "in
+setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims "with their
+wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and
+scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners "parting the
+silver" with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but
+to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the
+Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it is who bids the
+knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo with the poor. "Though
+he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set
+and with more bliss than thou.... For in charnel at church churles be evil
+to know, or a knight from a knave there." The gospel of equality is backed
+by the gospel of labour. The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make
+the world work with him. He warns the labourer as he warns the knight.
+Hunger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits
+to work her will on the idler and the waster. On the eve of the great
+struggle between wealth and labour, Langland stands alone in his fairness
+to both, in his shrewd political and religious common sense. In the face of
+the popular hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he paints the
+Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any
+rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.
+Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a righteous life to be
+better than a host of indulgences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when
+priests dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and
+without hope. It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady Mede,"
+brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In
+the waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is looked
+upon--he tells us bitterly--as a madman. There is a terrible despair in the
+close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only followed by
+the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst the revel of
+Death and Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses
+himself with a last effort, and seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the
+world to find Piers Ploughman.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Præmunire]
+
+The strife indeed which Langland would have averted raged only the fiercer
+as the dark years went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for
+their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in
+restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment,
+they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed,
+between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was
+opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William
+Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for
+such a revolution was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife
+between England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp protests from king
+and parliament the need for money at Avignon was too great to allow any
+relaxation in the Papal claims. Almost on the eve of Crécy Edward took the
+decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of any Papal bulls or
+documents interfering with the rights of presentation belonging to private
+patrons. But the tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this
+source of revenue for all Edward's protests. Crécy however gave a new
+boldness to the action of the State, and a Statute of Provisors was passed
+by the Parliament in 1351 which again asserted the rights of the English
+Church and enacted that all who infringed them by the introduction of Papal
+"provisors" should suffer imprisonment. But resistance to provisors only
+brought fresh vexations. The patrons who withstood a Papal nominee in the
+name of the law were summoned to defend themselves in the Papal Court. From
+that moment the supremacy of the Papal law over the law of the land became
+a great question in which the lesser question of provisors merged. The
+pretension of the Court of Avignon was met in 1353 by a statute which
+forbade any questioning of judgements rendered in the King's Courts or any
+prosecution of a suit in foreign courts under pain of outlawry, perpetual
+imprisonment, or banishment from the land. It was this act of Præmunire--as
+it came in after renewals to be called--which furnished so terrible a
+weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with Rome. But the Papacy paid
+little heed to these warnings, and its obstinacy in still receiving suits
+and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the pride of a conquering
+people. England was still fresh from her glory at Brétigny when Edward
+appealed to the Parliament of 1365. Complaints, he said, were constantly
+being made by his subjects to the Pope as to matters which were cognizable
+in the King's Courts. The practice of provisors was thus maintained in the
+teeth of the laws, and "the laws, usages, ancient customs, and franchises
+of his kingdom were thereby much hindered, the King's crown degraded, and
+his person defamed." The king's appeal was hotly met. "Biting words," which
+it was thought wise to suppress, were used in the debate which followed,
+and the statutes against provisors and appeals were solemnly confirmed.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wyclif]
+
+What gave point to this challenge was the assent of the prelates to the
+proceedings of the Parliament; and the pride of Urban V. at once met it by
+a counter-defiance. He demanded with threats the payment of the annual sum
+of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement of the
+suzerainty of the See of Rome. The insult roused the temper of the realm.
+The king laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that
+"neither King John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom, nor his
+people under subjection save with their accord or assent." John's
+submission had been made "without their assent and against his coronation
+oath" and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to enforce his
+claim, to resist him with all their power. Even Urban shrank from
+imperilling the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a Papal
+lordship over England was never again heard of. But the struggle had
+brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and
+significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing
+is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's
+earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during
+the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the
+fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed
+to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and
+recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic
+doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and most daring in
+philosophical speculation. A reckless audacity and love of novelty was the
+common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and
+more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas
+Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris during the English wars was
+transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif
+stood without a rival. From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a
+scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he published
+during this period, he inherited the tendency to a predestinarian
+Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.
+His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church
+reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunications of the Church,
+Ockham had supported the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle,
+and he had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking the
+foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the
+civil power. The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and
+asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the stormy work
+of Ockham; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an
+immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride. The
+personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only deepened the
+influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed
+even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his
+intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him which
+revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English
+prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous
+politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the
+unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of
+controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone,
+to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break
+through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the
+freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "De Dominio Divino."]
+
+At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however Wyclif was far from
+having advanced to such a position as this. As the most prominent of
+English scholars it was natural that he should come forward in defence of
+the independence and freedom of the English Church; and he published a
+formal refutation of the claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will
+with church property in the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates
+which we have described. As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of
+Rome but with its practices; and it was on the principles of Ockham that he
+defended the Parliament's refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by
+Urban. But his treatise on "The Kingdom of God," "De Dominio Divino," which
+can hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the breadth of the
+ground he was even now prepared to take up. In this, the most famous of his
+works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct ideal of society. All
+authority, to use his own expression, is "founded in grace." Dominion in
+the highest sense is in God alone; it is God who as the suzerain of the
+universe deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on
+tenure of their obedience to Himself. It was easy to object that in such a
+case "dominion" could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such a
+tenure and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely
+ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion and power,
+power which the wicked may have by God's permission, and to which the
+Christian must submit from motives of obedience to God. In his own
+scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth "God
+must obey the devil." But whether in the ideal or practical view of the
+matter all power and dominion was of God. It was granted by Him not to one
+person, His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The king was
+as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power was as sacred as the
+ecclesiastical, and as complete over temporal things, even over the
+temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church over spiritual things.
+So far as the question of Church and State therefore was concerned the
+distinction between the ideal and practical view of "dominion" was of
+little account. Wyclif's application of the theory to the individual
+conscience was of far higher and wider importance. Obedient as each
+Christian might be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of
+"dominion" held immediately of God. The throne of God Himself was the
+tribunal of personal appeal. What the Reformers of the sixteenth century
+attempted to do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted
+to do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establishing a direct
+relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a mediating
+priesthood, the very foundation on which the mediaeval church was built.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and Aquitaine]
+
+As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little seen. But the social
+and religious excitement which we have described was quickened by the
+renewal of the war, and the general suffering and discontent gathered
+bitterness when the success which had flushed England with a new and
+warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters in which men forgot
+the glories of Crécy and Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of
+Brétigny was really fatal to Edward's cause in the south of France. By the
+cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on
+which his strength rested lost its force. The people of the south had clung
+to their Duke, even though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had
+stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. While preserving
+however their traditional fealty to the descendants of Eleanor they still
+clung to the equally traditional suzerainty of the kings of France. But the
+treaty of Brétigny not only severed them from the realm of France, it
+subjected them to the realm of England. Edward ceased to be their
+hereditary Duke, he became simply an English king ruling Aquitaine as an
+English dominion. If the Southerners loved the North-French little, they
+loved the English less, and the treaty which thus changed their whole
+position was followed by a quick revulsion of feeling from the Garonne to
+the Pyrenees. The Gascon nobles declared that John had no right to transfer
+their fealty to another and to sever them from the realm of France. The
+city of Rochelle prayed the French king not to release it from its fealty
+to him. "We will obey the English with our lips," said its citizens, "but
+our hearts shall never be moved towards them." Edward strove to meet this
+passion for local independence, this hatred of being ruled from London, by
+sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing him in 1362 with the
+Duchy of Aquitaine. But the new Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the
+English king, and the grievance of the Southerners was left untouched.
+Charles V. who succeeded his father John in 1364 silently prepared to reap
+this harvest of discontent. Patient, wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly
+crowned before he put an end to the war which had gone on without a pause
+in Britanny by accepting homage from the claimant whom France had hitherto
+opposed. Through Bertrand du Guesclin, a fine soldier whom his sagacity had
+discovered, he forced the king of Navarre to a peace which closed the
+fighting in Normandy. A more formidable difficulty in the way of
+pacification and order lay in the Free Companies, a union of marauders whom
+the disbanding of both armies after the peace had set free to harry the
+wasted land and whom the king's military resources were insufficient to
+cope with. It was the stroke by which Charles cleared his realm of these
+scourges which forced on a new struggle with the English in the south.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Pedro the Cruel]
+
+In the judgement of the English court the friendship of Castille was of the
+first importance for the security of Aquitaine. Spain was the strongest
+naval power of the western world, and not only would the ports of Guienne
+be closed but its communication with England would be at once cut off by
+the appearance of a joint French and Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was
+with satisfaction therefore that Edward saw the growth of a bitter
+hostility between Charles and the Castilian king, Pedro the Cruel, through
+the murder of his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, the French king's
+sister-in-law. Henry of Trastamara, a bastard son of Pedro's father Alfonso
+the Eleventh, had long been a refugee at the French court, and soon after
+the treaty of Brétigny Charles in his desire to revenge this murder on
+Pedro gave Henry aid in an attempt on the Castilian throne. It was
+impossible for England to look on with indifference while a dependant of
+the French king became master of Castille; and in 1362 a treaty offensive
+and defensive was concluded between Pedro and Edward the Third. The time
+was not come for open war; but the subtle policy of Charles saw in this
+strife across the Pyrenees an opportunity both of detaching Castille from
+the English cause and of ridding himself of the Free Companies. With
+characteristic caution he dexterously held himself in the background while
+he made use of the Pope, who had been threatened by the Free Companies in
+his palace at Avignon and was as anxious to get rid of them as himself.
+Pedro's cruelty, misgovernment, and alliance with the Moslem of Cordova
+served as grounds for a crusade which was proclaimed by Pope Urban; and Du
+Guesclin, who was placed at the head of the expedition, found in the Papal
+treasury and in the hope of booty from an unravaged land means of gathering
+the marauders round his standard. As soon as these Crusaders crossed the
+Ebro Pedro was deserted by his subjects, and in 1366 Henry of Trastamara
+saw himself crowned without a struggle at Burgos as king of Castille. Pedro
+with his two daughters fled for shelter to Bordeaux and claimed the aid
+promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine shrank from fighting for
+such a cause, but in spite of their protests and the reluctance of the
+English council to embark in so distant a struggle Edward held that he had
+no choice save to replace his ally, for to leave Henry seated on the throne
+was to leave Aquitaine to be crushed between France and Castille.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Charles the Fifth]
+
+The after course of the war proved that in his anticipations of the fatal
+result of a combination of the two powers Edward was right, but his policy
+jarred not only against the universal craving for rest, but against the
+moral sense of the world. The Black Prince however proceeded to carry out
+his father's design in the teeth of the general opposition. His call to
+arms robbed Henry of the aid of those English Companies who had marched
+till now with the rest of the crusaders, but who returned at once to the
+standard of the Prince; the passes of Navarre were opened with gold, and in
+the beginning of 1367 the English army crossed the Pyrenees. Advancing to
+the Ebro the Prince offered battle at Navarete with an army already reduced
+by famine and disease in its terrible winter march, and Henry with double
+his numbers at once attacked him. But in spite of the obstinate courage of
+the Castilian troops the discipline and skill of the English soldiers once
+more turned the wavering day into a victory. Du Guesclin was taken, Henry
+fled across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was again seated on his throne. The pay
+however which he had promised was delayed; and the Prince, whose army had
+been thinned by disease to a fifth of its numbers and whose strength never
+recovered from the hardships of this campaign, fell back sick and beggared
+to Aquitaine. He had hardly returned when his work was undone. In 1368
+Henry reentered Castille; its towns threw open their gates; a general
+rising chased Pedro from the throne, and a final battle in the spring of
+1369 saw his utter overthrow. His murder by Henry's hand left the bastard
+undisputed master of Castille. Meanwhile the Black Prince, sick and
+disheartened, was hampered at Bordeaux by the expenses of the campaign
+which Pedro had left unpaid. To defray his debt he was driven in 1368 to
+lay a hearth-tax on Aquitaine, and the tax served as a pretext for an
+outbreak of the long-hoarded discontent. Charles was now ready for open
+action. He had won over the most powerful among the Gascon nobles, and
+their influence secured the rejection of the tax in a Parliament of the
+province which met at Bordeaux. The Prince, pressed by debt, persisted
+against the counsel of his wisest advisers in exacting it; and the lords of
+Aquitaine at once appealed to the king of France. Such an appeal was a
+breach of the treaty of Brétigny in which the French king had renounced his
+sovereignty over the south; but Charles had craftily delayed year after
+year the formal execution of the renunciations stipulated in the treaty,
+and he was still able to treat it as not binding on him. The success of
+Henry of Trastamara decided him to take immediate action, and in 1369 he
+summoned the Black Prince as Duke of Aquitaine to meet the appeal of the
+Gascon lords in his court.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Renewal of the War]
+
+The Prince was maddened by the summons. "I will come," he replied, "but
+with helmet on head, and with sixty thousand men at my back." War however
+had hardly been declared when the ability with which Charles had laid his
+plans was seen in his seizure of Ponthieu and in a rising of the whole
+country south of the Garonne. Du Gueselin returned in 1370 from Spain to
+throw life into the French attack. Two armies entered Guienne from the
+east; and a hundred castles with La Réole and Limoges threw open their
+gates to Du Guesclin. But the march of an English army from Calais upon
+Paris recalled him from the south to guard the capital at a moment when the
+English leader advanced to recover Limoges, and the Black Prince borne in a
+litter to its walls stormed the town and sullied by a merciless massacre of
+its inhabitants the fame of his earlier exploits. Sickness however recalled
+him home in the spring of 1371; and the war, protracted by the caution of
+Charles who forbade his armies to engage, did little but exhaust the energy
+and treasure of England. As yet indeed the French attack had made small
+impression on the south, where the English troops stoutly held their ground
+against Du Guesclin's inroads. But the protracted war drained Edward's
+resources, while the diplomacy of Charles was busy in rousing fresh dangers
+from Scotland and Castille. It was in vain that Edward looked for allies to
+the Flemish towns. The male line of the Counts of Flanders ended in Count
+Louis le Mâle; and the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Philip, Duke
+of Burgundy, a younger brother of the French king, secured Charles from
+attack along his northern border. In Scotland the death of David Bruce put
+an end to Edward's schemes for a reunion of the two kingdoms; and his
+successor, Robert the Steward, renewed in 1371 the alliance with France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Loss of Aquitaine]
+
+Castille was a yet more serious danger; and an effort which Edward made to
+neutralize its attack only forced Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole
+weight into the struggle. The two daughters of Pedro had remained since
+their father's flight at Bordeaux. The elder of these was now wedded to
+John of Gaunt, Edward's fourth son, whom he had created Duke of Lancaster
+on his previous marriage with Blanche, a daughter of Henry of Lancaster and
+the heiress of that house, while the younger was wedded to Edward's fifth
+son, the Earl of Cambridge. Edward's aim was that of raising again the
+party of King Pedro and giving Henry of Trastamara work to do at home which
+would hinder his interposition in the war of Guienne. It was with this view
+that John of Gaunt on his marriage took the title of king of Castille. But
+no adherent of Pedro's cause stirred in Spain, and Henry replied to the
+challenge by sending a Spanish fleet to the Channel. A decisive victory
+which this fleet won over an English convoy off Rochelle proved a fatal
+blow to the English cause. It wrested from Edward the mastery of the seas,
+and cut off all communication between England and Guienne. Charles was at
+once roused to new exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded
+to his general Du Guesclin; and Rochelle was surrendered by its citizens in
+1372. The next year saw a desperate attempt to restore the fortune of the
+English arms. A great army under John of Gaunt penetrated into the heart of
+France. But it found no foe to engage. Charles had forbidden any fighting.
+"If a storm rages over the land," said the king coolly, "it disperses of
+itself; and so will it be with the English." Winter in fact overtook the
+Duke of Lancaster in the mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of his
+host reached Bordeaux. The failure of this attack was the signal for a
+general defection, and ere the summer of 1374 had closed the two towns of
+Bordeaux and Bayonne were all that remained of the English possessions in
+Southern France. Even these were only saved by the exhaustion of the
+conquerors. The treasury of Charles was as utterly drained as the treasury
+of Edward; and the kings were forced to a truce.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Social Strife]
+
+Only fourteen years had gone by since the Treaty of Brétigny raised England
+to a height of glory such as it had never known before. But the years had
+been years of a shame and suffering which stung the people to madness.
+Never had England fallen so low. Her conquests were lost, her shores
+insulted, her commerce swept from the seas. Within she was drained by the
+taxation and bloodshed of the war. Its popularity had wholly died away.
+When the Commons were asked in 1354 whether they would assent to a treaty
+of perpetual peace if they might have it, "the said Commons responded all,
+and all together, 'Yes, yes!'" The population was thinned by the ravages of
+pestilence, for till 1369, which saw its last visitation, the Black Death
+returned again and again. The social strife too gathered bitterness with
+every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parliament after Parliament
+increased the severity of its laws. The demands of the Parliament of 1376
+show how inoperative the previous Statutes of Labourers had proved. They
+prayed that constables be directed to arrest all who infringed the Statute,
+that no labourer should be allowed to take refuge in a town and become an
+artizan if there were need of his service in the county from which he came,
+and that the king would protect lords and employers against the threats of
+death uttered by serfs who refused to serve. The reply of the Royal Council
+shows that statesmen at any rate were beginning to feel that repression
+might be pushed too far. The king refused to interfere by any further and
+harsher provisions between employers and employed, and left cases of breach
+of law to be dealt with in his ordinary courts of justice. On the one side
+he forbade the threatening gatherings which were already common in the
+country, but on the other he forbade the illegal exactions of the
+employers. With such a reply however the proprietary class were hardly
+likely to be content. Two years later the Parliament of Gloucester called
+for a Fugitive-slave Law, which would have enabled lords to seize their
+serfs in whatever county or town they found refuge, and in 1379 they prayed
+that judges might be sent five times a year into every shire to enforce the
+Statute of Labourers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Parliament]
+
+But the strife between employers and employed was not the only rift which
+was opening in the social structure. Suffering and defeat had stripped off
+the veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward
+the Third. His profligacy was now bringing him to a premature old age. He
+was sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mistresses. The glitter
+and profusion of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Table
+Round, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose
+frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep
+which crowned the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour round
+a king who tricked his Parliament and swindled his creditors. Edward paid
+no debts. He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of
+bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested payment from him by
+holding his royal person as their security. His own subjects fared no
+better than foreigners. The prerogative of "purveyance" by which the king
+in his progresses through the country had the right of first purchase of
+all that he needed at fair market price became a galling oppression in the
+hands of a bankrupt king who was always moving from place to place. "When
+men hear of your coming," Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward, "everybody at
+once for sheer fear sets about hiding or eating or getting rid of their
+geese and chickens or other possessions that they may not utterly lose them
+through your arrival. The purveyors and servants of your court seize on men
+and horses in the midst of their field work. They seize on the very
+bullocks that are at plough or at sowing, and force them to work for two or
+three days at a time without a penny of payment. It is no wonder that men
+make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as the truth is in God, I
+myself, whenever I hear a rumour of it, be I at home or in chapter or in
+church or at study, nay if I am saying mass, even I in my own person
+tremble in every limb." But these irregular exactions were little beside
+the steady pressure of taxation. Even in the years of peace fifteenths and
+tenths, subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were demanded and
+obtained from Parliament; and with the outbreak of war the royal demands
+became heavier and more frequent. As failure followed failure the expenses
+of each campaign increased an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle cost
+nearly a million; the march of John of Gaunt through France utterly drained
+the royal treasury. Nor were these legal supplies all that the king drew
+from the nation. He had repudiated his pledge to abstain from arbitrary
+taxation of imports and exports. He sold monopolies to the merchants in
+exchange for increased customs. He wrested supplies from the clergy by
+arrangements with the bishops or the Pope. There were signs that Edward was
+longing to rid himself of the control of Parliament altogether. The power
+of the Houses seemed indeed as high as ever; great statutes were passed.
+Those of Provisors and Præmunire settled the relations of England to the
+Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and its penalties.
+That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and
+the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted it. But side by side
+with these exertions of influence we note a series of steady encroachments
+by the Crown on the power of the Houses. If their petitions were granted,
+they were often altered in the royal ordinance which professed to embody
+them. A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once rendered the
+annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. Its very existence was
+threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with
+but a single knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small
+number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted
+subsidies.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Baronage and the Church]
+
+What aided Edward above all in eluding or defying the constitutional
+restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as well as in these more insidious
+attempts to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of the check which
+the Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The same causes which
+had long been reducing the number of the greater lords who formed the upper
+house went steadily on. Under Edward the Second little more than seventy
+were commonly summoned to Parliament; little more than forty were summoned
+under Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown,
+partly by their employment on its service, partly by their interest in the
+continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage too were members of the
+royal family. Edward had carried out on a far wider scale than before the
+policy which had been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the
+Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house all the greater
+heritages of the land. The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, the
+heiress of Edward the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock. His
+marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster brought to the king's
+second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions of
+the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by
+like matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson,
+Henry of Lancaster. But the greatest English heritage fell to Edward's
+third living son, John of Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent
+during his father's Flemish campaign. Originally created Earl of Richmond,
+the death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest
+daughter, raised John in his wife's right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and
+the Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage were
+thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and more into an hostility with
+the Church which in time disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it.
+What rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pressure of the war.
+The nobles and knighthood of the country, already half ruined by the rise
+in the labour market and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder
+than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for by the
+continuance of the struggle. In the hour of their distress they cast their
+eyes greedily--as in the Norman and Angevin days--on the riches of the
+Church. Never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of some
+three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty
+thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated about the country. They were
+said to own in landed property alone more than a third of the soil, while
+their "spiritualities" in dues and offerings amounted to twice the king's
+revenue. Exaggerated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church was
+really great; but even more galling to the nobles was its influence in the
+royal councils. The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by its
+victories at Crécy and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng
+of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to their love of peace
+the errors and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the disasters
+of the war. To rob the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a
+great baronial party.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Weakness of the Church]
+
+The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been fruitless had the
+spiritual power of the Church remained as of old. But the clergy were rent
+by their own dissensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares of
+political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous
+inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the
+"poor parson" of the country. A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy
+from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the Universities.
+Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline
+which was already being felt in the number of academical students, and the
+University checked by statute their practice of admitting mere children
+into their order. The clergy too at large shared in the discredit and
+unpopularity of the Papacy. Though they suffered more than any other class
+from the exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more to the Papal
+cause. The very statutes which would have protected them were practically
+set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crown. At home and abroad the
+Roman See was too useful for the king to come to any actual breach with it.
+However much Edward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he shrank
+from an open contest which would have added the Papacy to his many foes,
+and which would at the same time have robbed him of his most effective
+means of wresting aids from the English clergy by private arrangement with
+the Roman court. Rome indeed was brought to waive its alleged right of
+appointing foreigners to English livings. But a compromise was arranged
+between the Pope and the Crown in which both united in the spoliation and
+enslavement of the Church. The voice of chapters, of monks, of
+ecclesiastical patrons, went henceforth for nothing in the election of
+bishops or abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift of churchmen.
+The Crown recommended those whom it chose to the Pope, and the Pope
+nominated them to see or cure of souls. The treasuries of both King and
+Pope profited by the arrangement; but we can hardly wonder that after a
+betrayal such as this the clergy placed little trust in statutes or royal
+protection, and bowed humbly before the claims of Rome.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Worldliness]
+
+But what weakened the clergy most was their severance from the general
+sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of their
+temper. Immense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they could of
+the common burthens of the realm. They were still resolute to assert their
+exemption from the common justice of the land, though the mild punishments
+of the bishops' courts carried as little dismay as ever into the mass of
+disorderly clerks. But privileged as they thus held themselves against all
+interference from the lay world without them, they carried on a ceaseless
+interference with the affairs of this lay world through their control over
+wills, contracts and divorces. No figure was better known or more hated
+than the summoner who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of
+their courts. By their directly religious offices they penetrated into the
+very heart of the social life about them. But powerful as they were, their
+moral authority was fast passing away. The wealthier churchmen with their
+curled hair and hanging sleeves aped the costume of the knightly society
+from which they were drawn and to which they still really belonged. We see
+the general impression of their worldliness in Chaucer's pictures of the
+hunting monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto on her brooch.
+The older religious orders in fact had sunk into mere landowners, while the
+enthusiasm of the friars had in great part died away and left a crowd of
+impudent mendicants behind it. Wyclif could soon with general applause
+denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare that "the man who gives alms
+to a begging friar is _ipso facto_ excommunicate."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Advance of the Commons]
+
+It was this weakness of the Baronage and the Church, and the consequent
+withdrawal of both as represented in the temporal and spiritual Estates of
+the Upper House from the active part which they had taken till now in
+checking the Crown that brought the Lower House to the front. The Knight of
+the Shire was now finally joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the
+Third Estate of the realm: and this union of the trader and the country
+gentleman gave a vigour and weight to the action of the Commons which their
+House could never have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere
+gathering of burgesses. But it was only slowly and under the pressure of
+one necessity after another that the Commons took a growing part in public
+affairs. Their primary business was with taxation, and here they stood firm
+against the evasions by which the king still managed to baffle their
+exclusive right of granting supplies by voluntary agreements with the
+merchants of the Staple. Their steady pressure at last obtained in 1362 an
+enactment that no subsidy should henceforth be set upon wool without assent
+of Parliament, while Purveyance was restricted by a provision that payments
+should be made for all things taken for the king's use in ready money. A
+hardly less important advance was made by the change of Ordinances into
+Statutes. Till this time, even when a petition of the Houses was granted,
+the royal Council had reserved to itself the right of modifying its form in
+the Ordinance which professed to embody it. It was under colour of this
+right that so many of the provisions made in Parliament had hitherto been
+evaded or set aside. But the Commons now met this abuse by a demand that on
+the royal assent being given their petitions should be turned without
+change into Statutes of the Realm and derive force of law from their entry
+on the Rolls of Parliament. The same practical sense was seen in their
+dealings with Edward's attempt to introduce occasional smaller councils
+with parliamentary powers. Such an assembly in 1353 granted a subsidy on
+wool. The Parliament which met in the following year might have challenged
+its proceedings as null and void, but the Commons more wisely contented
+themselves with a demand that the ordinances passed in the preceding
+assembly should receive the sanction of the Three Estates. A precedent for
+evil was thus turned into a precedent for good, and though irregular
+gatherings of a like sort were for a while occasionally held they were soon
+seen to be fruitless and discontinued. But the Commons long shrank from
+meddling with purely administrative matters. When Edward in his anxiety to
+shift from himself the responsibility of the war referred to them in 1354
+for advice on one of the numerous propositions of peace, they referred him
+to the lords of his Council. "Most dreaded lord," they replied, "as to this
+war and the equipment needful for it we are so ignorant and simple that we
+know not how nor have the power to devise. Wherefore we pray your Grace to
+excuse us in this matter, and that it please you with the advice of the
+great and wise persons of your Council to ordain what seems best for you
+for the honour and profit of yourself and of your kingdom. And whatsoever
+shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement on the part of you and your
+Lords we readily assent to and will hold it firmly established."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Baronage attacks the Church]
+
+But humble as was their tone the growing power of the Commons showed itself
+in significant changes. In 1363 the Chancellor opened Parliament with a
+speech in English, no doubt as a tongue intelligible to the members of the
+Lower House. From a petition in 1376 that knights of the shire may be
+chosen by common election of the better folk of the shire and not merely
+nominated by the sheriff without due election, as well as from an earlier
+demand that the sheriffs themselves should be disqualified from serving in
+Parliament during their term of office, we see that the Crown had already
+begun not only to feel the pressure of the Commons but to meet it by
+foisting royal nominees on the constituencies. Such an attempt at packing
+the House would hardly have been resorted to had it not already proved too
+strong for direct control. A further proof of its influence was seen in a
+prayer of the Parliament that lawyers practising in the King's Courts might
+no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The petition marks the rise
+of a consciousness that the House was now no mere gathering of local
+representatives, but a national assembly, and that a seat in it could no
+longer be confined to dwellers within the bounds of this county or that.
+But it showed also a pressure for seats, a passing away of the old dread of
+being returned as a representative and a new ambition to gain a place among
+the members of the Commons. Whether they would or no indeed the Commons
+were driven forward to a more direct interference with public affairs. From
+the memorable statute of 1322 their right to take equal part in all matters
+brought before Parliament had been incontestable, and their waiver of much
+of this right faded away before the stress of time. Their assent was needed
+to the great ecclesiastical statutes which regulated the relation of the
+See of Rome to the realm. They naturally took a chief part in the enactment
+and re-enactment of the Statute of Labourers. The Statute of the Staple,
+with a host of smaller commercial and economical measures, was of their
+origination. But it was not till an open breach took place between the
+baronage and the prelates that their full weight was felt. In the
+Parliament of 1371, on the resumption of the war, a noble taunted the
+Church as an owl protected by the feathers which other birds had
+contributed, and which they had a right to resume when a hawk's approach
+threatened them. The worldly goods of the Church, the metaphor hinted, had
+been bestowed on it for the common weal, and could be taken from it on the
+coming of a common danger. The threat was followed by a prayer that the
+chief offices of state, which had till now been held by the leading
+bishops, might be placed in lay hands. The prayer was at once granted:
+William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, resigned the Chancellorship,
+another prelate the Treasury, to lay dependants of the great nobles; and
+the panic of the clergy was seen in large grants which were voted by both
+Convocations.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John of Gaunt]
+
+At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the Church found a leader
+in John of Gaunt. The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the
+Crown. Edward himself was sinking into dotage. Of his sons the Black
+Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish campaign,
+was fast drawing to the grave; he had lost a second son by death in
+childhood; the third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368. It was his
+fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the royal power mainly fell.
+By his marriage with the heiress of the house of Lancaster the Duke had
+acquired lands and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the
+Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons in any
+constitutional resistance to the Crown. His pride, already quickened by the
+second match with Constance to which he owed his shadowy kingship of
+Castille, drew him to the throne; and the fortune which placed the royal
+power practically in his hands bound him only the more firmly to its cause.
+Men held that his ambition looked to the Crown itself, for the approaching
+death of Edward and the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of
+the Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl, the daughter
+of the Duke of Clarence, between John and the throne. But the Duke's
+success fell short of his pride. In the campaign of 1373 he traversed
+France without finding a foe and brought back nothing save a ruined army to
+English shores. The peremptory tone in which money was demanded for the
+cost of this fruitless march while the petitions of the Parliament were set
+aside till it was granted roused the temper of the Commons. They
+requested--it is the first instance of such a practice--a conference with
+the lords, and while granting fresh subsidies prayed that the grant should
+be spent only on the war. The resentment of the government at this advance
+towards a control over the actual management of public affairs was seen in
+the calling of no Parliament through the next two years. But the years were
+disastrous both at home and abroad. The war went steadily against the
+English arms. The long negotiations with the Pope which went on at Bruges
+through 1375, and in which Wyclif took part as one of the royal
+commissioners, ended in a compromise by which Rome yielded nothing. The
+strife over the Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, and a return
+of the plague heightened the public distress. Edward was now wholly swayed
+by Alice Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the royal mistress.
+But if we gather its tenor from the complaints of the succeeding Parliament
+his administration was as weak as it was corrupt. The new lay ministers
+lent themselves to gigantic frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought
+up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue. With Richard Lyons, a
+merchant through whom the king negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he
+reaped enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by lending to
+the Crown at usurious rates of interest. When the empty treasury forced
+them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through
+the sheriffs.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Good Parliament]
+
+But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, and which gained from
+after times the name of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions
+had utterly failed. Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to
+win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser gentry or the
+wealthier burgesses who together formed the Commons. Projects of wide
+constitutional and social change, of the humiliation and impoverishment of
+an estate of the realm, were profoundly distasteful to men already
+struggling with a social revolution on their own estates and in their own
+workshops. But it was not merely its opposition to the projects of
+Lancaster and his party among the baronage which won for this assembly the
+name of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new period in our
+Parliamentary history, as it marked a new stage in the character of the
+national opposition to the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of
+resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out through
+risings of its feudal tenantry. But the misgovernment was now that of the
+baronage or of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction
+with the Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any adequate means of
+peaceful redress. The old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with
+matters of State was roughly swept away therefore by the pressure of the
+time. The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's succession by the
+removal of John of Gaunt, the prelates with William of Wykeham at their
+head, resolute again to take their place in the royal councils and to check
+the projects of ecclesiastical spoliation put forward by their opponents,
+alike found in it a body to oppose to the Duke's administration. Backed by
+powers such as these, the action of the Commons showed none of their old
+timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of a hundred and forty
+petitions of grievances preluded a bold attack on the royal Council.
+"Trusting in God, and standing with his followers before the nobles,
+whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings were ever
+contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the
+mis-management of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded an account
+of the expenditure. "What do these base and ignoble knights attempt?" cried
+John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be kings or princes of the land?" But
+the movement was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced by the
+charges brought against the ministers. After a strict enquiry Latimer and
+Lyons were alike thrown into prison, Alice Perrers was banished, and
+several of the royal servants were driven from the Court. At this moment
+the death of the Black Prince shook the power of the Parliament. But it
+only heightened its resolve to secure the succession. His son, Richard of
+Bordeaux, as he was called from the place of his birth, was now a child of
+but ten years old; and it was known that doubts were whispered on the
+legitimacy of his birth and claim. An early marriage of his mother Joan of
+Kent, a granddaughter of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury had
+been annulled; but the Lancastrian party used this first match to throw
+doubts on the validity of her subsequent union with the Black Prince and on
+the right of Richard to the throne. The dread of Lancaster's ambition is
+the first indication of the approach of what was from this time to grow
+into the great difficulty of the realm, the question of the succession to
+the Crown. From the death of Edward the Third to the death of Charles the
+First no English sovereign felt himself secure from rival claimants of his
+throne. As yet however the dread was a baseless one; the people were
+heartily with the Prince and his child. The Duke's proposal that the
+succession should be settled in case of Richard's death was rejected; and
+the boy himself was brought into Parliament and acknowledged as heir of the
+Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wyclif and John of Gaunt]
+
+To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining the addition of nine
+lords with William of Wykeham and two other prelates among them to the
+royal Council. But the Parliament was no sooner dismissed than the Duke at
+once resumed his power. His anger at the blow which had been dealt at his
+projects was no doubt quickened by resentment at the sudden advance of the
+Lower House. From the Commons who shrank even from giving counsel on
+matters of state to the Commons who dealt with such matters as their
+special business, who investigated royal accounts, who impeached royal
+ministers, who dictated changes in the royal advisers, was an immense step.
+But it was a step which the Duke believed could be retraced. His haughty
+will flung aside all restraints of law. He dismissed the new lords and
+prelates from the Council. He called back Alice Perrers and the disgraced
+ministers. He declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and did not
+suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter de la
+Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham. His attack on
+this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, and the attack became
+significant when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations of
+Church property which formed the favourite theme of John Wyclif. To Wyclif
+such a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which held down the Church.
+His administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and the
+colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise before
+his death, were all equally hateful. It was this wealth, this intermeddling
+with worldly business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse
+that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which could
+alone meet the vice and suffering of the time. Whatever baser motives might
+spur Lancaster and his party, their projects of spoliation must have seemed
+to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the Church. Poor and powerless in
+worldly matters, he held that she would have the wealth and might of heaven
+at her command. Wyclif's theory of Church and State had led him long since
+to contend that the property of the clergy might be seized and employed
+like other property for national purposes. Such a theory might have been
+left, as other daring theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the
+disputation of the schools. But the clergy were bitterly galled when the
+first among English teachers threw himself hotly on the side of the party
+which threatened them with spoliation, and argued in favour of their
+voluntary abandonment of all Church property and of a return to their
+original poverty. They were roused to action when Wyclif came forward as
+the theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party at a moment when the
+clergy were freshly outraged by the overthrow of the bishops and the
+plunder of Wykeham. They forced the king to cancel the sentence of
+banishment from the precincts of the Court which had been directed against
+the Bishop of Winchester by refusing any grant of supply in Convocation
+till William of Wykeham took his seat in it. But in the prosecution of
+Wyclif they resolved to return blow for blow. In February 1377 he was
+summoned before Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his heretical
+propositions concerning the wealth of the Church.
+
+The Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge as really given to himself,
+and stood by Wyclif's side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But no
+trial took place. Fierce words passed between the nobles and the prelate:
+the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag Courtenay out of the
+church by the hair of his head; at last the London populace, to whom John
+of Gaunt was hateful, burst in to their Bishop's rescue, and Wyclif's life
+was saved with difficulty by the aid of the soldiery. But his boldness only
+grew with the danger. A Papal bull which was procured by the bishops,
+directing the University to condemn and arrest him, extorted from him a
+bold defiance. In a defence circulated widely through the kingdom and laid
+before Parliament, Wyclif broadly asserted that no man could be
+excommunicated by the Pope "unless he were first excommunicated by
+himself." He denied the right of the Church to exact or defend temporal
+privileges by spiritual censures, declared that a Church might justly be
+deprived by the king or lay lords of its property for defect of duty, and
+defended the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. It marks the
+temper of the time and the growing severance between the Church and the
+nation that, bold as the defiance was, it won the support of the people as
+of the Crown. When Wyclif appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth
+Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons a message from the Court forbade
+the primate to proceed and the Londoners broke in and dissolved the
+session.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Edward the Third]
+
+Meanwhile the Duke's unscrupulous tampering with elections had packed the
+Parliament of 1377 with his adherents. The work of the Good Parliament was
+undone, and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who had been
+impeached by their predecessors. The needs of the treasury were met by a
+novel form of taxation. To the earlier land-tax, to the tax on personality
+which dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which had grown
+into importance in the last two reigns, was now added a tax which reached
+every person in the realm, a poll-tax of a groat a head. In this tax were
+sown the seeds of future trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in March
+the Duke's power seemed completely secured. Hardly three months later it
+was wholly undone. In June Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age,
+robbed on his death-bed even of his rings by the mistress to whom he clung,
+and the accession of his grandson, Richard the Second, changed the whole
+face of affairs. The Duke withdrew from Court, and sought a reconciliation
+with the party opposed to him. The men of the Good Parliament surrounded
+the new king, and a Parliament which assembled in October took vigorously
+up its work. Peter de la Mare was released from prison and replaced in the
+chair of the House of Commons. The action of the Lower House indeed was as
+trenchant and comprehensive as that of the Good Parliament itself. In
+petition after petition the Commons demanded the confirmation of older
+rights and the removal of modern abuses. They complained of administrative
+wrongs such as the practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the
+oppressions of officers of the exchequer and of the forest, of the ill
+state of prisons, of the customs of "maintenance" and "livery" by which
+lords extended their protection to shoals of disorderly persons and
+overawed the courts by means of them. Amid ecclesiastical abuses they noted
+the state of the Church courts, and the neglect of the laws of Provisors.
+They demanded that the annual assembly of Parliament, which had now become
+customary, should be defined by law, and that bills once sanctioned by the
+Crown should be forthwith turned into statutes without further amendment or
+change on the part of the royal Council. With even greater boldness they
+laid hands on the administration itself. They not only demanded that the
+evil counsellors of the last reign should be removed, and that the
+treasurer of the subsidy on wool should account for its expenditure to the
+lords, but that the royal Council should be named in Parliament, and chosen
+from members of either estate of the realm. Though a similar request for
+the nomination of the officers of the royal household was refused, their
+main demand was granted. It was agreed that the great officers of state,
+the chancellor, treasurer, and barons of exchequer should be named by the
+lords in Parliament, and removed from their offices during the king's
+"tender years" only on the advice of the lords. The pressure of the war,
+which rendered the existing taxes insufficient, gave the House a fresh hold
+on the Crown. While granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and
+property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the war, and assigned
+two of their members, William Walworth and John Philpot, as a standing
+committee to regulate its expenditure. The successor of this Parliament in
+the following year demanded and obtained an account of the way in which the
+subsidy had been spent.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Discontent of the people]
+
+The minority of the king, who was but eleven years old at his accession,
+the weakness of the royal council amidst the strife of the baronial
+factions, above all the disasters of the war without and the growing
+anarchy within the realm itself, alone made possible this startling
+assumption of the executive power by the Houses. The shame of defeat abroad
+was being added to the misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran
+its disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a
+second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like
+its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between
+employers and employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament, drawn
+as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for
+the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown.
+The Good Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement of
+the Statute of Labourers as any of its predecessors. In spite of statutes,
+however, the market remained in the labourers' hands. The comfort of the
+worker rose with his wages. Men who had "no land to live on but their hands
+disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and called for fresh flesh or
+fish, fried or bake, and that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw."
+But there were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour class.
+There were seasons of the year during which employment for the floating
+mass of labour was hard to find. In the long interval between harvest-tide
+and harvest-tide work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the
+time. Some lines of William Langland give us the picture of a farm of the
+day. "I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but
+two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves
+of beans and bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no cooked
+meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage
+plants, and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw afield my dung
+while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till
+Lammas-tide [August], and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft." But
+it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn bade "Hunger
+go to sleep," and during the long spring and summer the free labourer and
+the "waster that will not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but
+the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale," was a source
+of social and political danger. "He grieveth him against God and grudgeth
+against Reason, and then curseth he the King and all his council after such
+law to allow labourers to grieve." Such a smouldering mass of discontent as
+this needed but a spark to burst into flame; and the spark was found in the
+imposition of fresh taxation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Poll-Tax]
+
+If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he was still the leading
+noble in the realm, and it is possible that dread of the encroachments of
+the last Parliament on the executive power drew after a time even the new
+advisers of the Crown closer to him. Whatever was the cause, he again came
+to the front. But the supplies voted in the past year were wasted in his
+hands. A fresh expedition against France under the Duke himself ended in
+failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home his brutal household
+was outraging public order by the murder of a knight who had incurred
+John's anger in the precincts of Westminster. So great was the resentment
+of the Londoners at this act that it became needful to summon Parliament
+elsewhere than to the capital; and in 1378 the Houses met at Gloucester.
+The Duke succeeded in bringing the Lords to refuse those conferences with
+the Commons which had given unity to the action of the late Parliament, but
+he was foiled in an attack on the clerical privilege of sanctuary and in
+the threats which his party still directed against Church property, while
+the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before them the accounts of the
+last subsidy and to appoint a commission to examine into the revenue of the
+Crown. Unhappily the financial policy of the preceding year was persisted
+in. The check before St. Malo had been somewhat redeemed by treaties with
+Charles of Evreux and the Duke of Britanny which secured to England the
+right of holding Cherbourg and Brest; but the cost of these treaties only
+swelled the expenses of the war. The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester
+proved insufficient for their purpose, and a Parliament in the spring of
+1379 renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form. But the proceeds of the tax
+proved miserably inadequate, and when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a
+return was again made to the old system of subsidies. But these failed in
+their turn; and at the close of the year the Parliament again fell back on
+a severer Poll-tax. One of the attractions of the new mode of taxation
+seems to have been that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves, paid in
+this way a larger share of the burthens of the state; but the chief ground
+for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its bringing within the net of the
+tax-gatherer a class which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free
+labourer, the village smith, the village tiler. But few courses could have
+been more dangerous. The Poll-tax not only brought the pressure of the war
+home to every household; it goaded into action precisely the class which
+was already seething with discontent. The strife between labour and capital
+was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in town. The landlords were
+claiming new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves as free to
+prove they were no villeins by law. The free labourer was struggling
+against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages. The wandering
+workman was being seized and branded as a vagrant. The abbey towns were
+struggling for freedom against the abbeys. The craftsmen within boroughs
+were carrying on the same strife against employer and craft-gild. And all
+this mass of discontent was being heightened and organized by agencies with
+which the Government could not cope. The poorer villeins and the free
+labourers had long since banded together in secret conspiracies which the
+wealthier villeins supported with money. The return of soldiers from the
+war threw over the land a host of broken men, skilled in arms, and ready to
+take part in any rising. The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from
+village to village and street to street, shared the passions of the class
+from which they sprang. Priests like Ball openly preached the doctrines of
+communism. And to these had been recently added a fresh agency, which could
+hardly fail to stir a new excitement. With the practical ability which
+marked his character, Wyclif set on foot about this time a body of poor
+preachers to supply, as he held, the place of those wealthier clergy who
+had lost their hold on the land. The coarse sermons, bare feet, and russet
+dress of these "Simple Priests" moved the laughter of rector and canon, but
+they proved a rapid and effective means of diffusing Wyclif's protests
+against the wealth and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can hardly doubt
+that in the general turmoil their denunciation of ecclesiastical wealth
+passed often into more general denunciations of the proprietary classes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John Ball]
+
+As the spring went by quaint rimes passed through the country, and served
+as a summons to revolt. "John Ball," ran one, "greeteth you all, and doth
+for to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, will and
+skill, God speed every dele." "Help truth," ran another, "and truth shall
+help you! Now reigneth pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and
+lechery withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy reigneth with
+treason, and sloth is take in great season. God do bote, for now is tyme!"
+We recognize Ball's hand in the yet more stirring missives of "Jack the
+Miller" and "Jack the Carter." "Jack Miller asketh help to turn his mill
+aright. He hath grounden small, small: the King's Son of Heaven he shall
+pay for all. Look thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the post
+stand with steadfastness. With right and with might, with skill and with
+will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before
+might, so goeth our mill aright." "Jack Carter," ran the companion missive,
+"prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well,
+and aye better and better: for at the even men heareth the day." "Falseness
+and guile," sang Jack Trewman, "have reigned too long, and truth hath been
+set under a lock, and falseness and guile reigneth in every stock. No man
+may come truth to, but if he sing 'si dedero.' True love is away that was
+so good, and clerks for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is
+time." In the rude jingle of these lines began for England the literature
+of political controversy: they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets
+of Milton and of Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the
+mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants: their longing for
+a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality
+of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the
+perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Peasant Rising]
+
+From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness spread to all
+England south of the Thames. But the grounds of discontent varied with
+every district. The actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford,
+where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in vengeance for
+a brutal outrage on his daughter. The county at once rose in arms.
+Canterbury, where "the whole town was of their mind," threw open its gates
+to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop's palace and dragged John
+Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter
+Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Malling to march upon London. Their
+grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was unknown in Kent. As
+the peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every lawyer who fell into
+their hands was put to death; "not till all these were killed would the
+land enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the
+houses of the stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the
+flames. But this action can hardly have been due to anything more than
+sympathy with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the same
+men when pilgrims from the north brought news that John of Gaunt was
+setting free his bondmen to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and
+King of England. Nor was their grievance a religious one. Lollardry can
+have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of
+Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent
+was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax and
+better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy,
+to take the king into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good
+to the Commons of the realm. The whole population joined the Kentishmen as
+they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear. The young
+king--he was but a boy of sixteen--addressed them from a boat on the river;
+but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to
+allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason"
+the great mass rushed on London. On the 13th of June its gates were flung
+open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John
+of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses
+of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the insurgents, as they
+proudly boasted, were "seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or
+robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off a silver vessel from the sack
+of the Savoy was flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of
+insurgents encamped at the same time to the east of the city. In Essex and
+the eastern counties the popular discontent was more social than political.
+The demands of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, that
+tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with, that "no acre of land
+which is held in bondage or villeinage be held at higher rate than
+fourpence a year," in other words for a money commutation of all villein
+services. Their rising had been even earlier than that of the Kentishmen.
+Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the poll-tax gathered crowds of
+peasants together, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal
+commissioners who were sent to repress the tumult were driven from the
+field, and the Essex men marched upon London on one side of the river as
+the Kentishmen marched on the other. The evening of the thirteenth, the day
+on which Tyler entered the city, saw them encamped without its walls at
+Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury and the northern heights were
+occupied by the men of Hertfordshire and the villeins of St. Albans, where
+a strife between abbot and town had been going on since the days of Edward
+the Second.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard the Second]
+
+The royal Council with the young king had taken refuge in the Tower, and
+their aim seems to have been to divide the forces of the insurgents. On the
+morning of the fourteenth therefore Richard rode from the Tower to Mile-end
+to meet the Essex men. "I am your King and Lord, good people," the boy
+began with a fearlessness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis,
+"what will you?" "We will that you free us for ever," shouted the peasants,
+"us and our lands; and that we be never named nor held for serfs!" "I grant
+it," replied Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at once to
+issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy welcomed the promise.
+Throughout the day more than thirty clerks were busied writing letters of
+pardon and emancipation, and with these the mass of the Essex men and the
+men of Hertfordshire withdrew quietly to their homes. But while the king
+was successful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen on the councillors he
+left behind him. Richard had hardly quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen
+who had spent the night within the city appeared at its gates. The general
+terror was shown ludicrously enough when they burst in and taking the
+panic-stricken knights of the royal household in rough horse-play by the
+beard promised to be their equals and good comrades in the days to come.
+But the horse-play changed into dreadful earnest when they found that
+Richard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery of Archbishop Sudbury
+and other ministers in the chapel changed their fury into a cry for blood.
+The Primate was dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded. The same vengeance
+was wreaked on the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner for the levy of the
+hated poll-tax, the merchant Richard Lyons who had been impeached by the
+Good Parliament. Richard meanwhile had ridden round the northern wall of
+the city to the Wardrobe near Blackfriars, and from this new refuge he
+opened his negotiations with the Kentish insurgents. Many of these
+dispersed at the news of the king's pledge to the men of Essex, but a body
+of thirty thousand still surrounded Wat Tyler when Richard on the morning
+of the fifteenth encountered that leader by a mere chance at Smithfield.
+Hot words passed between his train and the peasant chieftain who advanced
+to confer with the king, and a threat from Tyler brought on a brief
+struggle in which the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck him with
+his dagger to the ground. "Kill! kill!" shouted the crowd: "they have slain
+our captain!" But Richard faced the Kentishmen with the same cool courage
+with which he faced the men of Essex. "What need ye, my masters?" cried the
+boy-king as he rode boldly up to the front of the bowmen. "I am your
+Captain and your King; follow me!" The hopes of the peasants centred in the
+young sovereign; one aim of their rising had been to free him from the evil
+counsellors who, as they believed, abused his youth; and at his word they
+followed him with a touching loyalty and trust till he entered the Tower.
+His mother welcomed him within its walls with tears of joy. "Rejoice and
+praise God," Richard answered, "for I have recovered to-day my heritage
+which was lost and the realm of England!" But he was compelled to give the
+same pledge of freedom to the Kentishmen as at Mile-end, and it was only
+after receiving his letters of pardon and emancipation that the yeomen
+dispersed to their homes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The general revolt]
+
+The revolt indeed was far from being at an end. As the news of the rising
+ran through the country the discontent almost everywhere broke into flame.
+There were outbreaks in every shire south of the Thames as far westward as
+Devonshire. In the north tumults broke out at Beverley and Scarborough, and
+Yorkshire and Lancashire made ready to rise. The eastern counties were in
+one wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen burned the charters
+of the University and attacked the colleges. A body of peasants occupied
+St. Albans. In Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called John the Litster or Dyer,
+took the title of King of the Commons, and marching through the country at
+the head of a mass of peasants compelled the nobles whom he captured to act
+as his meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast. The
+story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what was going on in Suffolk. Ever since
+the accession of Edward the Third the townsmen and the villeins of their
+lands around had been at war with the abbot and his monks. The old and more
+oppressive servitude had long passed away, but the later abbots had set
+themselves against the policy of concession and conciliation which had
+brought about this advance towards freedom. The gates of the town were
+still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the
+wardship of all orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these
+the town could never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from
+Pope or King, interpreted cunningly by the wit of the new lawyer class, lay
+stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained other and hardly
+less formidable documents than these. Untroubled by the waste of war, the
+religious houses profited more than any other landowners by the general
+growth of wealth. They had become great proprietors, money-lenders to their
+tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had banished from their land.
+There were few townsmen of St. Edmund's who had not some bonds laid up in
+the abbey registry. In 1327 one band of debtors had a covenant lying there
+for the payment of five hundred marks and fifty casks of wine. Another
+company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors on a bond for ten
+thousand pounds. The new spirit of commercial activity joined with the
+troubles of the time to throw the whole community into the abbot's hands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Saint Edmundsbury]
+
+We can hardly wonder that riots, lawsuits, and royal commissions marked the
+relation of the town and abbey under the first two Edwards. Under the third
+came an open conflict. In 1327 the townsmen burst into the great house,
+drove the monks into the choir, and dragged them thence to the town prison.
+The abbey itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
+frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
+kitchen, all disappeared. The monks estimated their losses at ten thousand
+pounds. But the townsmen aimed at higher booty than this. The monks were
+brought back from prison to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of their
+registry, papal bulls and royal charters, deeds and bonds and mortgages,
+were laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob they were forced
+to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a gild to the town as well as
+of free release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
+house. But all control over town or land was gone. Through spring and
+summer no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the
+abbey did not dare to show their faces in the streets. News came at last
+that the abbot was in London, appealing for redress to the court, and the
+whole county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the
+thought of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law, poured
+into the streets of the town. From thirty-two of the neighbouring villages
+the priests marched at the head of their flocks as on a new crusade. The
+wild mass of men, women, and children, twenty thousand in all, as men
+guessed, rushed again on the abbey, and for four November days the work of
+destruction went on unhindered. When gate, stables, granaries, kitchen,
+infirmary, hostelry had gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to the
+granges and barns of the abbey farms. Their plunder shows what vast
+agricultural proprietors the monks had become. A thousand horses, a hundred
+and twenty plough-oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three
+hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges and barns
+burned to the ground. It was judged afterwards that sixty thousand pounds
+would hardly cover the loss.
+
+Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, the appeal of the
+abbot against this outrage was promptly heeded. A royal force quelled the
+riot, thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich;
+twenty-four of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village priests
+were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack on the abbey, and
+twenty were summarily hanged. Nearly two hundred persons remained under
+sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the
+King's Courts. At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage. Irritated by
+repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses
+seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and
+carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street lest
+his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping
+him off to Brabant. The Primate and the Pope levelled their
+excommunications against the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at
+last discovered and brought home it was probably with some pledge of the
+arrangement which followed in 1332. The enormous damages assessed by the
+royal justices were remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed,
+the prisoners were released. On the other hand the deeds which had been
+stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters
+which had been extorted from the monks were formally cancelled.
+
+
+[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury in 1381]
+
+The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed by their failure, and
+throughout the reign of Edward the Third the oppression against which they
+had risen went on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow of sheer
+force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the law. At
+Richard's accession Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was
+in charge of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his
+day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
+pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more
+illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton
+Belgabred. John was "industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry
+found their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers around
+him. "Faithfully he strove," says the monastic chronicler, "with the
+villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned
+specially as his "adversaries," but it was the rustics who were to show
+what a hate he had won. On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler's
+fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall
+broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly, but he was
+betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein
+and bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay naked in the open field
+while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's head on a
+lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached
+the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish,
+was already impaled; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery of
+their friendship set them side by side. Another head soon joined them. The
+abbey gates were burst open, and the cloister filled with a maddened crowd,
+howling for a new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of the barony. Few
+knew him as he stood among the group of trembling monks, but he courted
+death with a contemptuous courage. "I am the man you seek," he said,
+stepping forward; and in a minute, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son!
+Monk! Traitor!" he was swept to the gallows, and his head hacked from his
+shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back again to the abbey gate, and summoned
+the monks before them. They told them that now for a long time they had
+oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that
+in the sight of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and
+charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many which
+were demanded they swore they could not find. A compromise was at last
+patched up; and it was agreed that the charters should be surrendered till
+the future abbot should confirm the liberties of the town. Then, unable to
+do more, the crowd ebbed away.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Close of the rising]
+
+A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went on the same day at
+St. Albans. William Grindecobbe, the leader of its townsmen, returned with
+one of the charters of emancipation which Richard had granted after his
+interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, and breaking
+into the abbey precincts at the head of the burghers, forced the abbot to
+deliver up the charters which bound the town in bondage to his house. But a
+more striking proof of servitude than any charters could give remained in
+the millstones which after a long suit at law had been adjudged to the
+abbey and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness that no
+townsman might grind corn within the domain of the abbey save at the
+abbot's mill. Bursting into the cloister, the burghers now tore the
+mill-stones from the floor, and broke them into small pieces, "like blessed
+bread in church," which each might carry off to show something of the day
+when their freedom was won again. But it was hardly won when it was lost
+anew. The quiet withdrawal and dispersion of the peasant armies with their
+charters of emancipation gave courage to the nobles. Their panic passed
+away. The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on Litster's camp,
+and scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock. Richard with an
+army of forty thousand men marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and
+spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions. At Waltham he was met
+by the display of his own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men
+that "they were so far as freedom went the peers of their lords." But they
+were to learn the worth of a king's word. "Villeins you were," answered
+Richard, "and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide, and that not
+your old bondage, but a worse!" The stubborn resistance which he met showed
+that the temper of the people was not easily broken. The villagers of
+Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights
+before they were reduced to submission. It was only by threats of death
+that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders
+of the revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if
+he would persuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they
+had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade
+them take no thought for his trouble. "If I die," he said, "I shall die for
+the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life
+by such a martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have done had I been
+killed yesterday." But repression went pitilessly on, and through the
+summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said to have perished on the
+gallows or the field.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+RICHARD THE SECOND
+1381-1400
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Results of the Peasant Revolt]
+
+Terrible as were the measures of repression which followed the Peasant
+Revolt, and violent as was the passion of reaction which raged among the
+proprietary classes at its close, the end of the rising was in fact
+secured. The words of Grindecobbe ere his death were a prophecy which time
+fulfilled. Cancel charters of manumission as the council might, serfage was
+henceforth a doomed and perishing thing. The dread of another outbreak hung
+round the employer. The attempts to bring back obsolete services quietly
+died away. The old process of enfranchisement went quietly on. During the
+century and a half which followed the Peasant Revolt villeinage died out so
+rapidly that it became a rare and antiquated thing. The class of small
+freeholders sprang fast out of the wreck of it into numbers and importance.
+In twenty years more they were in fact recognized as the basis of our
+electoral system in every English county. The Labour Statutes proved as
+ineffective as of old in enchaining labour or reducing its price. A hundred
+years after the Black Death the wages of an English labourer was sufficient
+to purchase twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have
+been obtained for the wages paid under Edward the Third. The incidental
+descriptions of the life of the working classes which we find in Piers
+Ploughman show that this increase of social comfort had been going on even
+during the troubled period which preceded the outbreak of the peasants, and
+it went on faster after the revolt was over. But inevitable as such a
+progress was, every step of it was taken in the teeth of the wealthier
+classes. Their temper indeed at the close of the rising was that of men
+frenzied by panic and the taste of blood. They scouted all notion of
+concession. The stubborn will of the conquered was met by as stubborn a
+will in their conquerors. The royal Council showed its sense of the danger
+of a mere policy of resistance by submitting the question of
+enfranchisement to the Parliament which assembled in November 1381 with
+words which suggested a compromise. "If you desire to enfranchise and set
+at liberty the said serfs," ran the royal message, "by your common assent,
+as the King has been informed that some of you desire, he will consent to
+your prayer." But no thoughts of compromise influenced the landowners in
+their reply. The king's grant and letters, the Parliament answered with
+perfect truth, were legally null and void: their serfs were their goods,
+and the king could not take their goods from them but by their own consent.
+"And this consent," they ended, "we have never given and never will give,
+were we all to die in one day." Their temper indeed expressed itself in
+legislation which was a fit sequel to the Statutes of Labourers. They
+forbade the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town.
+They prayed the king to ordain "that no bondman nor bondwoman shall place
+their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance their children
+in the world by their going into the church." The new colleges which were
+being founded at the Universities at this moment closed their gates upon
+villeins.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Religious reaction]
+
+The panic which produced this frenzied reaction against all projects of
+social reform produced inevitably as frenzied a panic of reaction against
+all plans for religious reform. Wyclif had been supported by the
+Lancastrian party till the very eve of the Peasant Revolt. But with the
+rising his whole work seemed suddenly undone. The quarrel between the
+baronage and the Church on which his political action had as yet been
+grounded was hushed in the presence of a common danger. His "poor
+preachers" were looked upon as missionaries of socialism. The friars
+charged Wyclif with being a "sower of strife, who by his serpentlike
+instigation had set the serf against his lord," and though he tossed back
+the charge with disdain he had to bear a suspicion which was justified by
+the conduct of some of his followers. John Ball, who had figured in the
+front rank of the revolt, was falsely-named as one of his adherents, and
+was alleged to have denounced in his last hour the conspiracy of the
+"Wyclifites." Wyclif's most prominent scholar, Nicholas Herford, was said
+to have openly approved the brutal murder of Archbishop Sudbury. Whatever
+belief such charges might gain, it is certain that from this moment all
+plans for the reorganization of the Church were confounded in the general
+odium which attached to the projects of the peasant leaders, and that any
+hope of ecclesiastical reform at the hands of the baronage and the
+Parliament was at an end. But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived
+Wyclif of the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto
+cooperated, their alliance must have been dissolved by the new theological
+position which he had already taken up. Some months before the outbreak of
+the insurrection he had by one memorable step passed from the position of a
+reformer of the discipline and political relations of the Church to that of
+a protester against its cardinal beliefs. If there was one doctrine upon
+which the supremacy of the Mediæval Church rested, it was the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation. It was by his exclusive right to the performance of the
+miracle which was wrought in the mass that the lowliest priest was raised
+high above princes. With the formal denial of the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued in the spring of 1381 began that
+great movement of religious revolt which ended more than a century after in
+the establishment of religious freedom by severing the mass of the Teutonic
+peoples from the general body of the Catholic Church. The act was the
+bolder that he stood utterly alone. The University of Oxford, in which his
+influence had been hitherto all-powerful, at once condemned him. John of
+Gaunt enjoined him to be silent. Wyclif was presiding as Doctor of Divinity
+over some disputations in the schools of the Augustinian Canons when his
+academical condemnation was publicly read, but though startled for the
+moment he at once challenged Chancellor or doctor to disprove the
+conclusions at which he had arrived. The prohibition of the Duke of
+Lancaster he met by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession which
+closes proudly with the quiet words, "I believe that in the end the truth
+will conquer."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Rise of Lollardry]
+
+For the moment his courage dispelled the panic around him. The University
+responded to his appeal, and by displacing his opponents from office
+tacitly adopted his cause. But Wyclif no longer looked for support to the
+learned or wealthier classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He appealed,
+and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to
+England at large. With an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in
+the tongue of the people itself. The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse
+and involved argument which the great doctor had addressed to his academic
+hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which marks the
+wonderful genius of the man the schoolman was transformed into the
+pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif
+is the father of our later English prose. The rough, clear, homely English
+of his tracts, the speech of the ploughman and the trader of the day though
+coloured with the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary
+use as distinctly a creation of his own as the style in which he embodied
+it, the terse vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard
+antitheses which roused the dullest mind like a whip. Once fairly freed
+from the trammels of unquestioning belief, Wyclif's mind worked fast in its
+career of scepticism. Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the
+shrines of the saints, worship of their images, worship of the saints
+themselves, were successively denied. A formal appeal to the Bible as the
+one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of every
+instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the very
+groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. Nor were these daring denials
+confined to the small circle of scholars who still clung to him. The
+"Simple Priests" were active in the diffusion of their master's doctrines,
+and how rapid their progress must have been we may see from the
+panic-struck exaggerations of their opponents. A few years later they
+complained that the followers of Wyclif abounded everywhere and in all
+classes, among the baronage, in the cities, among the peasantry of the
+countryside, even in the monastic cell itself. "Every second man one meets
+is a Lollard."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Lollardry at Oxford]
+
+"Lollard," a word which probably means "idle babbler," was the nickname of
+scorn with which the orthodox Churchmen chose to insult their assailants.
+But this rapid increase changed their scorn into vigorous action. In 1382
+Courtenay, who had now become Archbishop, summoned a council at Blackfriars
+and formally submitted twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif's works.
+An earthquake in the midst of the proceedings terrified every prelate but
+the resolute Primate; the expulsion of ill humours from the earth, he said,
+was of good omen for the expulsion of ill humours from the Church; and the
+condemnation was pronounced. Then the Archbishop turned fiercely upon
+Oxford as the fount and centre of the new heresies. In an English sermon at
+St. Frideswide's Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of Wyclif's
+doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the Chancellor to silence him and his
+adherents on pain of being himself treated as a heretic. The Chancellor
+fell back on the liberties of the University, and appointed as preacher
+another Wyclifite, Repyngdon, who did not hesitate to style the Lollards
+"holy priests," and to affirm that they were protected by John of Gaunt.
+Party spirit meanwhile ran high among the students. The bulk of them sided
+with the Lollard leaders, and a Carmelite, Peter Stokes, who had procured
+the Archbishop's letters, cowered panic stricken in his chamber while the
+Chancellor, protected by an escort of a hundred townsmen, listened
+approvingly to Repyngdon's defiance. "I dare go no further," wrote the poor
+Friar to the Archbishop, "for fear of death"; but he mustered courage at
+last to descend into the schools where Repyngdon was now maintaining that
+the clerical order was "better when it was but nine years old than now that
+it has grown to a thousand years and more." The appearance however of
+scholars in arms again drove Stokes to fly in despair to Lambeth, while a
+new heretic in open Congregation maintained Wyclif's denial of
+Transubstantiation. "There is no idolatry," cried William James, "save in
+the Sacrament of the Altar." "You speak like a wise man," replied the
+Chancellor, Robert Rygge. Courtenay however was not the man to bear
+defiance tamely, and his summons to Lambeth wrested a submission from Rygge
+which was only accepted on his pledge to suppress the Lollardism of the
+University. "I dare not publish them, on fear of death," exclaimed the
+Chancellor when Courtenay handed him his letters of condemnation. "Then is
+your University an open _fautor_ of heretics," retorted the Primate, "if it
+suffers not the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within its bounds." The
+royal Council supported the Archbishop's injunction, but the publication of
+the decrees at once set Oxford on fire. The scholars threatened death
+against the friars, "crying that they wished to destroy the University."
+The masters suspended Henry Crump from teaching as a troubler of the public
+peace for calling the Lollards "heretics." The Crown however at last
+stepped in to Courtenay's aid, and a royal writ ordered the instant
+banishment of all favourers of Wyclif with the seizure and destruction of
+all Lollard books on pain of forfeiture of the University's privileges. The
+threat produced its effect. Herford and Repyngdon appealed in vain to John
+of Gaunt for protection; the Duke himself denounced them as heretics
+against the Sacrament of the Altar, and after much evasion they were forced
+to make a formal submission. Within Oxford itself the suppression of
+Lollardism was complete, but with the death of religious freedom all trace
+of intellectual life suddenly disappears. The century which followed the
+triumph of Courtenay is the most barren in its annals, nor was the sleep of
+the University broken till the advent of the New Learning restored to it
+some of the life and liberty which the Primate had so roughly trodden out.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wyclif's Bible]
+
+Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclif's position as the last
+of the great schoolmen than the reluctance of so bold a man as Courtenay
+even after his triumph over Oxford to take extreme measures against the
+head of Lollardry. Wyclif, though summoned, had made no appearance before
+the "Council of the Earthquake." "Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends
+to-day," was his bitter comment on the new union which proved to have
+sprung up between the prelates and the monastic orders who had so long been
+at variance with each other; "since they have made a heretic of Christ, it
+is an easy inference for them to count simple Christians heretics." He
+seems indeed to have been sick at the moment, but the announcement of the
+final sentence roused him to life again. He petitioned the king and
+Parliament that he might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines he had
+put forth, and turning with characteristic energy to the attack of his
+assailants, he asked that all religious vows might be suppressed, that
+tithes might be diverted to the maintenance of the poor and the clergy
+maintained by the free alms of their flocks, that the Statutes of Provisors
+and Præmunire might be enforced against the Papacy, that Churchmen might be
+declared incapable of secular offices, and imprisonment for excommunication
+cease. Finally in the teeth of the council's condemnation he demanded that
+the doctrine of the Eucharist which he advocated might be freely taught. If
+he appeared in the following year before the convocation at Oxford it was
+to perplex his opponents by a display of scholastic logic which permitted
+him to retire without any retractation of his sacramental heresy. For the
+time his opponents seemed satisfied with his expulsion from the University,
+but in his retirement at Lutterworth he was forging during these troubled
+years the great weapon which, wielded by other hands than his own, was to
+produce so terrible an effect on the triumphant hierarchy. An earlier
+translation of the Scriptures, in part of which he was aided by his scholar
+Herford, was being revised and brought to the second form which is better
+known as "Wyclif's Bible" when death drew near. The appeal of the prelates
+to Rome was answered at last by a Brief ordering him to appear at the Papal
+Court. His failing strength exhausted itself in a sarcastic reply which
+explained that his refusal to comply with the summons simply sprang from
+broken health. "I am always glad," ran the ironical answer, "to explain my
+faith to any one, and above all to the Bishop of Rome; for I take it for
+granted that if it be orthodox he will confirm it, if it be erroneous he
+will correct it. I assume too that as chief Vicar of Christ upon earth the
+Bishop of Rome is of all mortal men most bound to the law of Christ's
+Gospel, for among the disciples of Christ a majority is not reckoned by
+simply counting heads in the fashion of this world, but according to the
+imitation of Christ on either side. Now Christ during His life upon earth
+was of all men the poorest, casting from Him all worldly authority. I
+deduce from these premisses as a simple counsel of my own that the Pope
+should surrender all temporal authority to the civil power and advise his
+clergy to do the same." The boldness of his words sprang perhaps from a
+knowledge that his end was near. The terrible strain on energies enfeebled
+by age and study had at last brought its inevitable result, and a stroke of
+paralysis while Wyclif was hearing mass in his parish church of Lutterworth
+was followed on the next day by his death.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Lollard movement]
+
+The persecution of Courtenay deprived the religious reform of its more
+learned adherents and of the support of the Universities. Wyclif's death
+robbed it of its head at a moment when little had been done save a work of
+destruction. From that moment Lollardism ceased to be in any sense an
+organized movement and crumbled into a general spirit of revolt. All the
+religious and social discontent of the times floated instinctively to this
+new centre. The socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener
+spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the
+great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming zealot
+were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common
+resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical
+system. But it was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity
+of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society.
+Women as well as men became the preachers of the new sect. Lollardry had
+its own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from
+hand to hand; scurrilous ballads which revived the old attacks of "Golias"
+in the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy were sung at
+every corner. Nobles like the Earl of Salisbury and at a later time Sir
+John Oldcastle placed themselves openly at the head of the cause and threw
+open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred of
+the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard preacher who
+ventured to advocate the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul's. One
+of its mayors, John of Northampton, showed the influence of the new
+morality by the Puritan spirit in which he dealt with the morals of the
+city. Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of the clergy who
+connived for money at every kind of debauchery, he arrested the loose
+women, cut off their hair, and carted them through the streets as objects
+of public scorn. But the moral spirit of the new movement, though
+infinitely its grander side, was less dangerous to the Church than its open
+repudiation of the older doctrines and systems of Christendom. Out of the
+floating mass of opinion which bore the name of Lollardry one faith
+gradually evolved itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a
+source of religious truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work.
+Scripture, complains a canon of Leicester, "became a vulgar thing, and more
+open to lay folk and women that knew how to read than it is wont to be to
+clerks themselves." Consequences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from
+drawing were boldly drawn by his disciples. The Church was declared to have
+become apostate, its priesthood was denounced as no priesthood, its
+sacraments as idolatry.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Lollardry and the Church]
+
+It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by
+their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage
+and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its
+efforts to make persecution effective. At the moment of the Peasant Revolt
+Courtenay procured the enactment of a statute which commissioned the
+sheriffs to seize all persons convicted before the bishops of preaching
+heresy. But the statute was repealed in the next session, and the Commons
+added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest that they considered
+it "in nowise their interest to be more under the jurisdiction of the
+prelates or more bound by them than their ancestors had been in times
+past." Heresy indeed was still a felony by the common law, and if as yet we
+meet with no instances of the punishment of heretics by the fire it was
+because the threat of such a death was commonly followed by the recantation
+of the Lollard. But the restriction of each bishop's jurisdiction within
+the limits of his own diocese made it impossible to arrest the wandering
+preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil punishment--even if it had
+been sanctioned by public opinion--seems to have long fallen into
+desuetude. Experience proved to the prelates that few sheriffs would arrest
+on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no royal court
+would issue the writ "for the burning of a heretic" on a bishop's
+requisition. But powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purposes
+of repression, they were effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards
+into a bitter fanaticism. The heretics delighted in outraging the religious
+sense of their day. One Lollard gentleman took home the sacramental wafer
+and lunched on it with wine and oysters. Another flung some images of the
+saints into his cellar. The Lollard preachers stirred up riots by the
+virulence of their preaching against the friars. But they directed even
+fiercer invectives against the wealth and secularity of the great
+Churchmen. In a formal petition which was laid before Parliament in 1395
+they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open
+profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and
+image-worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of
+opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be
+declared unchristian and that trades such as those of the goldsmith or the
+armourer, which were contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished
+from the realm. They contended (and it is remarkable that a Parliament of
+the next reign adopted the statement) that from the superfluous revenues of
+the Church, if once they were applied to purposes of general utility, the
+king might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six
+thousand squires, besides endowing a hundred hospitals for the relief of
+the poor.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Disasters of the War]
+
+The distress of the landowners, the general disorganization of the country,
+in every part of which bands of marauders were openly defying the law, the
+panic of the Church and of society at large as the projects of the Lollards
+shaped themselves into more daring and revolutionary forms, added a fresh
+keenness to the national discontent at the languid and inefficient
+prosecution of the war. The junction of the French and Spanish fleets had
+made them masters of the seas, and what fragments were left of Guienne lay
+at their mercy. The royal Council strove to detach the House of Luxemburg
+from, the French alliance by winning for Richard the hand of Anne, a
+daughter of the late Emperor Charles the Fourth who had fled at Crécy, and
+sister of King Wenzel of Bohemia who was now king of the Romans. But the
+marriage remained without political result, save that the Lollard books
+which were sent into their native country by the Bohemian servants of the
+new queen stirred the preaching of John Huss and the Hussite wars. Nor was
+English policy more successful in Flanders. Under Philip van Arteveldt, the
+son of the leader of 1345, the Flemish towns again sought the friendship of
+England against France, but at the close of 1382 the towns were defeated
+and their leader slain in the great French victory of Rosbecque. An
+expedition to Flanders in the following year under the warlike Bishop of
+Norwich turned out a mere plunder-raid and ended in utter failure. A short
+truce only gave France the leisure to prepare a counter-blow by the
+despatch of a small but well-equipped force under John de Vienne to
+Scotland in 1385. Thirty thousand Scots joined in the advance of this force
+over the border: and though northern England rose with a desperate effort
+and an English army penetrated as far as Edinburgh in the hope of bringing
+the foe to battle, it was forced to fall back without an encounter.
+Meanwhile France dealt a more terrible blow in the reduction of Ghent. The
+one remaining market for English commerce was thus closed up, while the
+forces which should have been employed in saving Ghent and in the
+protection of the English shores against the threat of invasion were
+squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone the
+Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary crown which he claimed in his
+wife's right. The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned the
+hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a new sphere of activity
+abroad. To drive him from the realm had been from the close of the Peasant
+Revolt the steady purpose of the councillors who now surrounded the young
+king, of his favourite Robert de Vere and his Chancellor Michael de la
+Pole, who was raised in 1385 to the Earldom of Suffolk. The Duke's friends
+were expelled from office; John of Northampton, the head of his adherents
+among the Commons, was thrown into prison; the Duke himself was charged
+with treason and threatened with arrest. In 1386 John of Gaunt abandoned
+the struggle and sailed for Spain.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Temper of the Court]
+
+Richard himself took part in these measures against the Duke. He was now
+twenty, handsome and golden-haired, with a temper capable of great actions
+and sudden bursts of energy but indolent and unequal. The conception of
+kingship in which he had been reared made him regard the constitutional
+advance which had gone on during the war as an invasion of the rights of
+his Crown. He looked on the nomination of the royal Council and the great
+officers of state by the two Houses or the supervision of the royal
+expenditure by the Commons as Infringements on the prerogative which only
+the pressure of the war and the weakness of a minority had forced the Crown
+to bow to. The judgement of his councillors was one with that of the king.
+Vere was no mere royal favourite; he was a great noble and of ancient
+lineage. Michael de la Pole was a man of large fortune and an old servant
+of the Crown; he had taken part in the war for thirty years, and had been
+admiral and captain of Calais. But neither were men to counsel the young
+king wisely in his effort to obtain independence at once of Parliament and
+of the great nobles. His first aim had been to break the pressure of the
+royal house itself, and in his encounter with John of Gaunt he had proved
+successful. But the departure of the Duke of Lancaster only called to the
+front his brother and his son. Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester,
+had inherited much of the lands and the influence of the old house of
+Bohun. Round Henry, Earl of Derby, the son of John of Gaunt by Blanche of
+Lancaster, the old Lancastrian party of constitutional opposition was once
+more forming itself. The favour shown to the followers of Wyclif at the
+Court threw on the side of this new opposition the bulk of the bishops and
+Churchmen. Richard himself showed no sympathy with the Lollards, but the
+action of her Bohemian servants shows the tendencies of his queen. Three
+members of the royal Council were patrons of the Lollards, and the Earl of
+Salisbury, a favourite with the king, was their avowed head. The Commons
+displayed no hostility to the Lollards nor any zeal for the Church; but the
+lukewarm prosecution of the war, the profuse expenditure of the Court, and
+above all the manifest will of the king to free himself from Parliamentary
+control, estranged the Lower House. Richard's haughty words told their own
+tale. When the Parliament of 1385 called for an enquiry every year into the
+royal household, the king replied he would enquire when he pleased. When it
+prayed to know the names of the officers of state, he answered that he
+would change them at his will.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Lords Appellant]
+
+The burthen of such answers and of the policy they revealed fell on the
+royal councillors, and the departure of John of Gaunt forced the new
+opposition into vigorous action. The Parliament of 1386 called for the
+removal of Suffolk. Richard replied that he would not for such a prayer
+dismiss a turnspit of his kitchen. The Duke of Gloucester and Bishop
+Arundel of Ely were sent by the Houses as their envoys, and warned the king
+that should a ruler refuse to govern with the advice of his lords and by
+mad counsels work out his private purposes it was lawful to depose him. The
+threat secured Suffolk's removal; he was impeached for corruption and
+maladministration, and condemned to forfeiture and imprisonment. It was
+only by submitting to the nomination of a Continual Council, with the Duke
+of Gloucester at its head, that Richard could obtain a grant of subsidies.
+But the Houses were no sooner broken up than Suffolk was released, and in
+1387 the young king rode through the country calling on the sheriffs to
+raise men against the barons, and bidding them suffer no knight of the
+shire to be returned for the next Parliament "save one whom the King and
+his Council chose." The general ill-will foiled both his efforts: and he
+was forced to take refuge in an opinion of five of the judges that the
+Continual Council was unlawful, the sentence on Suffolk erroneous, and that
+the Lords and Commons had no power to remove a king's servant. Gloucester
+answered the challenge by taking up arms, and a general refusal to fight
+for the king forced Richard once more to yield. A terrible vengeance was
+taken on his supporters in the recent schemes. In the Parliament of 1388
+Gloucester, with the four Earls of Derby, Arundel, Warwick, and Nottingham,
+appealed on a charge of high treason Suffolk and De Vere, the Archbishop of
+York, the Chief Justice Tresilian, and Sir Nicholas Bramber. The first two
+fled, Suffolk to France, De Vere after a skirmish at Radcot Bridge to
+Ireland; but the Archbishop was deprived of his see, Bramber beheaded, and
+Tresilian hanged. The five judges were banished, and Sir Simon Burley with
+three other members of the royal household sent to the block.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's Rule]
+
+At the prayer of the "Wonderful Parliament," as some called this assembly,
+or as others with more justice "The Merciless Parliament," it was provided
+that all officers of state should henceforth be named in Parliament or by
+the Continual Council. Gloucester remained at the head of the latter body,
+but his power lasted hardly a year. In May 1389 Richard found himself
+strong enough to break down the government by a word. Entering the Council
+he suddenly asked his uncle how old he was. "Your highness," answered
+Gloucester, "is in your twenty-fourth year!" "Then I am old enough to
+manage my own affairs," said Richard coolly; "I have been longer under
+guardianship than any ward in my realm. I thank you for your past services,
+my lords, but I need them no more." The resolution was welcomed by the
+whole country; and Richard justified the country's hopes by wielding his
+new power with singular wisdom and success. He refused to recall De Vere or
+the five judges. The intercession of John of Gaunt on his return from Spain
+brought about a full reconciliation with the Lords Appellant. A truce was
+concluded with France, and its renewal year after year enabled the king to
+lighten the burthen of taxation. Richard announced his purpose to govern by
+advice of Parliament; he soon restored the Lords Appellant to his Council,
+and committed the chief offices of state to great Churchmen like Wykeham
+and Arundel. A series of statutes showed the activity of the Houses. A
+Statute of Provisors which re-enacted those of Edward the Third was passed
+in 1390; the Statute of Præmunire, which punished the obtaining of bulls or
+other instruments from Rome with forfeiture, in 1393. The lords were
+bridled anew by a Statute of Maintenance, which forbade their violently
+supporting other men's causes in courts of justice, and giving "livery" to
+a host of retainers. The Statute of Uses in 1391, which rendered illegal
+the devices which had been invented to frustrate that of Mortmain, showed
+the same resolve to deal firmly with the Church. A reform of the staple and
+other mercantile enactments proved the king's care for trade. Throughout
+the legislation of these eight years we see the same tone of coolness and
+moderation. Eager as he was to win the good-will of the Parliament and the
+Church, Richard refused to bow to the panic of the landowners or to second
+the persecution of the priesthood. The demands of the Parliament that
+education should be denied to the sons of villeins was refused. Lollardry
+as a social danger was held firmly at bay, and in 1387 the king ordered
+Lollard books to be seized and brought before the Council. But the royal
+officers showed little zeal in aiding the bishops to seize or punish the
+heretical teachers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: French and English]
+
+It was in the period of peace which was won for the country by the wisdom
+and decision of its young king that England listened to the voice of her
+first great singer. The work of Chaucer marks the final settlement of the
+English tongue. The close of the great movement towards national unity
+which had been going on ever since the Conquest was shown in the middle of
+the fourteenth century by the disuse, even amongst the nobler classes, of
+the French tongue. In spite of the efforts of the grammar schools and of
+the strength of fashion English won its way throughout the reign of Edward
+the Third to its final triumph in that of his grandson. It was ordered to
+be used in courts of law in 1362 "because the French tongue is much
+unknown," and in the following year it was employed by the Chancellor in
+opening Parliament. Bishops began to preach in English, and the English
+tracts of Wyclif made it once more a literary tongue. We see the general
+advance in two passages from writers of Edward's and Richard's reigns.
+"Children in school," says Higden, a writer of the first period, "against
+the usage and manner of all other nations be compelled for to leave their
+own language and for to construe their lessons and their things in French,
+and so they have since the Normans first came into England. Also
+gentlemen's children be taught for to speak French from the time that they
+be rocked in their cradle, and know how to speak and play with a child's
+toy; and uplandish (or country) men will liken themselves to gentlemen, and
+strive with, great busyness to speak French for to be more told of." "This
+manner," adds John of Trevisa, Higden's translator in Richard's time, "was
+much used before the first murrain (the Black Death of 1349), and is since
+somewhat changed. For John Cornwal, a master of grammar, changed the lore
+in grammar school and construing of French into English; and Richard
+Pencrych learned this manner of teaching of him, as other men did of
+Pencrych. So that now, the year of our Lord 1385 and of the second King
+Richard after the Conquest nine, in all the grammar schools of England
+children leaveth French, and construeth and learneth in English. Also
+gentlemen have now much left for to teach their children French."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Chaucer]
+
+This drift towards a general use of the national tongue told powerfully on
+literature. The influence of the French romances everywhere tended to make
+French the one literary language at the opening of the fourteenth century,
+and in England this influence had been backed by the French tone of the
+court of Henry the Third and the three Edwards. But at the close of the
+reign of Edward the Third the long French romances needed to be translated
+even for knightly hearers. "Let clerks indite in Latin," says the author of
+the "Testament of Love," "and let Frenchmen in their French also indite
+their quaint terms, for it is kindly to their mouths; and let us show our
+fantasies in such wordes as we learned of our mother's tongue." But the new
+national life afforded nobler materials than "fantasies" now for English
+literature. With the completion of the work of national unity had come the
+completion of the work of national freedom. The vigour of English life
+showed itself in the wide extension of commerce, in the progress of the
+towns, and the upgrowth of a free yeomanry. It gave even nobler signs of
+its activity in the spirit of national independence and moral earnestness
+which awoke at the call of Wyclif. New forces of thought and feeling which
+were destined to tell on every age of our later history broke their way
+through the crust of feudalism in the socialist revolt of the Lollards, and
+a sudden burst of military glory threw its glamour over the age of Crécy
+and Poitiers. It is this new gladness of a great people which utters itself
+in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was born about 1340, the son of a
+London vintner who lived in Thames Street; and it was in London that the
+bulk of his life was spent. His family, though not noble, seems to have
+been of some importance, for from the opening of his career we find Chaucer
+in close connexion with the Court. At sixteen he was made page to the wife
+of Lionel of Clarence; at nineteen he first bore arms in the campaign of
+1359. But he was luckless enough to be made prisoner; and from the time of
+his release after the treaty of Brétigny he took no further share in the
+military enterprises of his time. He seems again to have returned to
+service about the Court, and it was now that his first poems made their
+appearance, the "Compleynte to Pity" in 1368, and in 1369 the "Death of
+Blanch the Duchesse," the wife of John of Gaunt who from this time at least
+may be looked upon as his patron. It may have been to John's influence that
+he owed his employment in seven diplomatic missions which were probably
+connected with the financial straits of the Crown. Three of these, in 1372,
+1374, and 1378, carried him to Italy. He visited Genoa and the brilliant
+court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the memory of Dante, the
+"great master" whom he commemorates so reverently in his verse, was still
+living, he may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of
+Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from the lips of
+Petrarca.
+
+
+[Sidenote: His Early Poems]
+
+It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer whom we know. From
+that hour his work stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic literature
+from the heart of which it sprang. The long French romances were the
+product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent curiosity, of a fanciful
+and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the great passions which gave life to the
+Middle Ages, that of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into the conceits
+of Mariolatry, that of war into the extravagances of Chivalry. Love indeed
+remained; it was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a
+love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of
+sensuous enjoyment--a plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to
+reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved
+through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the
+lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay
+avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life: life
+was too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of
+interest and gaiety and chat. It was an age of talk: "mirth is none," says
+Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur
+aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances,
+his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and
+fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about
+their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the
+vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world.
+
+It was with this literature that Chaucer had till now been familiar, and it
+was this which he followed in his earlier work. But from the time of his
+visits to Milan and Genoa his sympathies drew him not to the dying verse of
+France but to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry in Italy. Dante's eagle
+looks at him from the sun. "Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him
+one "whose rethorique sweete enlumyned al Itail of poetrie." The "Troilus"
+which he produced about 1382 is an enlarged English version of Boccaccio's
+"Filostrato"; the Knight's Tale, whose first draft is of the same period,
+bears slight traces of his Teseide. It was indeed the "Decameron" which
+suggested the very form of the "Canterbury Tales," the earliest of which,
+such as those of the Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress, the
+Franklin, and the Squire, may probably be referred like the Parliament of
+Foules and the House of Fame to this time of Chaucer's life. But even while
+changing, as it were, the front of English poetry Chaucer preserves his own
+distinct personality. If he quizzes in the rime of Sir Thopaz the wearisome
+idleness of the French romance he retains all that was worth retaining of
+the French temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its lightness and
+brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its gaiety and good humour, its
+critical coolness and self-control. The French wit quickens in him more
+than in any English writer the sturdy sense and shrewdness of our national
+disposition, corrects its extravagance, and relieves its somewhat ponderous
+morality. If on the other hand he echoes the joyous carelessness of the
+Italian tale, he tempers it with the English seriousness. As he follows
+Boccaccio all his changes are on the side of purity; and when the Troilus
+of the Florentine ends with the old sneer at the changeableness of woman
+Chaucer bids us "look Godward," and dwells on the unchangeableness of
+Heaven.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Canterbury Tales]
+
+The genius of Chaucer however was neither French nor Italian, whatever
+element it might borrow from either literature, but English to the core;
+and from the year 1384 all trace of foreign influence dies away. Chaucer
+had now reached the climax of his poetic power. He was a busy, practical
+worker, Comptroller of the Customs in 1374, of the Petty Customs in 1382, a
+member of the Commons in the Parliament of 1386. The fall of the Duke of
+Lancaster from power may have deprived him of employment for a time, but
+from 1389 to 1391 he was Clerk of the Royal Works, busy with repairs and
+building at Westminster, Windsor, and the Tower. His air indeed was that of
+a student rather than of a man of the world. A single portrait has
+preserved for us his forked beard, his dark-coloured dress, the knife and
+pen-case at his girdle, and we may supplement this portrait by a few vivid
+touches of his own. The sly, elvish face, the quick walk, the plump figure
+and portly waist were those of a genial and humorous man; but men jested at
+his silence, his abstraction, his love of study. "Thou lookest as thou
+wouldest find an hare," laughs the host, "and ever on the ground I see thee
+stare." He heard little of his neighbours' talk when office work in Thames
+Street was over. "Thou goest home to thy own house anon, and also dumb as
+any stone thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy look, and
+livest thus as an heremite, although," he adds slyly, "thy abstinence is
+lite," or little. But of this seeming abstraction from the world about him
+there is not a trace in Chaucer's verse. We see there how keen his
+observation was, how vivid and intense his sympathy with nature and the men
+among whom he moved. "Farewell, my book," he cried as spring came after
+winter and the lark's song roused him at dawn to spend hours gazing alone
+on the daisy whose beauty he sang. But field and stream and flower and
+bird, much as he loved them, were less to him than man. No poetry was over
+more human than Chaucer's, none ever came more frankly and genially home to
+men than his "Canterbury Tales."
+
+It was the continuation and revision of this work which mainly occupied him
+during the years from 1384 to 1391. Its best stories, those of the Miller,
+the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun,
+the Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as well as the
+Prologue. The framework which Chaucer chose--that of a pilgrimage from
+London to Canterbury--not only enabled him to string these tales together,
+but lent itself admirably to the peculiar characteristics of his poetic
+temper, his dramatic versatility and the universality of his sympathy. His
+tales cover the whole field of mediæval poetry; the legend of the priest,
+the knightly romance, the wonder-tale of the traveller, the broad humour of
+the fabliau, allegory and apologue, all are there. He finds a yet wider
+scope for his genius in the persons who tell these stories, the thirty
+pilgrims who start in the May morning from the Tabard in Southwark--thirty
+distinct figures, representatives of every class of English society from
+the noble to the ploughman. We see the "verray perfight gentil knight" in
+cassock and coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as
+the May morning, and behind them the brown-faced yeoman in his coat and
+hood of green with a mighty bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics light
+up for us the mediaeval church--the brawny hunt-loving monk, whose bridle
+jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-bell--the wanton friar, first among
+the beggars and harpers of the country-side--the poor parson, threadbare,
+learned, and devout, ("Christ's lore and his apostles twelve he taught, and
+first he followed it himself")--the summoner with his fiery face--the
+pardoner with his wallet "bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"--the
+lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth,
+and "Amor vincit omnia" graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the
+portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the
+pestilence--the busy serjeant-of-law, "that ever seemed busier than he
+was"--the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his love of books and short
+sharp sentences that disguise a latent tenderness which breaks out at last
+in the story of Griseldis. Around them crowd types of English industry: the
+merchant; the franklin in whose house "it snowed of meat and drink"; the
+sailor fresh from frays in the Channel; the buxom wife of Bath; the
+broad-shouldered miller; the haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer,
+tapestry-maker, each in the livery of his craft; and last the honest
+ploughman who would dyke and delve for the poor without hire. It is the
+first time in English poetry that we are brought face to face not with
+characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, but with living and
+breathing men, men distinct in temper and sentiment as in face or costume
+or mode of speech; and with this distinctness of each maintained throughout
+the story by a thousand shades of expression and action. It is the first
+time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each
+character but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each
+tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it but fuses all into a
+poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity,
+which surrounds us in the "Canterbury Tales." In some of the stories
+indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the
+tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a
+whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action.
+Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel--a
+training not of books but of life. And it is life that he loves--the
+delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its
+tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of
+the miller and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart, this wide
+tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as none but Shakspere
+has ever reflected him, and to do this with a pathos, a shrewd sense and
+kindly humour, a freshness and joyousness of feeling, that even Shakspere
+has not surpassed.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The French Marriage]
+
+The last ten years of Chaucer's life saw a few more tales added to the
+Pilgrimage and a few poems to his work; but his power was lessening, and in
+1400 he rested from his labours in his last home, a house in the garden of
+St. Mary's Chapel at Westminster. His body rests within the Abbey church.
+It was strange that such a voice should have awakened no echo in the
+singers that follow, but the first burst of English song died as suddenly
+in Chaucer as the hope and glory of his age. He died indeed at the moment
+of a revolution which was the prelude to years of national discord and
+national suffering. Whatever may have been the grounds of his action, the
+rule of Richard the Second after his assumption of power had shown his
+capacity for self-restraint. Parted by his own will from the counsellors of
+his youth, calling to his service the Lords Appellant, reconciled alike
+with the baronage and the Parliament, the young king promised to be among
+the noblest and wisest rulers that England had seen. But the violent and
+haughty temper which underlay this self-command showed itself from time to
+time. The Earl of Arundel and his brother the bishop stood in the front
+rank of the party which had coerced Richard in his early days; their
+influence was great in the new government. But a strife between the Earl
+and John of Gaunt revived the king's resentment at the past action of this
+house; and at the funeral of Anne of Bohemia in 1394 a fancied slight
+roused Richard to a burst of passion. He struck the Earl so violently that
+the blow drew blood. But the quarrel was patched up, and the reconciliation
+was followed by the elevation of Bishop Arundel to the vacant Primacy in
+1396. In the preceding year Richard had crossed to Ireland and in a short
+autumn campaign reduced its native chiefs again to submission. Fears of
+Lollard disturbances soon recalled him, but these died at the king's
+presence, and Richard was able to devote himself to the negotiation of a
+marriage which was to be the turning-point of his reign. His policy
+throughout the recent years had been a policy of peace. It was war which
+rendered the Crown helpless before the Parliament, and peace was needful if
+the work of constant progress was not to be undone. But the short truces,
+renewed from time to time, which he had as yet secured were insufficient
+for this purpose, for so long as war might break out in the coming year the
+king hands were tied. The impossibility of renouncing the claim to the
+French crown indeed made a formal peace impossible, but its ends might be
+secured by a lengthened truce, and it was with a view to this that Richard
+in 1396 wedded Isabella, the daughter of Charles the Sixth of France. The
+bride was a mere child, but she brought with her a renewal of the truce for
+five-and-twenty years.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Change of Richard's temper]
+
+The match was hardly concluded when the veil under which Richard had
+shrouded his real temper began to be dropped. His craving for absolute
+power, such as he witnessed in the Court of France, was probably
+intensified from this moment by a mental disturbance which gathered
+strength as the months went on. As if to preclude any revival of the war
+Richard had surrendered Cherbourg to the king of Navarre and now gave back
+Brest to the Duke of Britanny. He was said to have pledged himself at his
+wedding to restore Calais to the king of France. But once freed from all
+danger of such a struggle the whole character of his rule seemed to change.
+His court became as crowded and profuse as his grandfather's. Money was
+recklessly borrowed and as recklessly squandered. The king's pride became
+insane, and it was fed with dreams of winning the Imperial crown through
+the deposition of Wenzel of Bohemia. The councillors with whom he had acted
+since his resumption of authority saw themselves powerless. John of Gaunt
+indeed still retained influence over the king. It was the support of the
+Duke of Lancaster after his return from his Spanish campaign which had
+enabled Richard to hold in check the Duke of Gloucester and the party that
+he led; and the anxiety of the young king to retain this support was seen
+in his grant of Aquitaine to his uncle, and in the legitimation of the
+Beauforts, John's children by a mistress, Catherine Swinford, whom he
+married after the death of his second wife. The friendship of the Duke
+brought with it the adhesion of one even more important, his son Henry, the
+Earl of Derby. As heir through his mother, Blanche of Lancaster, to the
+estates and influence of the Lancastrian house, Henry was the natural head
+of a constitutional opposition, and his weight was increased by a marriage
+with the heiress of the house of Bohun. He had taken a prominent part in
+the overthrow of Suffolk and De Vere, and on the king's resumption of power
+he had prudently withdrawn from the realm on a vow of Crusade, had touched
+at Barbary, visited the Holy Sepulchre, and in 1390 sailed for Dantzig and
+taken part in a campaign against the heathen Prussians with the Teutonic
+Knights. Since his return he had silently followed in his father's track.
+But the counsels of John of Gaunt were hardly wiser than of old; Arundel
+had already denounced his influence as a hurtful one; and in the events
+which were now to hurry quickly on he seems to have gone hand in hand with
+the king.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's Tyranny]
+
+A new uneasiness was seen in the Parliament of 1397, and the Commons prayed
+for a redress of the profusion of the Court. Richard at once seized on the
+opportunity for a struggle. He declared himself grieved that his subjects
+should "take on themselves any ordinance or governance of the person of the
+King or his hostel or of any persons of estate whom he might be pleased to
+have in his company." The Commons were at once overawed; they owned that
+the cognizance of such matters belonged wholly to the king, and gave up to
+the Duke of Lancaster the name of the member, Sir Thomas Haxey, who had
+brought forward this article of their prayer. The lords pronounced him a
+traitor, and his life was only saved by the fact that he was a clergyman
+and by the interposition of Archbishop Arundel. The Earl of Arundel and the
+Duke of Gloucester at once withdrew from Court. They stood almost alone,
+for of the royal house the Dukes of Lancaster and York with their sons the
+Earls of Derby and Rutland were now with the king, and the old coadjutor of
+Gloucester, the Earl of Nottingham, was in high favour with him. The Earl
+of Warwick alone joined them, and he was included in a charge of conspiracy
+which was followed by the arrest of the three. A fresh Parliament in
+September was packed with royal partizans, and Richard moved boldly to his
+end. The pardons of the Lords Appellant were revoked. Archbishop Arundel
+was impeached and banished from the realm, he was transferred by the Pope
+to the See of St. Andrews, and the Primacy given to Roger Walden. The Earl
+of Arundel, accused before the Peers under John of Gaunt as High Steward,
+was condemned and executed in a single day. Warwick, who owned the truth of
+the charge, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. The Duke of Gloucester
+was saved from a trial by a sudden death in his prison at Calais. A new
+Parliament at Shrewsbury in the opening of 1398 completed the king's work.
+In three days it declared null the proceedings of the Parliament of 1388,
+granted to the king a subsidy on wool and leather for his life, and
+delegated its authority to a standing committee of eighteen members from
+both Houses with power to continue their sittings even after the
+dissolution of the Parliament and to "examine and determine all matters and
+subjects which had been moved in the presence of the king with all the
+dependencies thereof."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry of Lancaster]
+
+In a single year the whole colour of Richard's government had changed. He
+had revenged himself on the men who had once held him down, and his revenge
+was hardly taken before he disclosed a plan of absolute government. He had
+used the Parliament to strike down the Primate as well as the greatest
+nobles of the realm and to give him a revenue for life which enabled him to
+get rid of Parliament itself, for the Permanent Committee which it named
+were men devoted, as Richard held, to his cause. John of Gaunt was at its
+head, and the rest of its lords were those who had backed the king in his
+blow at Gloucester and the Arundels. Two however were excluded. In the
+general distribution of rewards which followed Gloucester's overthrow the
+Earl of Derby had been made Duke of Hereford, the Earl of Nottingham Duke
+of Norfolk. But at the close of 1397 the two Dukes charged each other with
+treasonable talk as they rode between Brentford and London, and the
+Permanent Committee ordered the matter to be settled by a single combat. In
+September 1398 the Dukes entered the lists; but Richard forbade the duel,
+sentenced the Duke of Norfolk to banishment for life, and Henry of
+Lancaster to exile for ten years. As Henry left London the streets were
+crowded with people weeping for his fate; some followed him even to the
+coast. But his withdrawal removed the last check on Richard's despotism. He
+forced from every tenant of the Crown an oath to recognize the acts of his
+Committee as valid, and to oppose any attempts to alter or revoke them.
+Forced loans, the sale of charters of pardon to Gloucester's adherents, the
+outlawry of seven counties at once on the plea that they had supported his
+enemies and must purchase pardon, a reckless interference with the course
+of justice, roused into new life the old discontent. Even this might have
+been defied had not Richard set an able and unscrupulous leader at its
+head. Leave had been given to Henry of Lancaster to receive his father's
+inheritance on the death of John of Gaunt, in February 1399. But an
+ordinance of the Continual Committee annulled this permission and Richard
+seized the Lancastrian estates. Archbishop Arundel at once saw the chance
+of dealing blow for blow. He hastened to Paris and pressed the Duke to
+return to England, telling him how all men there looked for it, "especially
+the Londoners, who loved him a hundred times more than they did the king."
+For a while Henry remained buried in thought, "leaning on a window
+overlooking a garden"; but Arundel's pressure at last prevailed, he made
+his way secretly to Britanny, and with fifteen knights set sail from
+Vannes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Ireland and the Pale]
+
+What had really decided him was the opportunity offered by Richard's
+absence from the realm. From the opening of his reign the king's attention
+had been constantly drawn to his dependent lordship of Ireland. More than
+two hundred years had passed away since the troubles which followed the
+murder of Archbishop Thomas forced Henry the Second to leave his work of
+conquest unfinished, and the opportunity for a complete reduction of the
+island which had been lost then had never returned. When Henry quitted
+Ireland indeed Leinster was wholly in English hands, Connaught bowed to a
+nominal acknowledgement of the English overlordship, and for a while the
+work of conquest seemed to go steadily on. John de Courcy penetrated into
+Ulster and established himself at Downpatrick; and Henry planned the
+establishment of his youngest son, John, as Lord of Ireland. But the levity
+of the young prince, who mocked the rude dresses of the native chieftains
+and plucked them in insult by the beard, soon forced his father to recall
+him; and in the continental struggle which soon opened on the Angevin
+kings, as in the constitutional struggle within England itself which
+followed it, all serious purpose of completing the conquest of Ireland was
+forgotten. Nothing indeed but the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes
+enabled the adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford,
+Waterford, and Cork, which formed what was thenceforth known as "the
+English Pale." In all the history of Ireland no event has proved more
+disastrous than this half-finished conquest. Had the Irish driven their
+invaders into the sea, or the English succeeded in the complete reduction
+of the island, the misery of its after ages might have been avoided. A
+struggle such as that in which Scotland drove out its conquerors might have
+produced a spirit of patriotism and national union which would have formed
+a people out of the mass of warring clans. A conquest such as that in which
+the Normans made England their own would have spread at any rate the law,
+the order, the civilization of the conquering country over the length and
+breadth of the conquered. Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to effect its
+entire deliverance, was strong enough to hold its assailants partially at
+bay. The country was broken into two halves whose conflict has never
+ceased. So far from either giving elements of civilization or good
+government to the other, conqueror and conquered reaped only degradation
+from the ceaseless conflict. The native tribes lost whatever tendency to
+union or social progress had survived the invasion of the Danes. Their
+barbarism was intensified by their hatred of the more civilized intruders.
+But these intruders themselves, penned within the narrow limits of the
+Pale, brutalized by a merciless conflict, cut off from contact with the
+refining influences of a larger world, sank rapidly to the level of the
+barbarism about them: and the lawlessness, the ferocity, the narrowness of
+feudalism broke out unchecked in this horde of adventurers who held the
+land by their sword.
+
+
+[Sidenote: English and Irish]
+
+From the first the story of the English Pale was a story of degradation and
+anarchy. It needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army stormed its
+strongholds and drove its leading barons into exile, to preserve even their
+fealty to the English Crown. John divided the Pale into counties and
+ordered the observance of the English law; but the departure of his army
+was the signal for a return of the disorder he had trampled under foot.
+Between Englishmen and Irishmen went on a ceaseless and pitiless war. Every
+Irishman without the Pale was counted by the English settlers an enemy and
+a robber whose murder found no cognizance or punishment at the hands of the
+law. Half the subsistence of the English barons was drawn from forays
+across the border, and these forays were avenged by incursions of native
+marauders which carried havoc at times to the very walls of Dublin. Within
+the Pale itself the misery was hardly less. The English settlers were
+harried and oppressed by their own baronage as much as by the Irish
+marauders, while the feuds of the English lords wasted their strength and
+prevented any effective combination either for common conquest or common
+defence. So utter seemed their weakness that Robert Bruce saw in it an
+opportunity for a counter-blow at his English assailants, and his victory
+at Bannockburn was followed up by the despatch of a Scotch force to Ireland
+with his brother Edward at its head. A general rising of the Irish welcomed
+this deliverer; but the danger drove the barons of the Pale to a momentary
+union, and in 1316 their valour was proved on the bloody field of Athenree
+by the slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes and the almost complete
+annihilation of the sept of the O'Connors. But with victory returned the
+old anarchy and degradation. The barons of the Pale sank more and more into
+Irish chieftains. The Fitz-Maurices, who became Earls of Desmond and whose
+vast territory in Minister was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the
+dress and manners of the natives around them. The rapid growth of this evil
+was seen in the ruthless provisions by which Edward the Third strove to
+check it in his Statute of Kilkenny. The Statute forbade the adoption of
+the Irish language or name or dress by any man of English blood: it
+enforced within the Pale the exclusive use of English law, and made the use
+of the native or Brehon law, which was gaining ground, an act of treason;
+it made treasonable any marriage of the Englishry with persons of Irish
+race, or any adoption of English children by Irish foster-fathers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard in Ireland]
+
+But stern as they were these provisions proved fruitless to check the
+fusion of the two races, while the growing independence of the Lords of the
+Pale threw off all but the semblance of obedience to the English
+government. It was this which stirred Richard to a serious effort for the
+conquest and organization of the island. In 1386 he granted the "entire
+dominion" of Ireland with the title of its Duke to Robert de Vere on
+condition of his carrying out its utter reduction. But the troubles of the
+reign soon recalled De Vere, and it was not till the truce with France had
+freed his hands that the king again took up his projects of conquest. In
+1394 he landed with an army at Waterford, and received the general
+submission of the native chieftains. But the Lords of the Pale held
+sullenly aloof; and Richard had no sooner quitted the island than the Irish
+in turn refused to carry out their promise of quitting Leinster, and
+engaged in a fresh contest with the Earl of March, whom the king had
+proclaimed as his heir and left behind him as his lieutenant in Ireland. In
+the summer of 1398 March was beaten and slain in battle: and Richard
+resolved to avenge his cousin's death and complete the work he had begun by
+a fresh invasion. He felt no apprehension of danger. At home his triumph
+seemed complete. The death of Norfolk, the exile of Henry of Lancaster,
+left the baronage without heads for any rising. He ensured, as he believed,
+the loyalty of the great houses by the hostages of their blood whom he
+carried with him, at whose head was Henry of Lancaster's son, the future
+Henry the Fifth. The refusal of the Percies, the Earl of Northumberland and
+his son Henry Percy or Hotspur, to obey his summons might have warned him
+that danger was brewing in the north. Richard however took little heed. He
+banished the Percies, who withdrew into Scotland; and sailed for Ireland at
+the end of May, leaving his uncle the Duke of York regent in his stead.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Landing of Henry]
+
+The opening of his campaign was indecisive, and it was not till fresh
+reinforcements arrived at Dublin that the king could prepare for a march
+into the heart of the island. But while he planned the conquest of Ireland
+the news came that England was lost. Little more than a month had passed
+after his departure when Henry of Lancaster entered the Humber and landed
+at Ravenspur. He came, he said, to claim his heritage; and three of his
+Yorkshire castles at once threw open their gates. The two great houses of
+the north joined him at once. Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, had
+married his half-sister; the Percies came from their exile over the
+Scottish border. As he pushed quickly to the south all resistance broke
+down. The army which the Regent gathered refused to do hurt to the Duke;
+London called him to her gates; and the royal Council could only march
+hastily on Bristol in the hope of securing that port for the King's return.
+But the town at once yielded to Henry's summons, the Regent submitted to
+him, and with an army which grew at every step the Duke marched upon
+Cheshire, where Richard's adherents were gathering in arms to meet the
+king. Contrary winds had for a while kept Richard ignorant of his cousin's
+progress, and even when the news reached him he was in a web of treachery.
+The Duke of Albemarle, the son of the Regent Duke of York, was beside him,
+and at his persuasion the King abandoned his first purpose of returning at
+once, and sent the Earl of Salisbury to Conway while he himself waited to
+gather his army and fleet. The six days he proposed to gather them in
+became sixteen, and the delay proved fatal to his cause. As no news came of
+Richard the Welshmen who flocked to Salisbury's camp dispersed on Henry's
+advance to Chester. Henry was in fact master of the realm at the opening of
+August when Richard at last sailed from Waterford and landed at Milford
+Haven.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's capture]
+
+Every road was blocked, and the news that all was lost told on the thirty
+thousand men he brought with him. In a single day but six thousand
+remained, and even these dispersed when it was found that the King had
+ridden off disguised as a friar to join the force which he believed to be
+awaiting him in North Wales with Salisbury at its head. He reached
+Caernarvon only to find this force already disbanded, and throwing himself
+into the castle despatched his kinsmen, the Dukes of Exeter and Surrey, to
+Chester to negotiate with Henry of Lancaster. But they were detained there
+while the Earl of Northumberland pushed forward with a picked body of men,
+and securing the castles of the coast at last sought an interview with
+Richard at Conway. The King's confidence was still unbroken. He threatened
+to raise a force of Welshmen and to put Lancaster to death. Deserted as he
+was indeed, a King was in himself a power, and only the treacherous pledges
+of the Earl induced him to set aside his plans for a reconciliation to be
+brought about in Parliament and to move from Conway on the promise of a
+conference with Henry at Flint. But he had no sooner reached the town than
+he found himself surrounded by Lancaster's forces. "I am betrayed," he
+cried, as the view of his enemies burst on him from the hill; "there are
+pennons and banners in the valley." But it was too late for retreat.
+Richard was seized and brought before his cousin. "I am come before my
+time," said Lancaster, "but I will show you the reason. Your people, my
+lord, complain that for the space of twenty years you have ruled them
+harshly: however, if it please God, I will help you to rule them better."
+"Fair cousin," replied the King, "since it pleases you, it pleases me
+well." Then, breaking in private into passionate regrets that he had ever
+spared his cousin's life, he suffered himself to be carried a prisoner
+along the road to London.
+
+END OF VOL. II.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of the English People, Volume II (of 8), by John Richard Green</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+
+    P                        { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .75em; text-align: justify; margin-bottom: .75em; }
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume II (of
+8), by John Richard Green</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p class="noindent">Title: History of the English People, Volume II (of 8)</p>
+<p class="noindent">       The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400</p>
+<p class="noindent">Author: John Richard Green</p>
+<p class="noindent">Release Date: November 10, 2005  [eBook #17038]<br>
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008</p>
+<p class="noindent">Language: English</p>
+<p class="noindent">Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p class="noindent">***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME II (OF 8)***</p>
+<br><br>
+<h4>E-text prepared by Paul Murray<br>
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br>
+    (https://www.pgdp.net/)</h4>
+<br><br>
+<table border=0 bgcolor="ddddee" cellpadding=10>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+		The index for the entire 8 volume
+		set of <i>History of the English People</i> was located
+		at the end of Volume VIII. For ease in
+		accessibility, it has been removed and produced as a
+		separate volume
+		(<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533">https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533</a>).	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<br><br>
+<hr class="pg" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="TOP"></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div class="titlepage">
+<span class="main">HISTORY<br>OF<br>THE ENGLISH PEOPLE</span>
+<span class="sub">VOLUME II</span>
+    <div class="byline">BY <span class="docauthor">JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.<br>HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD</span>
+</div>
+<ul>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522754"></a>THE CHARTER, 1216-1307</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522760"></a>THE PARLIAMENT, 1307-1400</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522779"></a><i>First Edition, Demy 8vo, November</i> 1877;<br>
+</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522796"></a><i>Reprinted December</i> 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.<br>
+</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522812"></a><i>Eversley Edition,</i> 1895.<br>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+London
+MacMillan and Co.
+and New York
+1895
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="toc"><div class="chapters">
+<hr>
+<div class="header">CONTENTS</div>
+<table summary="Table of contents">
+<tr class="volume"><td><a href="#Vol2">VOLUME II</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="book">
+<td><a href="#Bk3">BOOK III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3">THE CHARTER</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3">1216-1307</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch2">CHAPTER II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch2">HENRY THE THIRD</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch2">1216-1232</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch3">CHAPTER III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch3">THE BARON'S WAR</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch3">1232-1272</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch4">EDWARD THE FIRST</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch4">1272-1307</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="book">
+<td><a href="#Bk4">BOOK IV</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4">THE PARLIAMENT</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4">1307-1461</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Auth"> </a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Auth">AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch1">CHAPTER I</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch1">EDWARD II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch1">1307-1327</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch2">CHAPTER II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch2">EDWARD THE THIRD</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch2">1327-1347</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch3">CHAPTER III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch3">THE PEASANT REVOLT</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch3">1347-1381</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch4">RICHARD THE SECOND</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk4-Ch4">1381-1400</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="toc"><div class="maps">
+<hr>
+<div class="header">LIST OF MAPS</div>
+<table summary="List of maps">
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v2-map-1.jpg">Scotland in 1290</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v2-map-2.jpg">France at the Treaty of Bretigny</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="-Page-2-001"></a>2-001]</span>
+
+<div class="volume">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Vol2"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4518028"></a>VOLUME II</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4518075"></a>BOOK III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4518081"></a>THE CHARTER</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4518087"></a>1216-1307</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3-Ch2"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4518137"></a>CHAPTER II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4518143"></a>HENRY THE THIRD</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4518148"></a>1216-1232</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William Marshal</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The death of John changed the whole face of
+English affairs. His son, Henry of Winchester,
+was but nine years old, and the pity which was
+stirred by the child's helplessness was aided by a
+sense of injustice in burthening him with the
+iniquity of his father. At his death John had
+driven from his side even the most loyal of his
+barons; but William Marshal had clung to him to
+the last, and with him was Gualo, the Legate of
+Innocent's successor, Honorius the Third. The
+position of Gualo as representative of the Papal
+overlord of the realm was of the highest importance,
+and his action showed the real attitude of
+Rome towards English freedom. The boy-king
+was hardly crowned at Gloucester when Legate
+and Earl issued in his name the very Charter
+against which his father had died fighting. Only
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-002"></a>2-002]</span>
+
+the clauses which regulated taxation and the
+summoning of parliament were as yet declared to
+be suspended. The choice of William Marshal as
+"governor of King and kingdom" gave weight to
+this step; and its effect was seen when the
+contest was renewed in 1217. Lewis was at first
+successful in the eastern counties, but the political
+reaction was aided by jealousies which broke out
+between the English and French nobles in his
+force, and the first drew gradually away from him.
+So general was the defection that at the opening
+of summer William Marshal felt himself strong
+enough for a blow at his foes. Lewis himself was
+investing Dover, and a joint army of French and
+English barons under the Count of Perche and
+Robert Fitz-Walter was besieging Lincoln, when
+gathering troops rapidly from the royal castles
+the regent marched to the relief of the latter town.
+Cooped up in its narrow streets and attacked at
+once by the Earl and the garrison, the barons fled
+in utter rout; the Count of Perche fell on the
+field, Robert Fitz-Walter was taken prisoner.
+Lewis at once retreated on London and called
+for aid from France. But a more terrible defeat
+crushed his remaining hopes. A small English
+fleet which set sail from Dover under Hubert de
+Burgh fell boldly on the reinforcements which
+were crossing under escort of Eustace the Monk,
+a well-known freebooter of the Channel. Some
+incidents of the fight light up for us the naval
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-003"></a>2-003]</span>
+
+warfare of the time. From the decks of the
+English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into
+the crowded transports, others hurled quicklime
+into their enemies' faces, while the more active
+vessels crashed with their armed prows into the
+sides of the French ships. The skill of the
+mariners of the Cinque Ports turned the day
+against the larger forces of their opponents, and
+the fleet of Eustace was utterly destroyed. The
+royal army at once closed upon London, but
+resistance was really at an end. By a treaty concluded
+at Lambeth in September Lewis promised
+to withdraw from England on payment of a sum
+which he claimed as debt; his adherents were
+restored to their possessions, the liberties of London
+and other towns confirmed, and the prisoners on
+either side set at liberty. A fresh issue of the
+Charter, though in its modified form, proclaimed
+yet more clearly the temper and policy of the Earl
+Marshal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Hubert de Burgh</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His death at the opening of 1219, after a year
+spent in giving order to the realm, brought no
+change in the system he had adopted. The control
+of affairs passed into the hands of a new legate,
+Pandulf, of Stephen Langton who had just returned
+forgiven from Rome, and of the Justiciar, Hubert
+de Burgh. It was a time of transition, and the
+temper of the Justiciar was eminently transitional.
+Bred in the school of Henry the Second, Hubert
+had little sympathy with national freedom, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-004"></a>2-004]</span>
+
+though resolute to maintain the Charter he can
+have had small love for it; his conception of good
+government, like that of his master, lay in a wise
+personal administration, in the preservation of
+order and law. But he combined with this a
+thoroughly English desire for national independence,
+a hatred of foreigners, and a reluctance to
+waste English blood and treasure in Continental
+struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task
+was one of no common difficulty. He was
+hampered by the constant interference of Rome.
+A Papal legate resided at the English court, and
+claimed a share in the administration of the realm
+as the representative of its overlord and as guardian
+of the young sovereign. A foreign party too had
+still a footing in the kingdom, for William Marshal
+had been unable to rid himself of men like Peter
+des Roches or Faukes de Breauté, who had fought
+on the royal side in the struggle against Lewis.
+Hubert had to deal too with the anarchy which
+that struggle left behind it. From the time of
+the Conquest the centre of England had been
+covered with the domains of great houses, whose
+longings were for feudal independence and whose
+spirit of revolt had been held in check partly by
+the stern rule of the kings and partly by the rise
+of a baronage sprung from the Court and settled
+for the most part in the North. The oppression
+of John united both the earlier and these newer
+houses in the struggle for the Charter. But the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-005"></a>2-005]</span>
+
+character of each remained unchanged, and the
+close of the struggle saw the feudal party break
+out in their old lawlessness and defiance of the
+Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Order
+restored</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time the anarchy of Stephen's days
+seemed to revive. But the Justiciar was resolute
+to crush it, and he was backed by the strenuous
+efforts of Stephen Langton. A new and solemn
+coronation of the young king in 1220 was followed
+by a demand for the restoration of the royal
+castles which had been seized by the barons and
+foreigners. The Earl of Chester, the head of the
+feudal baronage, though he rose in armed rebellion,
+quailed before the march of Hubert and
+the Primate's threats of excommunication. A
+more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman,
+Faukes de Breauté, the sheriff of six counties,
+with six royal castles in his hands, and allied
+both with the rebel barons and Llewelyn of
+Wales. But in 1224 his castle of Bedford was
+besieged for two months; and on its surrender
+the stern justice of Hubert hung the twenty-four
+knights and their retainers who formed the
+garrison before its walls. The blow was effectual;
+the royal castles were surrendered by the barons,
+and the land was once more at peace. Freed from
+foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from
+the presence of the foreign legate. Langton
+wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he
+lived no future legate should be sent to England,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-006"></a>2-006]</span>
+
+and with Pandulf's resignation in 1221 the direct
+interference of the Papacy in the government of
+the realm came to an end. But even these services
+of the Primate were small compared with his services
+to English freedom. Throughout his life
+the Charter was the first object of his care. The
+omission of the articles which restricted the royal
+power over taxation in the Charter which was
+published at Henry's accession in 1216 was
+doubtless due to the Archbishop's absence and
+disgrace at Rome. The suppression of disorder
+seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance
+among the royal ministers; for when Langton
+demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in
+Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the
+King's councillors, protested that it had been extorted
+by force and was without legal validity.
+"If you loved the King, William," the Primate
+burst out in anger, "you would not throw a
+stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the
+realm." The young king was cowed by the
+Archbishop's wrath, and promised observance of
+the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness
+of such a temper among the royal
+councillors that made Langton and the baronage
+demand two years later a fresh promulgation of
+the Charter as the price of a subsidy, and Henry's
+assent established the principle, so fruitful of constitutional
+results, that redress of wrongs precedes
+a grant to the Crown.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-007"></a>2-007]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">State of the
+Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These repeated sanctions of the Charter and
+the government of the realm year after year in
+accordance with its provisions were gradually
+bringing the new freedom home to the mass of
+Englishmen. But the sense of liberty was at this
+time quickened and intensified by a religious
+movement which stirred English society to its
+depths. Never had the priesthood wielded such
+boundless power over Christendom as in the days
+of Innocent the Third and his immediate successors.
+But its religious hold on the people was
+loosening day by day. The old reverence for the
+Papacy was fading away before the universal
+resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use
+of interdict and excommunication for purely
+secular ends, its degradation of the most sacred
+sentences into means of financial extortion. In
+Italy the struggle that was opening between
+Rome and Frederick the Second disclosed a spirit
+of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets
+of Florence denied the immortality of the soul
+and attacked the very foundations of the faith
+itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence
+had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses
+and thrown off all allegiance to the Papacy. Even
+in England, though there were no signs as yet of
+religious revolt, and though the political action
+of Rome had been in the main on the side of
+freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its
+interference with national concerns which broke
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-008"></a>2-008]</span>
+
+out in the struggle against John. "The Pope has
+no part in secular matters," had been the reply of
+London to the interdict of Innocent. And within
+the English Church itself there was much to call
+for reform. Its attitude in the strife for the
+Charter as well as the after work of the Primate
+had made it more popular than ever; but its
+spiritual energy was less than its political. The
+disuse of preaching, the decline of the monastic
+orders into rich landowners, the non-residence
+and ignorance of the parish priests, lowered the
+religious influence of the clergy. The abuses of
+the time foiled even the energy of such men as
+Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln. His constitutions
+forbid the clergy to haunt taverns, to gamble, to
+share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot and
+debauchery of the life of the baronage. But
+such prohibitions witness to the prevalence of the
+evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were
+still withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to
+act as ministers, judges, or ambassadors. Benefices
+were heaped in hundreds at a time on royal
+favourites like John Mansel. Abbeys absorbed
+the tithes of parishes and then served them by
+half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased
+from Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons
+and monks from all episcopal discipline. And
+behind all this was a group of secular statesmen
+and scholars, the successors of such critics as
+Walter Map, waging indeed no open warfare with
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-009"></a>2-009]</span>
+
+the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its
+abuses and its faults.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Friars</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To bring the world back again within the pale
+of the Church was the aim of two religious orders
+which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of
+the thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard
+Dominic was roused at the sight of the lordly
+prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the
+Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he
+cried, "must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness,
+false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies
+by preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid
+orthodoxy were seconded by the mystical piety,
+the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi.
+The life of Francis falls like a stream of tender
+light across the darkness of the time. In the
+frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see
+him take Poverty for his bride. He strips himself
+of all, he flings his very clothes at his father's
+feet, that he may be one with Nature and God.
+His passionate verse claims the moon for his
+sister and the sun for his brother, he calls on his
+brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His
+last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!"
+Strangely as the two men differed from each
+other, their aim was the same--to convert the
+heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge
+with orthodoxy, above all to carry the
+Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done
+by an utter reversal of the older monasticism, by
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-010"></a>2-010]</span>
+
+seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation
+of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary
+of the cloister for the preacher, the monk
+for the "brother" or friar. To force the new
+"brethren" into entire dependence on those
+among whom they laboured their vow of Poverty
+was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging
+Friars" were to subsist solely on alms, they might
+possess neither money nor lands, the very houses
+in which they lived were to be held in trust for
+them by others. The tide of popular enthusiasm
+which welcomed their appearance swept before it
+the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older
+orders, the opposition of the parochial priesthood.
+Thousands of brethren gathered in a few years
+round Francis and Dominic; and the begging
+preachers, clad in coarse frock of serge with a
+girdle of rope round their waist, wandered barefooted
+as missionaries over Asia, battled with
+heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities,
+and preached and toiled among the poor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Friars
+and the
+Towns</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the towns especially the coming of the Friars
+was a religious revolution. They had been left
+for the most part to the worst and most ignorant
+of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence
+lay in his fees. Burgher and artizan were
+left to spell out what religious instruction they
+might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the
+Church's ritual or the scriptural pictures and
+sculptures which were graven on the walls of its
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-011"></a>2-011]</span>
+
+minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of
+enthusiasm which welcomed the itinerant preacher
+whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story
+brought religion into the fair and the market
+place. In England, where the Black Friars of
+Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of
+Francis in 1224, both were received with the
+same delight. As the older orders had chosen
+the country, the Friars chose the town. They
+had hardly landed at Dover before they made
+straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance
+of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost
+their way in the woods between Oxford and
+Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods
+turned aside to a grange of the monks of Abingdon.
+Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures,
+as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to
+take them for jongleurs, the jesters and jugglers
+of the day, and the news of this break in the
+monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and
+cellarer to the door to welcome them and witness
+their tricks. The disappointment was too much
+for the temper of the monks, and the brothers
+were kicked roughly from the gate to find their
+night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome
+of the townsmen made up everywhere for the ill-will
+and opposition of both clergy and monks.
+The work of the Friars was physical as well as
+moral. The rapid progress of population within
+the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary regulations
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-012"></a>2-012]</span>
+
+of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague
+or the more terrible scourge of leprosy festered
+in the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was
+to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed
+his disciples, and the Grey Brethren at once fixed
+themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters
+of each town. Their first work lay in the
+noisome lazar-houses; it was amongst the lepers
+that they commonly chose the site of their homes.
+At London they settled in the shambles of Newgate;
+at Oxford they made their way to the
+swampy ground between its walls and the streams
+of Thames. Huts of mud and timber, as mean
+as the huts around them, rose within the rough
+fence and ditch that bounded the Friary. The
+order of Francis made a hard fight against the
+taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater
+personal comfort which characterized the time.
+"I did not enter into religion to build walls,"
+protested an English provincial when the brethren
+pressed for a larger house; and Albert of Pisa
+ordered a stone cloister which the burgesses of
+Southampton had built for them to be razed to
+the ground. "You need no little mountains to
+lift your heads to heaven," was his scornful reply
+to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went
+shod. An Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes
+one morning, and wore them at matins. At night
+he dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a
+dangerous pass between Gloucester and Oxford
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-013"></a>2-013]</span>
+
+with, shouts of "Kill, kill!" "I am a friar,"
+shrieked the terror-stricken brother. "You lie,"
+was the instant answer, "for you go shod." The
+Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe
+was there. In an agony of repentance he woke
+and flung the pair out of window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Revival of Theology</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was with less success that the order struggled
+against the passion of the time for knowledge.
+Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was
+by their founders, would have denied them the
+possession of books or materials for study. "I am
+your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis cried
+passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter.
+When the news of a great doctor's reception was
+brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell. "I
+am afraid, my son," he replied, "that such doctors
+will be the destruction of my vineyard. They are
+the true doctors who with the meekness of wisdom
+show forth good works for the edification of their
+neighbours." One kind of knowledge indeed their
+work almost forced on them. The popularity of
+their preaching soon led them to the deeper study
+of theology; within a short time after their establishment
+in England we find as many as thirty readers or lecturers
+appointed at Hereford, Leicester, Bristol, and other places,
+and a regular succession of teachers provided at each
+University. The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology
+in the nave of their new church while philosophy was
+taught in the cloister. The first provincial of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-014"></a>2-014]</span>
+
+Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house
+and persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there. His
+influence after his promotion to the see of Lincoln
+was steadily exerted to secure theological study
+among the Friars, as well as their establishment in
+the University; and in this work he was ably
+seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de
+Marisco, under whom the Franciscan school at
+Oxford attained a reputation throughout Christendom.
+Lyons, Paris, and Koln borrowed from
+it their professors: it was through its influence
+indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly inferior
+to that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism.
+But the result of this powerful impulse was
+soon seen to be fatal to the wider intellectual
+activity which had till now characterized the
+Universities. Theology in its scholastic form
+resumed its supremacy in the schools. Its only
+efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine
+and law. The last, as he was by far the
+greatest, instance of the freer and wider culture
+which had been the glory of the last century, was
+Roger Bacon, and no name better illustrates the
+rapidity and completeness with which it passed
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Roger Bacon</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents
+who were driven into exile and reduced to poverty
+by the civil wars. From Oxford, where he studied
+under Edmund of Abingdon to whom he owed
+his introduction to the works of Aristotle, he
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-015"></a>2-015]</span>
+
+passed to the University of Paris, and spent his
+whole heritage there in costly studies and experiments.
+"From my youth up," he writes, "I have
+laboured at the sciences and tongues. I have
+sought the friendship of all men among the Latins
+who had any reputation for knowledge. I have
+caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry,
+arithmetic, the construction of tables and
+instruments, and many needful things besides."
+The difficulties in the way of such studies as he
+had resolved to pursue were immense. He was
+without instruments or means of experiment.
+"Without mathematical instruments no science
+can be mastered," he complains afterwards, "and
+these instruments are not to be found among the
+Latins, nor could they be made for two or three
+hundred pounds. Besides, better tables are indispensably
+necessary, tables on which the motions
+of the heavens are certified from the beginning to
+the end of the world without daily labour, but
+these tables are worth a king's ransom and could
+not be made without a vast expense. I have often
+attempted the composition of such tables, but could
+not finish them through failure of means and the
+folly of those whom I had to employ." Books
+were difficult and sometimes even impossible to
+procure. "The scientific works of Aristotle, of
+Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients
+cannot be had without great cost; their principal
+works have not been translated into Latin, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-016"></a>2-016]</span>
+
+copies of others are not to be found in ordinary
+libraries or elsewhere. The admirable books of
+Cicero de Republica are not to be found anywhere,
+so far as I can hear, though I have made anxious
+enquiry for them in different parts of the world,
+and by various messengers. I could never find
+the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search
+for them during twenty years and more. And so
+it is with many more most useful books connected
+with the science of morals." It is only words like
+these of his own that bring home to us the keen
+thirst for knowledge, the patience, the energy of
+Roger Bacon. He returned as a teacher to Oxford,
+and a touching record of his devotion to those
+whom he taught remains in the story of John of
+London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him
+above the general level of his pupils. "When he
+came to me as a poor boy," says Bacon in recommending
+him to the Pope, "I caused him to be
+nurtured and instructed for the love of God, especially
+since for aptitude and innocence I have never
+found so towardly a youth. Five or six years ago
+I caused him to be taught in languages, mathematics,
+and optics, and I have gratuitously instructed
+him with my own lips since the time that I
+received your mandate. There is no one at Paris
+who knows so much of the root of philosophy,
+though he has not produced the branches, flowers,
+and fruit because of his youth, and because he has
+had no experience in teaching. But he has the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-017"></a>2-017]</span>
+
+means of surpassing all the Latins if he live to
+grow old and goes on as he has begun."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pride with which he refers to his system
+of instruction was justified by the wide extension
+which he gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It
+is probably of himself that he speaks when he tells
+us that "the science of optics has not hitherto
+been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere among the
+Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science
+on which he had laboured for ten years. But his
+teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil.
+From the moment when the Friars settled in the
+Universities scholasticism absorbed the whole mental
+energy of the student world. The temper of the
+age was against scientific or philosophical studies.
+The older enthusiasm for knowledge was dying
+down; the study of law was the one source of
+promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy
+was discredited, literature in its purer forms became
+almost extinct. After forty years of incessant
+study, Bacon found himself in his own words
+"unheard, forgotten, buried." He seems at one
+time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was
+gone. "During the twenty years that I have
+specially laboured in the attainment of wisdom,
+abandoning the path of common men, I have spent
+on these pursuits more than two thousand pounds,
+not to mention the cost of books, experiments,
+instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages,
+and the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-018"></a>2-018]</span>
+
+made to procure the friendship of the wise and to
+obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined and
+baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels
+of his friend Grosseteste and renounced the world.
+He became a friar of the order of St. Francis, an
+order where books and study were looked upon as
+hindrances to the work which it had specially
+undertaken, that of preaching among the masses
+of the poor. He had written little. So far was he
+from attempting to write that his new superiors
+prohibited him from publishing anything under
+pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread
+and water. But we can see the craving of his
+mind, the passionate instinct of creation which
+marks the man of genius, in the joy with which
+he seized a strange opportunity that suddenly
+opened before him. "Some few chapters on
+different subjects, written at the entreaty of
+friends," seem to have got abroad, and were
+brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the
+notice of Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once
+invited Bacon to write. But difficulties stood in
+his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses
+for such a work as he projected would cost
+at least, £60, and the Pope sent not a penny.
+Bacon begged help from his family, but they were
+ruined like himself. No one would lend to a
+mendicant friar, and when his friends raised the
+money he needed it was by pawning their goods in
+the hope of repayment from Clement. Nor was
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-019"></a>2-019]</span>
+
+this all; the work itself, abstruse and scientific as
+was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and
+popular form to gain the Papal ear. But difficulties
+which would have crushed another man only
+roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman
+energy. By the close of 1267 the work was done.
+The "greater work," itself in modern form a
+closely-printed folio, with its successive summaries
+and appendices in the "lesser" and the "third"
+works (which make a good octavo more), were
+produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen
+months.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Opus Majus</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book
+itself. The "Opus Majus" is alike wonderful in
+plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the
+words of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity
+of a reform in the mode of philosophizing, to set
+forth the reasons why knowledge had not made
+a greater progress, to draw back attention to
+sources of knowledge which had been unwisely
+neglected, to discover other sources which were
+yet wholly unknown, and to animate men to the
+undertaking by a prospect of the vast advantages
+which it offered." The developement of his scheme
+is on the largest scale; he gathers together the
+whole knowledge of his time on every branch of
+science which it possessed, and as he passes them
+in review he suggests improvements in nearly all.
+His labours, both here and in his after works, in
+the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-020"></a>2-020]</span>
+
+in insisting on the necessity of correct texts,
+of an accurate knowledge of languages, of an
+exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable
+than his scientific investigations. From grammar
+he passes to mathematics, from mathematics to
+experimental philosophy. Under the name of
+mathematics indeed was included all the physical
+science of the time. "The neglect of it for nearly
+thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately,
+"hath nearly destroyed the entire studies of
+Latin Christendom. For he who knows not
+mathematics cannot know any other sciences; and
+what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance
+or find its proper remedies." Geography, chronology,
+arithmetic, music, are brought into something
+of scientific form, and like rapid sketches are given
+of the question of climate, hydrography, geography,
+and astrology. The subject of optics, his own
+especial study, is treated with greater fulness; he
+enters into the question of the anatomy of the eye
+besides discussing problems which lie more strictly
+within the province of optical science. In a word,
+the "Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr.
+Whewell, is "at once the Encyclopedia and the
+Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The
+whole of the after-works of Roger Bacon--and
+treatise after treatise has of late been disentombed
+from our libraries--are but developements in detail
+of the magnificent conception he laid before
+Clement. Such a work was its own great reward.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-021"></a>2-021]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+From the world around Roger Bacon could look
+for and found small recognition. No word of
+acknowledgement seems to have reached its author
+from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent
+story, his writings only gained him a prison from
+his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old
+man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved
+for later ages to roll away the obscurity that had
+gathered round his memory, and to place first in
+the great roll of modern science the name of
+Roger Bacon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Scholasticism</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering
+strength of the drift towards the practical studies,
+and above all towards theology in its scholastic
+guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at
+bay as the most dangerous foe of mediæval faith,
+was now turned by the adoption of his logical
+method in the discussion and definition of theological
+dogma into its unexpected ally. It was
+this very method that led to "that unprofitable
+subtlety and curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes
+as the vice of the scholastic philosophy. But
+"certain it is"--to continue the same great
+thinker's comment on the Friars--"that if these
+schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and unwearied
+travel of wit had joined variety of reading
+and contemplation, they had proved excellent
+lights to the great advancement of all learning and
+knowledge." What, amidst all their errors, they
+undoubtedly did was to insist on the necessity of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-022"></a>2-022]</span>
+
+rigid demonstration and a more exact use of
+words, to introduce a clear and methodical treatment
+of all subjects into discussion, and above all
+to substitute an appeal to reason for unquestioning
+obedience to authority. It was by this critical
+tendency, by the new clearness and precision
+which scholasticism gave to enquiry, that in spite
+of the trivial questions with which it often concerned
+itself it trained the human mind through
+the next two centuries to a temper which fitted it
+to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that
+brought about the Renascence. And it is to the
+same spirit of fearless enquiry as well as to the
+strong popular sympathies which their very
+constitution necessitated that we must attribute
+the influence which the Friars undoubtedly exerted
+in the coming struggle between the people and
+the Crown. Their position is clearly and strongly
+marked throughout the whole contest. The University
+of Oxford, which soon fell under the direction of
+their teaching, stood first in its resistance to Papal
+exactions and its claim of English liberty. The
+classes in the towns, on whom the influence of the
+Friars told most directly, were steady supporters
+of freedom throughout the Barons' Wars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Its Political Influence</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen
+was of immense value, for it set on a religious
+basis and gave an intellectual form to the constitutional
+theory of the relations between king and
+people which was slowly emerging from the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-023"></a>2-023]</span>
+
+struggle with the Crown. In assuming the
+responsibility of a Christian king to God for the
+good government of his realm, in surrounding the
+pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious
+sanctions, the mediæval Church entered its protest
+against any personal despotism. The schoolmen
+pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract
+between king and people; and their trenchant
+logic made short work of the royal claims to
+irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience.
+"He who would be in truth a king," ran a poem
+which embodies their teaching at this time in
+pungent verse--"he is a 'free king' indeed if he
+rightly rule himself and his realm. All things
+are lawful to him for the government of his realm,
+but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction.
+It is one thing to rule according to a king's duty,
+another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the
+law." "Let the community of the realm advise,
+and let it be known what the generality, to whom
+their laws are best known, think on the matter.
+They who are ruled by the laws know those laws
+best; they who make daily trial of them are best
+acquainted with them; and since it is their own
+affairs which are at stake they will take the more
+care and will act with an eye to their own peace."
+"It concerns the community to see what sort of
+men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the
+realm." The constitutional restrictions on the
+royal authority, the right of the whole nation to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-024"></a>2-024]</span>
+
+deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to
+have a voice in the selection of the administrators
+of government, had never been so clearly stated
+before. But the importance of the Friar's work
+lay in this, that the work of the scholar was
+supplemented by that of the popular preacher.
+The theory of government wrought out in cell and
+lecture-room was carried over the length and
+breadth of the land by the mendicant brother,
+begging his way from town to town, chatting with
+farmer or housewife at the cottage door, and
+setting up his portable pulpit in village green or
+market-place. His open-air sermons, ranging from
+impassioned devotion to coarse story and homely
+mother wit, became the journals as well as the
+homilies of the day; political and social questions
+found place in them side by side with spiritual
+matters; and the rudest countryman learned his
+tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as
+he listened to the rambling, passionate, humorous
+discourse of the begging friar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry the Third</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never had there been more need of such a
+political education of the whole people than at the
+moment we have reached. For the triumph of
+the Charter, the constitutional government of
+Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly on the
+helplessness of the king. As boy or youth, Henry
+the Third had bowed to the control of William
+Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he
+was now grown to manhood, and his character
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-025"></a>2-025]</span>
+
+was from this hour to tell on the events of his
+reign. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of
+his father the young king was absolutely free.
+There was a geniality, a vivacity, a refinement in
+his temper which won a personal affection for him
+even in his worst days from some who bitterly
+censured his rule. The Abbey-church of Westminster,
+with which he replaced the ruder minster
+of the Confessor, remains a monument of his
+artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of men
+of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science"
+of the troubadour. But of the political capacity
+which was the characteristic of his house he had
+little or none. Profuse, changeable, false from sheer
+meanness of spirit, impulsive alike in good and ill,
+unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless in insult
+and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an
+empty and prodigal magnificence, his one notion
+of government was a dream of arbitrary power.
+But frivolous as the king's mood was, he clung
+with a weak man's obstinacy to a distinct line of
+policy; and this was the policy not of Hubert or
+Langton but of John. He cherished the hope of
+recovering his heritage across the sea. He believed
+in the absolute power of the Crown; and looked
+on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises
+which force had wrested from the king and which
+force could wrest back again. France was telling
+more and more on English opinion; and the
+claim which the French kings were advancing to a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-026"></a>2-026]</span>
+
+divine and absolute power gave a sanction in
+Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority
+which was still maintained by his favourite advisers
+in the royal council. Above all he clung to the
+alliance with the Papacy. Henry was personally
+devout; and his devotion only bound him the
+more firmly to his father's system of friendship
+with Rome. Gratitude and self-interest alike
+bound him to the Papal See. Rome had saved
+him from ruin as a child; its legate had set the
+crown on his head; its threats and excommunications
+had foiled Lewis and built up again a royal
+party. Above all it was Rome which could alone
+free him from his oath to the Charter, and which
+could alone defend him if like his father he had to
+front the baronage in arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">England and Rome</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His temper was now to influence the whole
+system of government. In 1227 Henry declared
+himself of age; and though Hubert still remained
+Justiciar every year saw him more powerless in
+his struggle with the tendencies of the king.
+The death of Stephen Langton in 1228 was a yet
+heavier blow to English freedom. In persuading
+Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had
+averted a conflict between the national desire for
+self-government and the Papal claims of overlordship.
+But his death gave the signal for a
+more serious struggle, for it was in the oppression
+of the Church of England by the Popes through
+the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-027"></a>2-027]</span>
+
+which was destined to widen into the gulf that
+parted the one from the other at the Reformation.
+In the mediæval theory of the Papacy, as
+Innocent and his successors held it, Christendom,
+as a spiritual realm of which the Popes were the
+head, took the feudal form of the secular realms
+which lay within its pale. The Pope was its
+sovereign, the Bishops were his barons, and the
+clergy were his under vassals. As the king
+demanded aids and subsidies in case of need from
+his liegemen, so in the theory of Rome might the
+head of the Church demand aid in need from the
+priesthood. And at this moment the need of
+the Popes was sore. Rome had plunged into her
+desperate conflict with the Emperor, Frederick
+the Second, and was looking everywhere for the
+means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On
+England she believed herself to have more than
+a spiritual claim for support. She regarded the
+kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid
+its overlord. It was only by the promise of a
+heavy subsidy that Henry in 1229 could buy the
+Papal confirmation of Langton's successor. But
+the baronage was of other mind than Henry as to
+this claim of overlordship, and the demand of an
+aid to Rome from the laity was at once rejected
+by them. Her spiritual claim over the allegiance
+of the clergy however remained to fall back
+upon, and the clergy were in the Pope's hand.
+Gregory the Ninth had already claimed for the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-028"></a>2-028]</span>
+
+Papal See a right of nomination to some prebends
+in each cathedral church; he now demanded a
+tithe of all the moveables of the priesthood,
+and a threat of excommunication silenced their
+murmurs. Exaction followed exaction as the
+needs of the Papal treasury grew greater. The
+very rights of lay patrons were set aside, and
+under the name of "reserves" presentations to
+English benefices were sold in the Papal market,
+while Italian clergy were quartered on the best
+livings of the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Fall of Hubert de Burgh</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The general indignation at last found vent in
+a wide conspiracy. In 1231 letters from "the
+whole body of those who prefer to die rather than
+be ruined by the Romans" were scattered over
+the kingdom by armed men; tithes gathered for
+the Pope or the foreign priests were seized and
+given to the poor; the Papal collectors were
+beaten and their bulls trodden under foot. The
+remonstrances of Rome only made clearer the
+national character of the movement; but as
+enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself
+was seen to have been at work. Sheriffs had
+stood idly by while violence was done; royal
+letters had been shown by the rioters as approving
+their acts; and the Pope openly laid the
+charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance
+of Hubert de Burgh. No charge could have been
+more fatal to Hubert in the mind of the king.
+But he was already in full collision with the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-029"></a>2-029]</span>
+
+Justiciar on other grounds. Henry was eager
+to vindicate his right to the great heritage his
+father had lost: the Gascons, who still clung to
+him, not because they loved England but because
+they hated France, spurred him to war; and in
+1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman
+barons. But while Hubert held power no serious
+effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. The
+Norman call was rejected through his influence,
+and when a great armament gathered at Portsmouth
+for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for
+want of transport and supplies. The young king
+drew his sword and rushed madly on the
+Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption
+by the gold of France. But the quarrel was
+appeased and the expedition deferred for the year.
+In 1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny
+and Poitou, but the failure of the campaign was
+again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition
+was said to have prevented a decisive engagement.
+It was at this moment that the Papal accusation
+filled up the measure of Henry's wrath against
+his minister. In the summer of 1232 he was
+deprived of his office of Justiciar, and dragged
+from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of
+death had driven him to take sanctuary. A
+smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly
+refused. "I will die any death," he said, "before
+I put iron on the man who freed England from
+the stranger and saved Dover from France." The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-030"></a>2-030]</span>
+
+remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced
+the king to replace Hubert in sanctuary, but
+hunger compelled him to surrender; he was
+thrown a prisoner into the Tower, and though
+soon released he remained powerless in the realm.
+His fall left England without a check to the
+rule of Henry himself.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-031"></a>2-031]</span>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3-Ch3"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4533622"></a>CHAPTER III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4533628"></a>THE BARON'S WAR</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4533634"></a>1232-1272</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Aliens</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once master of his realm, Henry the Third was
+quick to declare his plan of government. The
+two great checks on a merely personal rule lay as
+yet in the authority of the great ministers of
+State and in the national character of the administrative
+body which had been built up by
+Henry the Second. Both of these checks Henry
+at once set himself to remove. He would be his
+own minister. The Justiciar ceased to be the
+Lieutenant-General of the king and dwindled
+into a presiding judge of the law-courts. The
+Chancellor had grown into a great officer of State,
+and in 1226 this office had been conferred on the
+Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent
+of the Great Council. But Henry succeeded in
+wresting the seal from him and naming to this
+as to other offices at his pleasure. His policy
+was to entrust all high posts of government to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-032"></a>2-032]</span>
+
+mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained administrators,
+but wholly dependent on the royal will.
+He found equally dependent agents of administration
+by surrounding himself with foreigners.
+The return of Peter des Roches to the royal
+councils was the first sign of the new system;
+and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were
+summoned over to occupy the royal castles and
+fill the judicial and administrative posts about
+the Court. The king's marriage in 1236 to
+Eleanor of Provence was followed by the arrival
+in England of the new queen's uncles. The
+"Savoy," as his house in the Strand was named,
+still recalls Peter of Savoy who arrived five years
+later to take for a while the chief place at Henry's
+council-board; another brother, Boniface, was
+consecrated on Archbishop Edmund's death to
+the highest post in the realm save the Crown
+itself, the Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The
+young Primate, like his brother, brought with
+him foreign fashions strange enough to English
+folk. His armed retainers pillaged the markets.
+His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground
+the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who
+opposed his visitation. London was roused by
+the outrage; on the king's refusal to do justice
+a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's
+house at Lambeth with cries of vengeance, and
+the "handsome archbishop," as his followers
+styled him, was glad to escape over sea. This
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-033"></a>2-033]</span>
+
+brood of Provençals was followed in 1243 by the
+arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's queen,
+Isabella of Angoulême. Aymer was made Bishop
+of Winchester; William of Valence received at
+a later time the earldom of Pembroke. Even the
+king's jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their
+dependants followed these great nobles to find a
+fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords
+brought in their train a bevy of ladies in search
+of husbands, and three English earls who were in
+royal wardship were wedded by the king to
+foreigners. The whole machinery of administration
+passed into the hands of men who were
+ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of
+English government or English law. Their rule
+was a mere anarchy; the very retainers of the
+royal household turned robbers and pillaged
+foreign merchants in the precincts of the Court;
+corruption invaded the judicature; at the close
+of this period of misrule Henry de Bath, a
+justiciary, was proved to have openly taken
+bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed
+estates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry
+and the
+Baronage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That misgovernment of this kind should have
+gone on unchecked in defiance of the provisions of
+the Charter was owing to the disunion and
+sluggishness of the English baronage. On the
+first arrival of the foreigners Richard, the Earl
+Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth
+as their leader to demand the expulsion of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-034"></a>2-034]</span>
+
+strangers from the royal Council. Though deserted
+by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign
+troops sent against him and forced the king to
+treat for peace. But at this critical moment the
+Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches
+to Ireland; he fell in a petty skirmish, and the
+barons were left without a head. The interposition
+of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon,
+forced the king to dismiss Peter from court; but
+there was no real change of system, and the remonstrances
+of the Archbishop and of Robert
+Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, remained fruitless.
+In the long interval of misrule the financial
+straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on
+exaction. The Forest Laws were used as a means
+of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant,
+loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the
+Court itself lived at free quarters wherever it
+moved. Supplies of this kind however were utterly
+insufficient to defray the cost of the king's prodigality.
+A sixth of the royal revenue was wasted
+in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of
+the Crown amounted to four times its annual
+income. Henry was forced to appeal for aid to
+the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted
+in 1237 on promise of control in its expenditure
+and on condition that the king confirmed the
+Charter. But Charter and promise were alike disregarded;
+and in 1242 the resentment of the
+barons expressed itself in a determined protest and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-035"></a>2-035]</span>
+
+a refusal of further subsidies. In spite of their refusal
+however Henry gathered money enough for a
+costly expedition for the recovery of Poitou. The
+attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg
+the king's force fled in disgraceful rout before the
+French as far as Saintes, and only the sudden
+illness of Lewis the Ninth and a disease which
+scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the
+conquerors. The treasury was utterly drained,
+and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh
+appeal with his own mouth to the baronage. But
+the barons had now rallied to a plan of action, and
+we can hardly fail to attribute their union to the
+man who appears at their head. This was the
+Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon
+of Montfort</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort,
+whose name had become memorable for his ruthless
+crusade against the Albigensian heretics in Southern
+Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of
+Leicester through his mother, a sister and co-heiress
+of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.
+But as Simon's tendencies were for the most part
+French John had kept the revenues of the earldom
+in his own hands, and on his death the claim of
+his elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of
+Henry the Third to accept a divided allegiance.
+The refusal marks the rapid growth of that sentiment
+of nationality which the loss of Normandy
+had brought home. Amaury chose to remain
+French, and by a family arrangement with the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-036"></a>2-036]</span>
+
+king's sanction the honour of Leicester passed in
+1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice
+made Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood
+still moved the jealousy of the barons, and this
+jealousy was quickened by a secret match in 1238
+with Eleanor, the king's sister and widow of the
+second William Marshal. The match formed probably
+part of a policy which Henry pursued
+throughout his reign of bringing the great earldoms
+into closer connexion with the Crown. That of
+Chester had fallen to the king through the extinction
+of the family of its earls; Cornwall was held
+by his brother, Richard; Salisbury by his cousin.
+Simon's marriage linked the Earldom of Leicester
+to the royal house. But it at once brought Simon
+into conflict with the nobles and the Church. The
+baronage, justly indignant that such a step should
+have been taken without their consent, for the
+queen still remained childless and Eleanor's
+children by one whom they looked on as a stranger
+promised to be heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt
+which failed only through the desertion of their
+head, Earl Richard of Cornwall, who was satisfied
+with Earl Simon's withdrawal from the Royal
+Council. The censures of the Church on Eleanor's
+breach of a vow of chaste widowhood which she
+had made at her first husband's death were averted
+with hardly less difficulty by a journey to Rome.
+It was after a year of trouble that Simon returned
+to England to reap as it seemed the fruits of his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-037"></a>2-037]</span>
+
+high alliance. He was now formally made Earl of
+Leicester and re-entered the Royal Council. But
+it is probable that he still found there the old
+jealousy which had forced from him a pledge of
+retirement after his marriage; and that his enemies
+now succeeded in winning over the king. In a few
+months, at any rate, he found the changeable king
+alienated from him, he was driven by a burst of
+royal passion from the realm, and was forced to
+spend seven months in France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon's
+early action</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry's anger passed as quickly as it had risen,
+and in the spring of 1240 the Earl was again
+received with honour at court. It was from this
+moment however that his position changed. As
+yet it had been that of a foreigner, confounded in
+the eyes of the nation at large with the Poitevins and
+Provençals who swarmed about the court. But in
+the years of retirement which followed Simon's
+return to England his whole attitude was reversed.
+There was as yet no quarrel with the king: he
+followed him in a campaign across the Channel,
+and shared in his defeat at Saintes. But he was
+a friend of Grosseteste and a patron of the Friars,
+and became at last known as a steady opponent of
+the misrule about him. When prelates and barons
+chose twelve representatives to confer with Henry
+in 1244 Simon stood with Earl Richard of Cornwall
+at the head of them. A definite plan of reform
+disclosed his hand. The confirmation of the
+Charter was to be followed by the election of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-038"></a>2-038]</span>
+
+Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer, in the Great
+Council. Nor was this restoration of a responsible
+ministry enough; a perpetual Council was to
+attend the king and devise further reforms. The
+plan broke against Henry's resistance and a Papal
+prohibition; but from this time the Earl took his
+stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. The
+struggle of the following years was chiefly with the
+exactions of the Papacy, and Simon was one of the
+first to sign the protest which the Parliament in
+1246 addressed to the court of Rome. He was
+present at the Lent Parliament of 1248, and we
+can hardly doubt that he shared in its bold rebuke
+of the king's misrule and its renewed demand for
+the appointment of the higher officers of state by
+the Council. It was probably a sense of the danger
+of leaving at home such a centre of all efforts
+after reform that brought Henry to send him in
+the autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to
+save for the Crown the last of its provinces over
+sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon in Gascony</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Threatened by France and by Navarre without
+as well as by revolt within, the loss of Gascony
+seemed close at hand; but in a few months the
+stern rule of the new Seneschal had quelled every
+open foe within or without its bounds. To bring
+the province to order proved a longer and a harder
+task. Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the
+Rhine: "they rode the country by night," wrote
+the Earl, "like thieves, in parties of twenty or
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-039"></a>2-039]</span>
+
+thirty or forty," and gathered in leagues against
+the Seneschal, who set himself to exact their dues
+to the Crown and to shield merchant and husbandman
+from their violence. For four years Earl
+Simon steadily warred down these robber bands,
+storming castles where there was need, and bridling
+the wilder country with a chain of forts. Hard
+as the task was, his real difficulty lay at home.
+Henry sent neither money nor men; and the Earl
+had to raise both from his own resources, while the
+men whom he was fighting found friends in Henry's
+council-chamber. Again and again Simon was recalled
+to answer charges of tyranny and extortion
+made by the Gascon nobles and pressed by his
+enemies at home on the king. Henry's feeble and
+impulsive temper left him open to pressure like
+this; and though each absence of the Earl from the
+province was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder
+which only his presence repressed, the
+deputies of its nobles were still admitted to the
+council-table and commissions sent over to report
+on the Seneschal's administration. The strife
+came to a head in 1252, when the commissioners
+reported that stern as Simon's rule had been the
+case was one in which sternness was needful. The
+English barons supported Simon, and in the face of
+their verdict Henry was powerless. But the king
+was now wholly with his enemies; and his anger
+broke out in a violent altercation. The Earl
+offered to resign his post if the money he had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-040"></a>2-040]</span>
+
+spent was repaid him, and appealed to Henry's
+word. Henry hotly retorted that he was bound
+by no promise to a false traitor. Simon at once
+gave Henry the lie; "and but that thou bearest
+the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee
+when thou utteredst such a word!" A formal reconciliation
+was brought about, and the Earl once
+more returned to Gascony, but before winter had
+come he was forced to withdraw to France. The
+greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer
+which its nobles made him of the regency of their
+realm during the absence of King Lewis from the
+land. But the offer was refused; and Henry,
+who had himself undertaken the pacification of
+Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to
+recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed
+to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon's temper</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Earl's character had now thoroughly developed.
+He inherited the strict and severe piety
+of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance
+on religious services whether by night or day. In
+his correspondence with Adam Marsh we see him
+finding patience under his Gascon troubles in a
+perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure
+and singularly temperate; he was noted for his
+scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially
+he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his
+natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense of
+honour keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His
+impatience of contradiction, his fiery temper, were
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-041"></a>2-041]</span>
+
+in fact the great stumbling-blocks in his after
+career. His best friends marked honestly this
+fault, and it shows the greatness of the man that
+he listened to their remonstrances. "Better is a
+patient man," writes honest Friar Adam, "than a
+strong man, and he who can rule his own temper
+than he who storms a city." But the one characteristic
+which overmastered all was what men at that
+time called his "constancy," the firm immoveable
+resolve which trampled even death under foot in
+its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward
+the First chose as his device, "Keep troth," was
+far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see in
+his correspondence with what a clear discernment
+of its difficulties both at home and abroad he
+"thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of
+so great an exploit" as the reduction of Gascony
+to peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered
+in spite of the opposition he met with, the
+failure of all support or funds from England, and
+the king's desertion of his cause, till the work was
+done. There was the same steadiness of will and
+purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Robert
+Grosseteste show how early Simon had learned to
+sympathize with the Bishop in his resistance to
+Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offered
+him his own support and that of his associates.
+But Robert passed away, and as the tide of misgovernment
+mounted higher and higher the Earl
+silently trained himself for the day of trial. The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-042"></a>2-042]</span>
+
+fruit of his self-discipline was seen when the crisis
+came. While other men wavered and faltered
+and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people
+clung to the grave, stern soldier who "stood like
+a pillar," unshaken by promise or threat or fear of
+death, by the oath he had sworn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Matthew
+Paris</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Simon had been warring with Gascon
+rebels affairs in England had been going from bad
+to worse. The scourge of Papal taxation fell
+heavier on the clergy. After vain appeals to
+Rome and to the king, Archbishop Edmund retired
+to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-gatherer
+after tax-gatherer with powers of excommunication,
+suspension from orders, and presentation to benefices,
+descended on the unhappy priesthood. The
+wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance.
+Oxford gave the signal by hunting a Papal legate
+out of the city amid cries of "usurer" and
+"simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne
+in the name of the barons bade a Papal
+collector begone out of England. "If you tarry
+here three days longer," he added, "you and your
+company shall be cut to pieces." For a time
+Henry himself was swept away by the tide of
+national indignation. Letters from the king, the
+nobles, and the prelates, protested against the
+Papal exactions, and orders were given that no
+money should be exported from the realm. But
+the threat of interdict soon drove Henry back on
+a policy of spoliation in which he went hand in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-043"></a>2-043]</span>
+
+hand with Rome. The temper which this oppression
+begot among even the most sober churchmen
+has been preserved for us by an annalist whose
+pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic feeling.
+Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality
+is the last, of our monastic historians. The school
+of St. Alban's survived indeed till a far later time,
+but its writers dwindle into mere annalists whose
+view is bounded by the abbey precincts and whose
+work is as colourless as it is jejune. In Matthew
+the breadth and precision of the narrative, the
+copiousness of his information on topics whether
+national or European, the general fairness and
+justice of his comments, are only surpassed by the
+patriotic fire and enthusiasm of the whole. He
+had succeeded Roger of Wendover as chronicler at
+St. Alban's; and the Greater Chronicle with an
+abridgement of it which long passed under the
+name of Matthew of Westminster, a "History of
+the English," and the "Lives of the Earlier Abbots,"
+are only a few among the voluminous works which
+attest his prodigious industry. He was an artist
+as well as an historian, and many of the manuscripts
+which are preserved are illustrated by his own
+hand. A large circle of correspondents--bishops
+like Grosseteste, ministers like Hubert de Burgh,
+officials like Alexander de Swereford--furnished
+him with minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical
+proceedings. Pilgrims from the East and
+Papal agents brought news of foreign events to his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-044"></a>2-044]</span>
+
+scriptorium at St. Alban's. He had access to and
+quotes largely from state documents, charters, and
+exchequer rolls. The frequency of royal visits to
+the abbey brought him a store of political
+intelligence, and Henry himself contributed to the great
+chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a
+faithfulness the memory of his weakness and
+misgovernment. On one solemn feast-day the king
+recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the
+middle step between the floor and the throne
+begged him to write the story of the day's proceedings.
+While on a visit to St. Alban's he invited
+him to his table and chamber, and enumerated
+by name two hundred and fifty of the English
+baronies for his information. But all this royal
+patronage has left little mark on his work. "The
+case," as Matthew says, "of historical writers is
+hard, for if they tell the truth they provoke men,
+and if they write what is false they offend God."
+With all the fulness of the school of court
+historians, such as Benedict and Hoveden, to which
+in form he belonged, Matthew Paris combines an
+independence and patriotism which is strange to
+their pages. He denounces with the same unsparing
+energy the oppression of the Papacy and of
+the king. His point of view is neither that of a
+courtier nor of a churchman but of an Englishman,
+and the new national tone of his chronicle is but
+the echo of a national sentiment which at last
+bound nobles and yeomen and churchmen together
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-045"></a>2-045]</span>
+
+into a people resolute to wrest freedom from the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wales</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nation was outraged like the Church. Two
+solemn confirmations of the Charter failed to
+bring about any compliance with its provisions. In
+1248, in 1249, and again in 1255 the great Council
+fruitlessly renewed its demand for a regular
+ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to
+enforce good government was seen in their offer of
+a grant on condition that the great officers of the
+Crown were appointed in the Council of the
+Baronage.  But Henry refused their offer with scorn
+and sold his plate to the citizens of London to find
+payment for his household. A spirit of mutinous
+defiance broke out on the failure of all legal remedy.
+When the Earl of Norfolk refused him aid Henry
+answered with a threat. "I will send reapers and
+reap your fields for you," he said. "And I will
+send you back the heads of your reapers," replied
+the Earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court
+and the refusal of supplies, the Crown was in fact
+penniless; and yet never was money more wanted,
+for a trouble which had long pressed upon the
+English kings had now grown to a height that
+called for decisive action. Even his troubles at
+home could not blind Henry to the need of dealing
+with the difficulty of Wales. Of the three Welsh
+states into which all that remained unconquered
+of Britain had been broken by the victories of
+Deorham and Chester, two had long ceased to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-046"></a>2-046]</span>
+
+exist. The country between the Clyde and the
+Dee had been gradually absorbed by the conquests
+of Northumbria and the growth of the Scot
+monarchy. West Wales, between the British Channel
+and the estuary of the Severn, had yielded to the
+sword of Ecgberht. But a fiercer resistance prolonged
+the independence of the great central portion
+which alone in modern language preserves the
+name of Wales. Comprising in itself the largest
+and most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was
+aided in its struggle against Mercia by the weakness
+of its assailant, the youngest and feeblest of
+the English states, as well as by an internal warfare
+which distracted the energies of the invaders.
+But Mercia had no sooner risen to supremacy
+among the English kingdoms than it took the work
+of conquest vigorously in hand. Offa tore from
+Wales the border-land between the Severn and
+the Wye; the raids of his successors carried fire
+and sword into the heart of the country; and an
+acknowledgement of the Mercian overlordship was
+wrested from the Welsh princes. On the fall of
+Mercia this overlordship passed to the West-Saxon
+kings, and the Laws of Howel Dda own the payment
+of a yearly tribute by "the prince of Aberffraw"
+to "the King of London." The weakness
+of England during her long struggle with the Danes
+revived the hopes of British independence; it was
+the co-operation of the Welsh on which the northmen
+reckoned in their attack on the house of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-047"></a>2-047]</span>
+
+Ecgberht. But with the fall of the Danelaw the
+British princes were again brought to submission,
+and when in the midst of the Confessor's reign the
+Welsh seized on a quarrel between the houses of
+Leofric and Godwine to cross the border and carry
+their attacks into England itself, the victories of
+Harold reasserted the English supremacy.
+Disembarking on the coast his light-armed troops he
+penetrated to the heart of the mountains, and the
+successors of the Welsh prince Gruffydd, whose
+head was the trophy of the campaign, swore to
+observe the old fealty and render the old tribute
+to the English Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wales and the Normans</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A far more desperate struggle began when the
+wave of Norman conquest broke on the Welsh
+frontier. A chain of great earldoms, settled by
+William along the border-land, at once bridled the
+old marauding forays. From his county palatine
+of Chester Hugh the Wolf harried Flintshire into
+a desert, Robert of Belesme in his earldom of
+Shrewsbury "slew the Welsh," says a chronicler,
+"like sheep, conquered them, enslaved them and
+flayed them with nails of iron." The earldom of
+Gloucester curbed Britain along the lower Severn.
+Backed by these greater baronies a horde of lesser
+adventurers obtained the royal "licence to make
+conquest on the Welsh." Monmouth and Abergavenny
+were seized and guarded by Norman castellans;
+Bernard of Neufmarché won the lordship
+of Brecknock; Roger of Montgomery raised
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-048"></a>2-048]</span>
+
+the town and fortress in Powysland which still
+preserves his name. A great rising of the whole
+people in the days of the second William won
+back some of this Norman spoil. The new castle
+of Montgomery was burned, Brecknock and
+Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and the
+Welsh poured ravaging over the English border.
+Twice the Red King carried his arms fruitlessly
+among the mountains against enemies who took
+refuge in their fastnesses till famine and hardship
+drove his broken host into retreat. The wiser
+policy of Henry the First fell back on his father's
+system of gradual conquest. A new tide of invasion
+flowed along the southern coast, where the
+land was level and open and accessible from the
+sea. The attack was aided by strife in the country
+itself. Robert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Gloucester,
+was summoned to his aid by a Welsh chieftain;
+and his defeat of Rhys ap Tewdor, the last
+prince under whom Southern Wales was united,
+produced an anarchy which enabled Robert to
+land safely on the coast of Glamorgan, to conquer
+the country round, and to divide it among his
+soldiers. A force of Flemings and Englishmen
+followed the Earl of Clare as he landed near
+Milford Haven and pushing back the British
+inhabitants settled a "Little England" in the
+present Pembrokeshire. A few daring adventurers
+accompanied the Norman Lord of Kemeys
+into Cardigan, where land might be had for the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-049"></a>2-049]</span>
+
+winning by any one who would "wage war on the Welsh."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Welsh Revival</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation
+of the British race seemed at hand, that
+a new outburst of energy rolled back the tide of
+invasion and changed the fitful resistance of the
+separate Welsh provinces into a national effort to
+regain independence. To all outer seeming Wales
+had become utterly barbarous. Stripped of every
+vestige of the older Roman civilization by ages of
+bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement from
+the general culture of Christendom, the
+unconquered Britons had sunk into a mass of savage
+herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk
+of the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and
+revengeful, retaining no higher political
+organization than that of the clan, their strength
+was broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united
+only in battle or in raid against the stranger. But
+in the heart of the wild people there still lingered
+a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it
+four hundred years before through Aneurin and
+Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest
+Englishmen. At the hour of its lowest degradation
+the silence of Wales was suddenly broken by
+a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth
+century burst forth, not from one bard or another,
+but from the nation at large. The Welsh temper
+indeed was steeped in poetry. "In every house,"
+says the shrewd Gerald de Barri, "strangers who
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-050"></a>2-050]</span>
+
+arrived in the morning were entertained till eventide
+with the talk of maidens and the music of the
+harp." A romantic literature, which was destined
+to leaven the fancy of western Europe, had grown
+up among this wild people and found an admirable
+means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language
+was as real a developement of the old Celtic
+language heard by Cæsar as the Romance tongues
+are developements of Cæsar's Latin, but at a far
+earlier date than any other language of modern
+Europe it had attained to definite structure and to
+settled literary form. No other mediæval literature
+shows at its outset the same elaborate and
+completed organization as that of the Welsh. But
+within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played
+with a startling freedom. In one of the later poems
+Gwion the Little transforms himself into a hare, a
+fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the
+symbol of the strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy
+embodies itself in the romantic tales which reached
+their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Welsh Poetry</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion"
+flings defiance to all fact, tradition, probability,
+and revels in the impossible and unreal. When
+Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship
+of glass. The "descent into hell," as a Celtic poet
+paints it, shakes off the mediæval horror with the
+mediæval reverence, and the knight who achieves
+the quest spends his years of infernal durance in
+hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with fair
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-051"></a>2-051]</span>
+
+women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world
+of pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels and
+enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is
+broken by the hermit's bell and sunny glades
+where the light plays on the hero's armour. Each
+figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is
+bright with glancing colour. "The maiden was
+clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about
+her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were
+precious emeralds and rubies. Her head was of
+brighter gold than the flower of the broom, her
+skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and
+fairer were her hands and her fingers than the
+blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of
+the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained
+hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not brighter
+than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the
+breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder
+than the reddest roses." Everywhere there is an
+Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the
+gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The sensibility
+of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive beauty,
+so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its
+adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a
+passionate melancholy that expresses its revolt
+against the impossible, by an instinct of what is
+noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird
+charm of nature. The wildest extravagance of
+the tale-teller is relieved by some graceful play of
+pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, some
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-052"></a>2-052]</span>
+
+magical touch of beauty. As Kulwch's greyhounds
+bound from side to side of their master's
+steed, they "sport round him like two sea-swallows."
+His spear is "swifter than the fall of
+the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the
+earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest."
+A subtle, observant love of nature and natural
+beauty takes fresh colour from the passionate
+human sentiment with which it is imbued. "I
+love the birds" sings Gwalchmai "and their sweet
+voices in the lulling songs of the wood"; he
+watches at night beside the fords "among the
+untrodden grass" to hear the nightingale and
+watch the play of the sea-mew. Even patriotism
+takes the same picturesque form. The Welsh
+poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the
+Saxon; as he dwells on his own he tells of "its
+sea-coast and its mountains, its towns on the
+forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its
+waters, and its valleys, its white sea-mews, its
+beauteous women." Here as everywhere the
+sentiment of nature passes swiftly and subtly
+into the sentiment of a human tenderness: "I
+love its fields clothed with tender trefoil" goes on
+the song; "I love the marches of Merioneth where
+my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm." In
+the Celtic love of woman there is little of the
+Teutonic depth and earnestness, but in its stead a
+childlike spirit of delicate enjoyment, a faint
+distant flush of passion like the rose-light of dawn
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-053"></a>2-053]</span>
+
+on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in
+beauty. "White is my love as the apple-blossom,
+as the ocean's spray; her face shines like the
+pearly dew on Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is
+like the light of sunset." The buoyant and elastic
+temper of the French trouveur was spiritualized
+in the Welsh singers by a more refined poetic
+feeling. "Whoso beheld her was filled with her
+love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever
+she trod." A touch of pure fancy such as this
+removes its object out of the sphere of passion
+into one of delight and reverence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Bards</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is strange to pass from the world of actual
+Welsh history into such a world as this. But side by
+side with this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy and
+romance ran a torrent of intenser song. The spirit
+of the earlier bards, their joy in battle, their love
+of freedom, broke out anew in ode after ode, in
+songs extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, but
+fused into poetry by the intense fire of patriotism
+which glowed within them. Every fight, every
+hero had its verse. The names of older singers,
+of Taliesin, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, were
+revived in bold forgeries to animate the national
+resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in
+North Wales that the spirit of patriotism received
+its strongest inspiration from this burst of song.
+Again and again Henry the Second was driven
+to retreat from the impregnable fastnesses where
+the "Lords of Snowdon," the princes of the house
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-054"></a>2-054]</span>
+
+of Gruffydd ap Conan, claimed supremacy over
+the whole of Wales. Once in the pass of Consilt
+a cry arose that the king was slain, Henry of
+Essex flung down the royal standard, and the
+king's desperate efforts could hardly save his army
+from utter rout. The bitter satire of the Welsh
+singers bade him knight his horse, since its speed
+had alone saved him from capture. In a later
+campaign the invaders were met by storms of rain,
+and forced to abandon their baggage in a headlong
+flight to Chester. The greatest of the Welsh odes,
+that known to English readers in Gray's translation
+as "The Triumph of Owen," is Gwalchmai's song
+of victory over the repulse of an English fleet from
+Abermenai.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Llewelyn ap Jorwerth</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth
+seemed destined to realize the hopes of his countrymen.
+The homage which he succeeded in extorting
+from the whole of the Welsh chieftains during
+a reign which lasted from 1194 to 1246 placed him
+openly at the head of his race, and gave a new
+character to its struggle with the English king.
+In consolidating his authority within his own
+domains, and in the assertion of his lordship over
+the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth
+aimed steadily at securing the means of striking
+off the yoke of the Saxon. It was in vain that
+John strove to buy his friendship by the hand of
+his natural daughter Johanna. Fresh raids on the
+Marches forced the king to enter Wales in 1211;
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-055"></a>2-055]</span>
+
+but though his army reached Snowdon it fell back
+like its predecessors, starved and broken before an
+enemy it could never reach. A second attack in
+the same year had better success. The chieftains
+of South Wales were drawn from their new allegiance
+to join the English forces, and Llewelyn,
+prisoned in his fastnesses, was at last driven to
+submit. But the ink of the treaty was hardly dry
+before Wales was again on fire; a common fear of
+the English once more united its chieftains, and
+the war between John and his barons soon removed
+all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his
+allegiance to an excommunicated king, and allied
+with the barons under Fitz-Walter--too glad to enlist
+in their cause a prince who could hold in check
+the nobles of the border country where the royalist
+cause was strongest--Llewelyn seized his opportunity
+to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex Powys, the
+central district of Wales where the English influence
+had always been powerful, to clear the
+royal garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardigan,
+and to force even the Flemings of Pembroke to do
+him homage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Llewelyn
+and the
+Bards</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+England watched these efforts of the subject
+race with an anger still mingled with contempt.
+"Who knows not," exclaims Matthew Paris as he
+dwells on the new pretensions of the Welsh ruler,
+"who knows not that the Prince of Wales is a
+petty vassal of the King of England?" But the
+temper of Llewelyn's own people was far other
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-056"></a>2-056]</span>
+
+than the temper of the English chronicler. The
+hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each
+triumph of the Lord of Snowdon. His court was
+crowded with bardic singers. "He pours," sings
+one of them, "his gold into the lap of the bard as
+the ripe fruit falls from the trees." Gold however
+was hardly needed to wake their enthusiasm.
+Poet after poet sang of "the Devastator of England,"
+the "Eagle of men that loves not to lie nor
+sleep," "towering above the rest of men with his
+long red lance," his "red helmet of battle crested
+with a fierce wolf." "The sound of his coming is
+like the roar of the wave as it rushes to the shore,
+that can neither be stayed nor hushed." Lesser
+bards strung together Llewelyn's victories in rough
+jingle of rime and hounded him on to the slaughter.
+"Be of good courage in the slaughter," sings Elidir,
+"cling to thy work, destroy England, and plunder
+its multitudes." A fierce thirst for blood runs
+through the abrupt, passionate verses of the court
+singers. "Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken
+in heaps," bursts out a triumphant bard; "St.
+Clears, with its bright white lands, it is not Saxons
+who hold it now!" "In Swansea, the key of
+Lloegria, we made widows of all the wives." "The
+dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to
+feast with the leader of wolves and with hovering
+ravens glutted with flesh, butchers with keen
+scent of carcases." "Better," closes the song,
+"better the grave than the life of man who sighs
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-057"></a>2-057]</span>
+
+when the horns call him forth, to the squares of
+battle."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Welsh
+hopes</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out
+of the mere mob of chieftains who live by rapine,
+and boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from hand
+to hand through the hall that "they take and give
+no quarter." "Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious,"
+he was "the great Caesar" who was to
+gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of
+the Celtic race. Mysterious prophecies, the
+prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from
+lip to lip and were heard even along the Seine and
+the Rhine, came home again to nerve Wales to
+its last struggle with the stranger. Medrawd and
+Arthur, men whispered, would appear once more
+on earth to fight over again the fatal battle of
+Camlan in which the hero-king perished. The
+last conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still
+lived to combat for his people. The supposed
+verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope of a
+restoration of the Cymry. "In their hands shall
+be all the land from Britanny to Man: ... a
+rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving
+out of Britain back again to their fatherland."
+Gathered up in the strange work of Geoffry of
+Monmouth, these predictions had long been making
+a deep impression not on Wales only but on its
+conquerors. It was to meet the dreams of a yet
+living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king
+at Glastonbury was found and visited by
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-058"></a>2-058]</span>
+
+Henry the Second. But neither trick nor conquest
+could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the
+ultimate victory of his race. "Think you," said
+Henry to a Welsh chieftain who joined his host,
+"that your people of rebels can withstand my
+army?" "My people," replied the chieftain, "may
+be weakened by your might, and even in great
+part destroyed, but unless the wrath of God be on
+the side of its foe it will not perish utterly. Nor
+deem I that other race or other tongue will
+answer for this corner of the world before the
+Judge of all at the last day save this people and
+tongue of Wales." So ran the popular rime,
+"Their Lord they will praise, their speech they
+shall keep, their land they shall lose--except wild
+Wales."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Provisions of Oxford</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Faith and prophecy seemed justified by the
+growing strength of the British people. The
+weakness and dissensions which characterized the
+reign of Henry the Third enabled Llewelyn ap
+Jorwerth to preserve a practical independence till
+the close of his life, when a fresh acknowledgement
+of the English supremacy was wrested from
+him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs
+of his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of
+Gruffydd, who followed him in 1246. The raids
+of the new chieftain swept the border to the very
+gates of Chester, while his conquest of Glamorgan
+seemed to bind the whole people together in a
+power strong enough to meet any attack from the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-059"></a>2-059]</span>
+
+stranger. So pressing was the danger that it
+called the king's eldest son, Edward, to the field;
+but his first appearance in arms ended in a crushing
+defeat. The defeat however remained unavenged.
+Henry's dreams were of mightier enterprises
+than the reduction of the Welsh. The
+Popes were still fighting their weary battle against
+the House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its
+kingdom of Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited
+fief of the Holy See, to any power that
+would aid them in the struggle. In 1254 it was
+offered to the king's second son, Edmund. With
+imbecile pride Henry accepted the offer, prepared
+to send an army across the Alps, and pledged
+England to repay the sums which the Pope was
+borrowing for the purposes of his war. In a
+Parliament at the opening of 1257 he demanded
+an aid and a tenth from the clergy. A fresh
+demand was made in 1258. But the patience of
+the realm was at last exhausted. Earl Simon had
+returned in 1253 from his government of Gascony,
+and the fruit of his meditations during the four
+years of his quiet stay at home, a quiet broken
+only by short embassies to France and Scotland
+which showed there was as yet no open quarrel
+with Henry, was seen in a league of the baronage
+and in their adoption of a new and startling
+policy. The past half-century had shown both
+the strength and weakness of the Charter: its
+strength as a rallying-point for the baronage and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-060"></a>2-060]</span>
+
+a definite assertion of rights which the king could
+be made to acknowledge; its weakness in providing
+no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations.
+Henry had sworn again and again to
+observe the Charter and his oath was no sooner
+taken than it was unscrupulously broken. The
+barons had secured the freedom of the realm; the
+secret of their long patience during the reign of
+Henry lay in the difficulty of securing its right
+administration. It was this difficulty which Earl
+Simon was prepared to solve when action was
+forced on him by the stir of the realm. A great
+famine added to the sense of danger from Wales
+and from Scotland and to the irritation at the new
+demands from both Henry and Rome with which
+the year 1258 opened. It was to arrange for a
+campaign against Wales that Henry called a parliament
+in April. But the baronage appeared in
+arms with Gloucester and Leicester at their head.
+The king was forced to consent to the appointment
+of a committee of twenty-four to draw up
+terms for the reform of the state. The Twenty-four
+again met the Parliament at Oxford in June,
+and although half the committee consisted of royal
+ministers and favourites it was impossible to resist
+the tide of popular feeling. Hugh Bigod, one of
+the firmest adherents of the two Earls, was chosen
+as Justiciar. The claim to elect this great officer
+was in fact the leading point in the baronial
+policy. But further measures were needed to hold
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-061"></a>2-061]</span>
+
+in check such arbitrary misgovernment as had
+prevailed during the last twenty years. By the
+"Provisions of Oxford" it was agreed that the
+Great Council should assemble thrice in the year,
+whether summoned by the king or no; and on
+each occasion "the Commonalty shall elect twelve
+honest men who shall come to the Parliaments,
+and at other times when occasion shall be when
+the King and his Council shall send for them, to
+treat of the wants of the king and of his kingdom.
+And the Commonalty shall hold as established
+that which these Twelve shall do." Three permanent
+committees of barons and prelates were
+named to carry out the work of reform and
+administration. The reform of the Church was
+left to the original Twenty-four; a second Twenty-four
+negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent
+Council of Fifteen advised the king in the ordinary
+work of government. The complexity of
+such an arrangement was relieved by the fact that
+the members of each of these committees were in
+great part the same persons. The Justiciar,
+Chancellor, and the guardians of the king's
+castles swore to act only with the advice and
+assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two
+great officers, with the Treasurer, were to give
+account of their proceedings to it at the end of the
+year. Sheriffs were to be appointed for a single
+year only, no doubt by the Council, from among
+the chief tenants of the county, and no undue
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-062"></a>2-062]</span>
+
+fees were to be exacted for the administration of
+justice in their court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Government
+of the
+Barons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A royal proclamation in the English tongue,
+the first in that tongue since the Conquest which
+has reached us, ordered the observance of these
+Provisions. The king was in fact helpless, and
+resistance came only from the foreign favourites,
+who refused to surrender the castles and honours
+which had been granted to them. But the
+Twenty-four were resolute in their action; and an
+armed demonstration of the barons drove the
+foreigners in flight over sea. The whole royal
+power was now in fact in the hands of the
+committees appointed by the Great Council. But
+the measures of the barons showed little of the
+wisdom and energy which the country had hoped
+for. In October 1259 the knighthood complained
+that the barons had done nothing but seek their
+own advantage in the recent changes. This protest
+produced the Provisions of Westminster, which
+gave protection to tenants against their feudal lords,
+regulated legal procedure in the feudal courts,
+appointed four knights in each shire to watch the
+justice of the sheriffs, and made other temporary
+enactments for the furtherance of justice. But
+these Provisions brought little fruit, and a tendency
+to mere feudal privilege showed itself in an exemption
+of all nobles and prelates from attendance at
+the Sheriff's courts. Their foreign policy was
+more vigorous and successful.  All further payment
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-063"></a>2-063]</span>
+
+to Rome, whether secular or ecclesiastical,
+was prohibited, formal notice was given to the Pope
+of England's withdrawal from the Sicilian enterprise,
+peace put an end to the incursions of the
+Welsh, and negotiations on the footing of a formal
+abandonment of the king's claim to Normandy,
+Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in
+October 1259 in a peace with France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon and the Baronage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This peace, the triumph of that English policy
+which had been struggling ever since the days of
+Hubert de Burgh with the Continental policy of
+Henry and his foreign advisers, was the work of
+the Earl of Leicester. The revolution had doubtless
+been mainly Simon's doing. In the summer
+of 1258, while the great change was going on, a
+thunderstorm drove the king as he passed along
+the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham
+where the Earl was then sojourning. Simon bade
+Henry take shelter with him and have no fear of
+the storm. The king refused with petulant wit.
+"If I fear the thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more
+than all the thunder in the world." But Simon
+had probably small faith in the cumbrous system
+of government which the Barons devised, and it
+was with reluctance that he was brought to swear
+to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it.
+With their home government he had little to do,
+for from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he
+was chiefly busied in negotiation in France.
+But already his breach with Gloucester and the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-064"></a>2-064]</span>
+
+bulk of his fellow councillors was marked. In the
+Lent Parliament of 1259 he had reproached them,
+and Gloucester above all, with faithlessness to their
+trust. "The things we are treating of," he cried,
+"we have sworn to carry out. With such feeble
+and faithless men I care not to have ought to do!"
+The peace with France was hardly signed when
+his distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's
+withdrawal to the French court at the close of the
+year for the formal signature of the treaty was the
+signal for a reactionary movement. From France
+the king forbade the summoning of a Lent Parliament
+in 1260 and announced his resumption of the
+enterprise against Sicily. Both acts were distinct
+breaches of the Provisions of Oxford, but Henry
+trusted to the divisions of the Twenty-four.
+Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester; the
+Justiciar, Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the
+spring; and both of these leaders drew cautiously
+to the king. Roger Mortimer and the Earls of
+Hereford and Norfolk more openly espoused the
+royal cause, and in February 1260 Henry had
+gained confidence enough to announce that as the
+barons had failed to keep their part of the Provisions
+he should not keep his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Counter
+Revolution</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Earl Simon almost alone remained unshaken.
+But his growing influence was seen in the appointment
+of his supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar
+in Bigod's place, while his strength was doubled
+by the accession of the King's son Edward to his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-065"></a>2-065]</span>
+
+side. In the moment of the revolution Edward
+had vehemently supported the party of the
+foreigners. But he had sworn to observe the
+Provisions, and the fidelity to his pledge which
+remained throughout his life the chief note of his
+temper at once showed itself. Like Simon he protested
+against the faithlessness of the barons in the
+carrying out of their reforms, and it was his strenuous
+support of the petition of the knighthood that
+brought about the additional Provisions of 1259.
+He had been brought up with Earl Simon's sons,
+and with the Earl himself his relations remained
+friendly even at the later time of their fatal
+hostilities. But as yet he seems to have had no
+distrust of Simon's purposes or policy. His adhesion
+to the Earl recalled Henry from France;
+and the king was at once joined by Gloucester in
+London while Edward and Simon remained without
+the walls. But the love of father and son
+proved too strong to bear political severance, and
+Edward's reconciliation foiled the Earl's plans.
+He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh
+troubles were breaking out, while Henry prepared
+to deal his final blow at the government which,
+tottering as it was, still held him in check. Rome
+had resented the measures which had put an end
+to her extortions, and it was to Rome that Henry
+looked for a formal absolution from his oath to
+observe the Provisions. In June 1261 he produced
+a Bull annulling the Provisions and freeing
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-066"></a>2-066]</span>
+
+him from his oath in a Parliament at Winchester.
+The suddenness of the blow forbade open protest
+and Henry quickly followed up his victory. Hugh
+Bigod, who had surrendered the Tower and Dover
+in the spring, surrendered the other castles he held
+in the autumn. Hugh Despenser was deposed
+from the Justiciarship and a royalist, Philip Basset,
+appointed in his place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon's rising</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The news of this counter-revolution reunited
+for a moment the barons. Gloucester joined Earl
+Simon in calling an autumn Parliament at St.
+Alban's, and in summoning to it three knights from
+every shire south of Trent. But the union was a
+brief one. Gloucester consented to refer the
+quarrel with the king to arbitration and the Earl
+of Leicester withdrew in August to France. He
+saw that for the while there was no means of withstanding
+Henry, even in his open defiance of the
+Provisions. Foreign soldiers were brought into
+the land; the king won back again the appointment
+of sheriffs. For eighteen months of this
+new rule Simon could do nothing but wait. But
+his long absence lulled the old jealousies against
+him. The confusion of the realm and a fresh outbreak
+of troubles in Wales renewed the disgust at
+Henry's government, while his unswerving faithfulness
+to the Provisions fixed the eyes of all
+Englishmen upon the Earl as their natural leader.
+The death of Gloucester in the summer of 1262
+removed the one barrier to action; and in the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-067"></a>2-067]</span>
+
+spring of 1263 Simon landed again in England as
+the unquestioned head of the baronial party.
+What immediately forced him to action was a
+march of Edward with a body of foreign troops
+against Llewelyn, who was probably by this time
+in communication if not in actual alliance with the
+Earl. The chief opponents of Llewelyn among
+the Marcher Lords were ardent supporters of
+Henry's misgovernment, and when a common
+hostility drew the Prince and Earl together, the
+constitutional position of Llewelyn as an English
+noble gave formal justification for co-operation
+with him. At Whitsuntide the barons met Simon
+at Oxford and finally summoned Henry to observe
+the Provisions. His refusal was met by an appeal
+to arms. Throughout the country the younger
+nobles flocked to Simon's standard, and the young
+Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, became his
+warmest supporter. His rapid movements foiled
+all opposition. While Henry vainly strove to
+raise money and men, Simon swept the Welsh
+border, marched through Reading on Dover, and
+finally appeared before London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Mise of Amiens</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Earl's triumph was complete. Edward
+after a brief attempt at resistance was forced to
+surrender Windsor and disband his foreign troops.
+The rising of London in the cause of the barons
+left Henry helpless. But at the moment of
+triumph the Earl saw himself anew forsaken.
+The bulk of the nobles again drew towards the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-068"></a>2-068]</span>
+
+king; only six of the twelve barons who had
+formed the patriot half of the committee of 1258,
+only four of the twelve representatives of the
+community at that date, were now with the Earl.
+The dread too of civil war gave strength to the
+cry for a compromise, and at the end of the year
+it was agreed that the strife should be left to the
+arbitration of the French king, Lewis the Ninth.
+But saint and just ruler as he was, the royal power
+was in the conception of Lewis a divine thing,
+which no human power could limit or fetter, and
+his decision, which was given in January 1264,
+annulled the whole of the Provisions. Only the
+Charters granted before the Provisions were to be
+observed. The appointment and removal of all
+officers of state was to be wholly with the king,
+and he was suffered to call aliens to his councils if
+he would. The Mise of Amiens was at once confirmed
+by the Pope, and, crushing blow as it was,
+the barons felt themselves bound by the award.
+It was only the exclusion of aliens--a point which
+they had not purposed to submit to arbitration--which
+they refused to concede. Luckily Henry
+was as inflexible on this point as on the rest, and
+the mutual distrust prevented any real accommodation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Battle of Lewes</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Henry had to reckon on more than the
+baronage. Deserted as he was by the greater
+nobles, Simon was far from standing alone.
+Throughout the recent struggle the new city
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-069"></a>2-069]</span>
+
+governments of the craft-gilds, which were known
+by the name of "Communes," had shown an
+enthusiastic devotion to his cause. The queen
+was stopped in her attempt to escape from the
+Tower by an angry mob, who drove her back with
+stones and foul words. When Henry attempted
+to surprise Leicester in his quarters at Southwark,
+the Londoners burst the gates which had been
+locked by the richer burghers against him, and
+rescued him by a welcome into the city. The
+clergy and the universities went in sympathy with
+the towns, and in spite of the taunts of the
+royalists, who accused him of seeking allies against
+the nobility in the common people, the popular
+enthusiasm gave a strength to the Earl which
+sustained him even in this darkest hour of the
+struggle. He at once resolved on resistance. The
+French award had luckily reserved the rights of
+Englishmen to the liberties they had enjoyed
+before the Provisions of Oxford, and it was easy
+for Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave
+to the Crown was as contrary to the Charter as
+to the Provisions themselves. London was the
+first to reject the decision; in March 1264 its
+citizens mustered at the call of the town-bell at
+Saint Paul's, seized the royal officials, and plundered
+the royal parks. But an army had already
+mustered in great force at the king's summons,
+while Leicester found himself deserted by the bulk
+of the baronage. Every day brought news of ill.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-070"></a>2-070]</span>
+
+A detachment from Scotland joined Henry's forces.
+The younger De Montfort was taken prisoner.
+Northampton was captured, the king raised the
+siege of Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl
+Simon's only saved London itself from a surprise
+by Edward. But, betrayed as he was, the Earl
+remained firm to the cause. He would fight to
+the end, he said, even were he and his sons left to
+fight alone. With an army reinforced by 15,000
+Londoners, he marched in May to the relief of the
+Cinque Ports which were now threatened by the
+king. Even on the march he was forsaken by
+many of the nobles who followed him. Halting at
+Fletching in Sussex, a few miles from Lewes,
+where the royal army was encamped, Earl Simon
+with the young Earl of Gloucester offered the
+king compensation for all damage if he would
+observe the Provisions. Henry's answer was one
+of defiance, and though numbers were against him,
+the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a soldier
+reversed the advantages of the ground; marching
+at dawn on the 14th of May he seized the heights
+eastward of the town, and moved down these slopes
+to an attack. His men with white crosses on back
+and breast knelt in prayer before the battle opened,
+and all but reached the town before their approach
+was perceived. Edward however opened the fight
+by a furious charge which broke the Londoners on
+Leicester's left. In the bitterness of his hatred for
+the insult to his mother he pursued them for four
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-071"></a>2-071]</span>
+
+miles, slaughtering three thousand men. But he
+returned to find the battle lost. Crowded in the
+narrow space between the heights and the river
+Ouse, a space broken by marshes and by the long
+street of the town, the royalist centre and left
+were crushed by Earl Simon. The Earl of Cornwall,
+now King of the Romans, who, as the mocking
+song of the victors ran, "makede him a castel
+of a mulne post" ("he weened that the mill-sails
+were mangonels" goes on the sarcastic verse), was
+taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.
+Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join
+in his father's surrender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon's rule</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the
+head of the state. "Now England breathes in the
+hope of liberty," sang a poet of the time; "the
+English were despised like dogs, but now they
+have lifted up their head and their foes are
+vanquished." But the moderation of the terms
+agreed upon in the Mise of Lewes, a convention
+between the king and his captors, shows Simon's
+sense of the difficulties of his position. The
+question of the Provisions was again to be submitted
+to arbitration; and a parliament in June, to which
+four knights were summoned from every county,
+placed the administration till this arbitration was
+complete in the hands of a new council of nine to
+be nominated by the Earls of Leicester and
+Gloucester and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester.
+Responsibility to the community was provided for
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-072"></a>2-072]</span>
+
+by the declaration of a right in the body of barons
+and prelates to remove either of the Three Electors,
+who in turn could displace or appoint the members
+of the Council. Such a constitution was of a
+different order from the cumbrous and oligarchical
+committees of 1258. But it had little time to
+work in. The plans for a fresh arbitration broke
+down. Lewis refused to review his decision, and
+all schemes for setting fresh judges between the
+king and his people were defeated by a formal
+condemnation of the barons' cause issued by the
+Pope. Triumphant as he was indeed Earl Simon's
+difficulties thickened every day. The queen with
+Archbishop Boniface gathered an army in France
+for an invasion; Roger Mortimer with the border
+barons was still in arms and only held in check by
+Llewelyn. It was impossible to make binding
+terms with an imprisoned king, yet to release
+Henry without terms was to renew the war. The
+imprisonment too gave a shock to public feeling
+which thinned the Earl's ranks. In the new
+Parliament which he called at the opening of
+1265 the weakness of the patriotic party among
+the baronage was shown in the fact that only
+twenty-three earls and barons could be found to
+sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Summons
+of the
+Commons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was just this sense of his weakness which
+prompted the Earl to an act that has done more
+than any incident of this struggle to immortalize
+his name. Had the strife been simply a strife for
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-073"></a>2-073]</span>
+
+power between the king and the baronage the
+victory of either would have been equally fatal in
+its results. The success of the one would have
+doomed England to a royal despotism, that of the
+other to a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our
+freedom the English baronage had been brought
+too low by the policy of the kings to be able to
+withstand the crown single-handed. From the
+first moment of the contest it had been forced to
+make its cause a national one. The summons of
+two knights from each county, elected in its county
+court, to a Parliament in 1254, even before the
+opening of the struggle, was a recognition of the
+political weight of the country gentry which was
+confirmed by the summons of four knights from
+every county to the Parliament assembled after
+the battle of Lewes. The Provisions of Oxford,
+in stipulating for attendance and counsel on the
+part of twelve delegates of the "commonalty,"
+gave the first indication of a yet wider appeal to
+the people at large. But it was the weakness of
+his party among the baronage at this great crisis
+which drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change
+of mighty issue in our history. As before, he
+summoned two knights from every county. But
+he created a new force in English politics when he
+summoned to sit beside them two citizens from
+every borough. The attendance of delegates from
+the towns had long been usual in the county courts
+when any matter respecting their interests was in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-074"></a>2-074]</span>
+
+question; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon
+that first summoned the merchant and the trader
+to sit beside the knight of the shire, the baron,
+and the bishop in the parliament of the realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon's
+difficulties</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only this great event however which
+enables us to understand the large and prescient
+nature of Earl Simon's designs. Hardly a few
+months had passed away since the victory of Lewes
+when the burghers took their seats at Westminster,
+yet his government was tottering to its fall. We
+know little of the Parliament's acts. It seems to
+have chosen Simon as Justiciar and to have provided
+for Edward's liberation, though he was still
+to live under surveillance at Hereford and to
+surrender his earldom of Chester to Simon, who
+was thus able to communicate with his Welsh
+allies. The Earl met the dangers from without
+with complete success. In September 1264 a
+general muster of the national forces on Barham
+Down and a contrary wind put an end to the
+projects of invasion entertained by the mercenaries
+whom the queen had collected in Flanders; the
+threats of France died away into negotiations; the
+Papal Legate was forbidden to cross the Channel,
+and his bulls of excommunication were flung into
+the sea. But the difficulties at home grew more
+formidable every day. The restraint upon Henry
+and Edward jarred against the national feeling of
+loyalty, and estranged the mass of Englishmen
+who always side with the weak.  Small as the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-075"></a>2-075]</span>
+
+patriotic party among the barons had been from
+the first, it grew smaller as dissensions broke out
+over the spoils of victory. The Earl's justice and
+resolve to secure the public peace told heavily
+against him. John Giffard left him because he
+refused to allow him to exact ransom from a
+prisoner, contrary to the agreement made after
+Lewes. A greater danger opened when the young
+Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the
+estates of the foreigners, held himself aloof from
+the Justiciar, and resented Leicester's prohibition
+of a tournament, his naming the wardens of the
+royal castles by his own authority, his holding
+Edward's fortresses on the Welsh marches by his
+own garrisons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward and
+Gloucester</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gloucester's later conduct proves the wisdom of
+Leicester's precautions. In the spring Parliament
+of 1265 he openly charged the Earl with violating
+the Mise of Lewes, with tyranny, and with aiming
+at the crown. Before its close he withdrew to his
+own lands in the west and secretly allied himself
+with Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Barons.
+Earl Simon soon followed him to the west, taking
+with him the king and Edward. He moved along
+the Severn, securing its towns, advanced westward
+to Hereford, and was marching at the end of May
+along bad roads into the heart of South Wales to
+attack the fortresses of Earl Gilbert in Glamorgan
+when Edward suddenly made his escape from
+Hereford and joined Gloucester at Ludlow. The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-076"></a>2-076]</span>
+
+moment had been skilfully chosen, and Edward
+showed a rare ability in the movements by which
+he took advantage of the Earl's position. Moving
+rapidly along the Severn he seized Gloucester and
+the bridges across the river, destroyed the ships
+by which Leicester strove to escape across the
+Channel to Bristol, and cut him off altogether
+from England. By this movement too he placed
+himself between the Earl and his son Simon, who
+was advancing from the east to his father's relief.
+Turning rapidly on this second force Edward surprised
+it at Kenilworth and drove it with heavy
+loss within the walls of the castle. But the success
+was more than compensated by the opportunity
+which his absence gave to the Earl of breaking
+the line of the Severn. Taken by surprise and
+isolated as he was, Simon had been forced to seek
+for aid and troops in an avowed alliance with
+Llewelyn, and it was with Welsh reinforcements
+that he turned to the east. But the seizure of his
+ships and of the bridges of the Severn held him a
+prisoner in Edward's grasp, and a fierce attack
+drove him back, with broken and starving forces,
+into the Welsh hills. In utter despair he struck
+northward to Hereford; but the absence of Edward
+now enabled him on the 2nd of August to throw
+his troops in boats across the Severn below
+Worcester. The news drew Edward quickly back
+in a fruitless counter-march to the river, for the
+Earl had already reached Evesham by a long night
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-077"></a>2-077]</span>
+
+march on the morning of the 4th, while his son,
+relieved in turn by Edward's counter-march, had
+pushed in the same night to the little town of
+Alcester. The two armies were now but some ten
+miles apart, and their junction seemed secured.
+But both were spent with long marching, and
+while the Earl, listening reluctantly to the request
+of the King who accompanied him, halted at
+Evesham for mass and dinner, the army of the
+younger Simon halted for the same purpose at
+Alcester.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Battle of Evesham</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Those two dinners doleful were, alas!" sings
+Robert of Gloucester; for through the same
+memorable night Edward was hurrying back from
+the Severn by country cross-lanes to seize the
+fatal gap that lay between them. As morning
+broke his army lay across the road that led northward
+from Evesham to Alcester. Evesham lies
+in a loop of the river Avon where it bends to the
+south; and a height on which Edward ranged his
+troops closed the one outlet from it save across
+the river. But a force had been thrown over the
+river under Mortimer to seize the bridges, and all
+retreat was thus finally cut off. The approach of
+Edward's army called Simon to the front, and for
+the moment he took it for his son's. Though the
+hope soon died away a touch of soldierly pride
+moved him as he recognised in the orderly advance
+of his enemies a proof of his own training. "By
+the arm of St. James," he cried, "they come on
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-078"></a>2-078]</span>
+
+in wise fashion, but it was from me that they
+learnt it." A glance however satisfied him of the
+hopelessness of a struggle; it was impossible for
+a handful of horsemen with a mob of half-armed
+Welshmen to resist the disciplined knighthood of
+the royal army. "Let us commend our souls to
+God," Simon said to the little group around him,
+"for our bodies are the foe's." He bade Hugh
+Despenser and the rest of his comrades fly from
+the field. "If he died," was the noble answer,
+"they had no will to live." In three hours the
+butchery was over. The Welsh fled at the first
+onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in
+the cornfields and gardens where they sought
+refuge. The little group of knights around Simon
+fought desperately, falling one by one till the
+Earl was left alone. So terrible were his sword-strokes
+that he had all but gained the hill-top
+when a lance-thrust brought his horse to the
+ground, but Simon still rejected the summons to
+yield till a blow from behind felled him mortally
+wounded to the ground. Then with a last cry of
+"It is God's grace," the soul of the great patriot
+passed away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Royalist reaction</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The triumphant blare of trumpets which welcomed
+the rescued king into Evesham, "his men
+weeping for joy," rang out in bitter contrast to
+the mourning of the realm. It sounded like the
+announcement of a reign of terror. The rights
+and laws for which men had toiled and fought so
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-079"></a>2-079]</span>
+
+long seemed to have been swept away in an hour.
+Every town which had supported Earl Simon was
+held to be at the king's mercy, its franchises to
+be forfeited. The Charter of Lynn was annulled;
+London was marked out as the special object of
+Henry's vengeance, and the farms and merchandise
+of its citizens were seized as first-fruits of its
+plunder. The darkness which on that fatal
+morning hid their books from the monks of
+Evesham as they sang in choir was but a presage
+of the gloom which fell on the religious houses.
+From Ramsey, from Evesham, from St. Alban's
+rose the same cry of havoc and rapine. But the
+plunder of monk and burgess was little to the
+vast sentence of confiscation which the mere fact
+of rebellion was held to have passed on all the
+adherents of Earl Simon. To "disinherit" these
+of their lands was to confiscate half the estates of
+the landed gentry of England; but the hotter
+royalists declared them disinherited, and Henry
+was quick to lavish their lands away on favourites
+and foreigners. The very chroniclers of their
+party recall the pillage with shame. But all
+thought of resistance lay hushed in a general
+terror. Even the younger Simon "saw no other
+rede" than to release his prisoners. His army,
+after finishing its meal, was again on its march to
+join the Earl when the news of his defeat met
+it, heralded by a strange darkness that, rising
+suddenly in the north-west and following as it
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-080"></a>2-080]</span>
+
+were on Edward's track, served to shroud the
+mutilations and horrors of the battle-field. The
+news was soon fatally confirmed. Simon himself
+could see from afar his father's head borne off on
+a spear-point to be mocked at Wigmore. But the
+pursuit streamed away southward and westward
+through the streets of Tewkesbury, heaped with
+corpses of the panic-struck Welshmen whom the
+townsmen slaughtered without pity; and there
+was no attack as the little force fell back through
+the darkness and big thunder-drops in despair
+upon Kenilworth. "I may hang up my axe," are
+the bitter words which a poet attributes to their
+leader, "for feebly have I gone"; and once
+within the castle he gave way to a wild sorrow,
+day after day tasting neither meat nor drink.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was roused into action again by news
+of the shameful indignities which the Marcher
+Lords had offered to the body of the great Earl
+before whom they had trembled so long. The
+knights around him broke out at the tidings in a
+passionate burst of fury, and clamoured for the
+blood of Richard of Cornwall and his son, who
+were prisoners in the castle. But Simon had
+enough nobleness left to interpose. "To God
+and him alone was it owing" Richard owned
+afterwards, "that I was snatched from death."
+The captives were not only saved, but set free.
+A Parliament had been called at Winchester at
+the opening of September, and its mere assembly
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-081"></a>2-081]</span>
+
+promised an end to the reign of utter lawlessness.
+A powerful party, too, was known to exist in the
+royal camp which, hostile as it had shown itself
+to Earl Simon, shared his love for English liberties,
+and the liberation of Richard was sure to aid its
+efforts. At the head of this party stood the
+young Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, to
+whose action above all the Earl's overthrow was
+due. And with Gilbert stood Edward himself.
+The passion for law, the instinct of good government,
+which were to make his reign so memorable
+in our history, had declared themselves from the
+first. He had sided with the barons at the outset
+of their struggle with Henry; he had striven to
+keep his father true to the Provisions of Oxford.
+It was only when the figure of Earl Simon seemed
+to tower above that of Henry himself, when the
+Crown seemed falling into bondage, that Edward
+passed to the royal side; and now that the danger
+which he dreaded was over he returned to his
+older attitude. In the first flush of victory, while
+the doom of Simon was as yet unknown, Edward
+had stood alone in desiring his captivity against
+the cry of the Marcher Lords for his blood. When
+all was done he wept over the corpse of his cousin
+and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and followed
+the Earl's body to the tomb. But great as was
+Edward's position after the victory of Evesham,
+his moderate counsels were as yet of little avail.
+His efforts in fact were met by those of Henry's
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-082"></a>2-082]</span>
+
+second son, Edmund, who had received the lands
+and earldom of Earl Simon, and whom the dread
+of any restoration of the house of De Montfort
+set at the head of the ultra-royalists. Nor was
+any hope of moderation to be found in the Parliament
+which met in September 1265. It met in
+the usual temper of a restoration-Parliament to
+legalize the outrages of the previous month. The
+prisoners who had been released from the dungeons
+of the barons poured into Winchester to add fresh
+violence to the demands of the Marchers. The
+wives of the captive loyalists and the widows of
+the slain were summoned to give fresh impulse to
+the reaction. Their place of meeting added fuel
+to the fiery passions of the throng, for Winchester
+was fresh from its pillage by the younger Simon
+on his way to Kenilworth, and its stubborn
+loyalty must have been fanned into a flame by
+the losses it had endured. In such an assembly
+no voice of moderation could find a hearing.
+The four bishops who favoured the national cause,
+the bishops of London and Lincoln, of Worcester
+and Chichester, were excluded from it, and the
+heads of the religious houses were summoned for
+the mere purpose of extortion. Its measures
+were but a confirmation of the violence which
+had been wrought. All grants made during the
+king's "captivity" were revoked. The house of
+De Montfort was banished from the realm. The
+charter of London was annulled. The adherents
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-083"></a>2-083]</span>
+
+of Earl Simon were disinherited and seizin of
+their lands was given to the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Simon's Miracles</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry at once appointed commissioners to
+survey and take possession of his spoil while he
+moved to Windsor to triumph in the humiliation
+of London. Its mayor and forty of its chief
+citizens waited in the castle yard only to be
+thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and
+Henry entered his capital in triumph as into an
+enemy's city. The surrender of Dover came to
+fill his cup of joy, for Richard and Amaury of
+Montfort had sailed with the Earl's treasure to
+enlist foreign mercenaries, and it was by this
+port that their force was destined to land. But a
+rising of the prisoners detained there compelled
+its surrender in October, and the success of the
+royalists seemed complete. In reality their difficulties
+were but beginning. Their triumph over
+Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious
+sentiment of the time, and religion avenged itself
+in its own way. Everywhere the Earl's death
+was looked upon as a martyrdom; and monk and
+friar united in praying for the souls of the men
+who fell at Evesham as for soldiers of Christ. It
+was soon whispered that heaven was attesting the
+sanctity of De Montfort by miracles at his tomb.
+How great was the effect of this belief was seen in
+the efforts of King and Pope to suppress the
+miracles, and in their continuance not only
+through the reign of Edward the First but even
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-084"></a>2-084]</span>
+
+in the days of his successor. But its immediate
+result was a sudden revival of hope. "Sighs are
+changed into songs of praise," breaks out a monk
+of the time, "and the greatness of our former joy
+has come to life again!" Nor was it in miracles
+alone that the "faithful," as they proudly styled
+themselves, began to look for relief "from the
+oppression of the malignants." A monk of St.
+Alban's who was penning a eulogy of Earl Simon
+in the midst of this uproar saw the rise of a new
+spirit of resistance in the streets of the little
+town. In dread of war it was guarded and
+strongly closed with bolts and bars, and refused
+entrance to all strangers, and above all to horsemen,
+who wished to pass through. The Constable
+of Hertford, an old foe of the townsmen, boasted
+that spite of bolts and bars he would enter the
+place and carry off four of the best villeins captive.
+He contrived to make his way in; but as he
+loitered idly about a butcher who passed by heard
+him ask his men how the wind stood. The
+butcher guessed his design to burn the town, and
+felled him to the ground. The blow roused the
+townsmen. They secured the Constable and his
+followers, struck off their heads, and fixed them
+at the four corners of the borough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Younger Simon</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The popular reaction gave fresh heart to the
+younger Simon. Quitting Kenilworth, he joined
+in November John D'Eyvill and Baldewin Wake in
+the Isle of Axholme where the Disinherited were
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-085"></a>2-085]</span>
+
+gathering in arms. So fast did horse and foot
+flow in to him that Edward himself hurried into
+Lincolnshire to meet this new danger. He saw
+that the old strife was just breaking out again.
+The garrison of Kenilworth scoured the country;
+the men of the Cinque Ports, putting wives and
+children on board their barks, swept the Channel
+and harried the coasts; while Llewelyn, who had
+brought about the dissolution of Parliament by a
+raid upon Chester, butchered the forces sent
+against him and was master of the border. The
+one thing needed to link the forces of resistance
+together was a head, and such a head the
+appearance of Simon at Axholme seemed to
+promise. But Edward was resolute in his plan of
+conciliation. Arriving before the camp at the
+close of 1265, he at once entered into negotiations
+with his cousin, and prevailed on him to quit the
+island and appear before the king. Richard of
+Cornwall welcomed Simon at the court, he
+presented him to Henry as the saviour of his life,
+and on his promise to surrender Kenilworth Henry
+gave him the kiss of peace. In spite of the
+opposition of Roger Mortimer and the Marcher
+Lords success seemed to be crowning this bold
+stroke of the peace party when the Earl of
+Gloucester interposed. Desirous as he was of
+peace, the blood of De Montfort lay between him
+and the Earl's sons, and the safety of the one lay
+in the ruin of the other. In the face of this
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-086"></a>2-086]</span>
+
+danger Earl Gilbert threw his weight into the scale
+of the ultra-royalists, and peace became impossible.
+The question of restitution was shelved by a
+reference to arbitrators; and Simon, detained in
+spite of a safe-conduct, moved in Henry's train at
+Christmas to witness the surrender of Kenilworth
+which had been stipulated as the price of his full
+reconciliation with the king. But hot blood was
+now stirred again on both sides. The garrison
+replied to the royal summons by a refusal to
+surrender. They had received ward of the castle,
+they said, not from Simon but from the Countess,
+and to none but her would they give it up. The
+refusal was not likely to make Simon's position an
+easier one. On his return to London the award
+of the arbitrators bound him to quit the realm and
+not to return save with the assent of king and
+baronage when all were at peace. He remained
+for a while in free custody at London; but
+warnings that he was doomed to lifelong imprisonment
+drove him to flight, and he finally sought a
+refuge over sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Ban of
+Kenilworth</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His escape set England again on fire. Llewelyn
+wasted the border; the Cinque Ports held the sea;
+the garrison of Kenilworth pushed their raids as
+far as Oxford; Baldewin Wake with a band of
+the Disinherited threw himself into the woods and
+harried the eastern counties; Sir Adam Gurdon, a
+knight of gigantic size and renowned prowess,
+wasted with a smaller party the shires of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-087"></a>2-087]</span>
+
+south. In almost every county bands of outlaws
+were seeking a livelihood in rapine and devastation,
+while the royal treasury stood empty and the
+enormous fine imposed upon London had been
+swept into the coffers of French usurers. But a
+stronger hand than the king's was now at the
+head of affairs, and Edward met his assailants
+with untiring energy. King Richard's son, Henry
+of Almaine, was sent with a large force to the
+north; Mortimer hurried to hold the Welsh
+border; Edmund was despatched to Warwick to
+hold Kenilworth in check; while Edward himself
+marched at the opening of March to the south.
+The Berkshire woods were soon cleared, and at
+Whitsuntide Edward succeeded in dispersing Adam
+Gurdon's band and in capturing its renowned
+leader in single combat. The last blow was
+already given to the rising in the north, where
+Henry of Almaine surprised the Disinherited at
+Chesterfield and took their leader, the Earl of
+Derby, in his bed. Though Edmund had done
+little but hold the Kenilworth knights in check,
+the submission of the rest of the country now
+enabled the royal army to besiege it in force. But
+the king was penniless, and the Parliament which
+he called to replenish his treasury in August
+showed the resolve of the nation that the strife
+should cease. They would first establish peace, if
+peace were possible, they said, and then answer
+the king's demand. Twelve commissioners, with
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-088"></a>2-088]</span>
+
+Earl Gilbert at their head, were appointed on
+Henry's assent to arrange terms on reconciliation.
+They at once decided that none should be utterly
+disinherited for their part in the troubles, but that
+liberty of redemption should be left open to all.
+Furious at the prospect of being forced to disgorge
+their spoil, Mortimer and the ultra-royalists broke
+out in mad threats of violence, even against the
+life of the Papal legate who had pressed for the
+reconciliation. But the power of the ultra-royalists
+was over. The general resolve was not to be
+shaken by the clamour of a faction, and Mortimer's
+rout at Brecknock by Llewelyn, the one defeat
+that chequered the tide of success, had damaged
+that leader's influence. Backed by Edward and
+Earl Gilbert, the legate met their opposition with
+a threat of excommunication, and Mortimer withdrew
+sullenly from the camp. Fresh trouble in
+the country and the seizure of the Isle of Ely by
+a band of the Disinherited quickened the labours
+of the Twelve. At the close of September they
+pronounced their award, restoring the lands to
+all who made submission on a graduated scale of
+redemption, promising indemnity for all wrong
+done during the troubles, and leaving the restoration
+of the house of De Montfort to the royal will.
+But to these provisions was added an emphatic
+demand that "the king fully keep and observe
+those liberties of the Church, charters of liberties,
+and forest charters, which he is expressly and by
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-089"></a>2-089]</span>
+
+his own mouth bound to preserve and keep."
+"Let the King," they add, "establish on a lasting
+foundation those concessions which he has hitherto
+made of his own will and not on compulsion, and
+those needful ordinances which have been devised
+by his subjects and by his own good pleasure."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Close of the Struggle</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this Award the struggle came to an end.
+The garrison of Kenilworth held out indeed till
+November, and the full benefit of the Ban was
+only secured when Earl Gilbert in the opening of
+the following year suddenly appeared in arms and
+occupied London. But the Earl was satisfied, the
+Disinherited were at last driven from Ely, and
+Llewelyn was brought to submission by the
+appearance of an army at Shrewsbury. All was
+over by the close of 1267. His father's age and
+weakness, his own brilliant military successes, left
+Edward practically in possession of the royal
+power; and his influence at once made itself felt.
+There was no attempt to return to the misrule of
+Henry's reign, to his projects of continental
+aggrandizement or internal despotism. The constitutional
+system of government for which the Barons
+had fought was finally adopted by the Crown, and
+the Parliament of Marlborough which assembled
+in November 1267 renewed the provisions by
+which the baronage had remedied the chief abuses
+of the time in their Provisions of Oxford and
+Westminster. The appointment of all officers of
+state indeed was jealously reserved to the crown.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-090"></a>2-090]</span>
+
+But the royal expenditure was brought within
+bounds. Taxation was only imposed with the
+assent of the Great Council. So utterly was the
+land at rest that Edward felt himself free to take
+the cross in 1268 and to join the Crusade which
+was being undertaken by St. Lewis of France.
+He reached Tunis only to find Lewis dead and his
+enterprise a failure, wintered in Sicily, made his
+way to Acre in the spring of 1271, and spent more
+than a year in exploits which want of force
+prevented from growing into a serious campaign.
+He was already on his way home when the death
+of Henry the Third in November 1272 called him
+to the throne.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-091"></a>2-091]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3-Ch4"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4537421"></a>CHAPTER IV</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4537427"></a>EDWARD THE FIRST</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4537432"></a>1272-1307</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward's Temper</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his own day and among his own subjects
+Edward the First was the object of an almost
+boundless admiration. He was in the truest
+sense a national king. At the moment when
+the last trace of foreign conquest passed away,
+when the descendants of those who won and
+those who lost at Senlac blended for ever into
+an English people, England saw in her ruler no
+stranger but an Englishman. The national tradition
+returned in more than the golden hair or the
+English name which linked him to our earlier
+kings. Edward's very temper was English to the
+core. In good as in evil he stands out as the
+typical representative of the race he ruled, like
+them wilful and imperious, tenacious of his rights,
+indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow
+of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like
+them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-092"></a>2-092]</span>
+
+conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and
+self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious.
+It is this oneness with the character of his people
+which parts the temper of Edward from what had
+till now been the temper of his house. He inherited
+indeed from the Angevins their fierce
+and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he
+punished in anger, were without pity; and a
+priest who ventured at a moment of storm into
+his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead
+from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature
+had nothing of the hard selfishness, the vindictive
+obstinacy which had so long characterized the
+house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it
+gathered; and for the most part his conduct was
+that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful, averse
+from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever
+asked mercy of me," he said in his old age, "and
+was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of his
+nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk
+where he lay on the bare ground among his men,
+or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to
+drink of the one cask of wine which had been
+saved from marauders. "It is I who have brought
+you into this strait," he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers,
+"and I will have no advantage of you in
+meat or drink." Beneath the stern imperiousness
+of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange tenderness
+and sensitiveness to affection. Every subject
+throughout his realm was drawn closer to the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-093"></a>2-093]</span>
+
+king who wept bitterly at the news of his
+father's death though it gave him a crown,
+whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out
+by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose
+as memorials of his love and sorrow at every
+spot where his wife's bier rested. "I loved her
+tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's
+friend, the Abbot of Cluny; "I do not cease to
+love her now she is dead." And as it was with
+mother and wife, so it was with his people at
+large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the
+foreign kings disappeared in Edward. He was the
+first English ruler since the Conquest who loved
+his people with a personal love and craved for
+their love back again. To his trust in them we
+owe our Parliament, to his care for them the
+great statutes which stand in the forefront of our
+laws. Even in his struggles with her England
+understood a temper which was so perfectly her
+own, and the quarrels between king and people
+during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly
+as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a
+moment the worth or affection of the other. Few
+scenes in our history are more touching than a
+scene during the long contest over the Charter,
+when Edward stood face to face with his people in
+Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears
+owned himself frankly in the wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Influence of Chivalry</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness
+to outer impressions and outer influences, that led
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-094"></a>2-094]</span>
+
+to the strange contradictions which meet us in
+Edward's career. His reign was a time in which a
+foreign, influence told strongly on our manners, our
+literature, our national spirit, for the sudden rise
+of France into a compact and organized monarchy
+was now making its influence dominant in Western
+Europe. The "chivalry" so familiar to us in the
+pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high
+sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy before
+which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared
+to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest
+caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to
+human suffering, was specially of French creation.
+There was a nobleness in Edward's nature from
+which the baser influences of this chivalry fell
+away. His life was pure, his piety, save when it
+stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and
+sincere, while his high sense of duty saved him
+from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors.
+But he was far from being wholly free from the
+taint of his age. His passionate desire was to be
+a model of the fashionable chivalry of his day.
+His frame was that of a born soldier--tall, deep-chested,
+long of limb, capable alike of endurance
+or action, and he shared to the full his people's
+love of venture and hard fighting. When he
+encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he
+forced him single-handed to beg for mercy. At
+the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer
+fighting in a tournament at Challon. It was this
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-095"></a>2-095]</span>
+
+love of adventure which lent itself to the frivolous
+unreality of the new chivalry. His fame as a
+general seemed a small thing to Edward when
+compared with his fame as a knight. At his
+"Round Table of Kenilworth" a hundred lords
+and ladies, "clad all in silk," renewed the faded
+glories of Arthur's Court. The false air of
+romance which was soon to turn the gravest
+political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental
+feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when
+rising at the royal board he swore on the dish
+before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of
+Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more
+fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy
+to the noble class and in its exclusion of the
+peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity.
+"Knight without reproach" as he was, he looked
+calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of
+Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but
+a common robber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Influence of Legality</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French notion of chivalry had hardly more
+power over Edward's mind than the French conception
+of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise
+of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary
+into written rights, allegiance into subjection,
+loose ties such as commendation into a
+definite vassalage. But it was specially through
+French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and
+his successors, that the imperial theories of the
+Roman Law were brought to bear upon this
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-096"></a>2-096]</span>
+
+natural tendency of the time. When the "sacred
+majesty" of the Cæsars was transferred by a legal
+fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage
+every constitutional relation was changed. The
+"defiance" by which a vassal renounced service
+to his lord became treason, his after resistance
+"sacrilege." That Edward could appreciate what
+was sound and noble in the legal spirit around
+him was shown in his reforms of our judicature
+and our Parliament; but there was something
+as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its
+rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never
+wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in
+his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take
+advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception
+of royalty which he borrowed from St.
+Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the
+worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties
+unregistered in charter or roll Edward would
+know nothing, while his own good sense was
+overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It
+was incredible to him that Scotland should revolt
+against a legal bargain which made her national
+independence conditional on the terms extorted
+from a claimant of her throne; nor could he view
+in any other light but as treason the resistance of
+his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which
+their fathers had borne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">His Moral Grandeur</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is in the anomalies of such a character as
+this, in its strange mingling of justice and wrong-doing,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-097"></a>2-097]</span>
+
+of grandeur and littleness, that we must
+look for any fair explanation of much that has
+since been bitterly blamed in Edward's conduct
+and policy. But what none of these anomalies
+can hide from us is the height of moral temper
+which shows itself in the tenor of his rule.
+Edward was every inch a king; but his notion
+of kingship was a lofty and a noble one. He
+loved power; he believed in his sovereign rights
+and clung to them with a stubborn tenacity. But
+his main end in clinging to them was the welfare
+of his people. Nothing better proves the self-command
+which he drew from the purpose he set
+before him than his freedom from the common
+sin of great rulers--the lust of military glory.
+He was the first of our kings since William the
+Conqueror who combined military genius with
+political capacity; but of the warrior's temper, of
+the temper that finds delight in war, he had little
+or none. His freedom from it was the more
+remarkable that Edward was a great soldier. His
+strategy in the campaign before Evesham marked
+him as a consummate general. Earl Simon was
+forced to admire the skill of his advance on the
+fatal field, and the operations by which he met
+the risings that followed it were a model of
+rapidity and military grasp. In his Welsh campaigns
+he was soon to show a tenacity and force
+of will which wrested victory out of the midst of
+defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-098"></a>2-098]</span>
+
+as at Lewes, or organize a commissariat which
+enabled him to move army after army across the
+harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick
+to discover the value of the English archery and
+to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk.
+But master as he was of the art of war, and forced
+from time to time to show his mastery in great
+campaigns, in no single instance was he the
+assailant. He fought only when he was forced
+to fight; and when fighting was over he turned
+back quietly to the work of administration and
+the making of laws.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">His Political
+Genius</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+War in fact was with Edward simply a means
+of carrying out the ends of statesmanship, and it
+was in the character of his statesmanship that his
+real greatness made itself felt. His policy was an
+English policy; he was firm to retain what was
+left of the French dominion of his race, but he
+abandoned from the first all dreams of recovering
+the wider dominions which his grandfather had
+lost. His mind was not on that side of the
+Channel, but on this. He concentrated his
+energies on the consolidation and good government
+of England itself. We can only fairly judge
+the annexation of Wales or his attempt to annex
+Scotland if we look on his efforts in either quarter
+as parts of the same scheme of national administration
+to which we owe his final establishment of
+our judicature, our legislation, our parliament.
+The character of his action was no doubt determined
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-099"></a>2-099]</span>
+
+in great part by the general mood of his
+age, an age whose special task and aim seemed to
+be that of reducing to distinct form the principles
+which had sprung into a new and vigorous life
+during the age which preceded it. As the opening
+of the thirteenth century had been an age of
+founders, creators, discoverers, so its close was an
+age of lawyers, of rulers such as St. Lewis of
+France or Alfonso the Wise of Castille, organizers,
+administrators, framers of laws and institutions.
+It was to this class that Edward himself belonged.
+He had little of creative genius, of political
+originality, but he possessed in a high degree the
+passion for order and good government, the
+faculty of organization, and a love of law which
+broke out even in the legal chicanery to which he
+sometimes stooped. In the judicial reforms to
+which so much of his attention was directed he
+showed himself, if not an "English Justinian," at
+any rate a clear-sighted and judicious man of
+business, developing, reforming, bringing into a
+shape which has borne the test of five centuries'
+experience the institutions of his predecessors. If
+the excellence of a statesman's work is to be
+measured by its duration and the faculty it has
+shown of adapting itself to the growth and
+developement of a nation, then the work of Edward
+rises to the highest standard of excellence. Our
+law courts preserve to this very day the form
+which he gave them. Mighty as has been the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-100"></a>2-100]</span>
+
+growth of our Parliament, it has grown on the
+lines which he laid down. The great roll of
+English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series
+to the Statutes of Edward. The routine of the
+first Henry, the administrative changes which
+had been imposed on the nation by the clear head
+and imperious will of the second, were transformed
+under Edward into a political organization
+with carefully-defined limits, directed not by the
+king's will alone but by the political impulse of
+the people at large. His social legislation was
+based in the same fashion on principles which had
+already been brought into practical working by
+Henry the Second. It was no doubt in great
+measure owing to this practical sense of its
+financial and administrative value rather than to
+any foresight of its political importance that we
+owe Edward's organization of our Parliament.
+But if the institutions which we commonly associate
+with his name owe their origin to others, they
+owe their form and their perpetuity to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Constitutional Aspect of his Reign</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king's English policy, like his English
+name, was in fact the sign of a new epoch. England
+was made. The long period of national
+formation had come practically to an end. With
+the reign of Edward begins the constitutional
+England in which we live. It is not that any
+chasm separates our history before it from our
+history after it as the chasm of the Revolution
+divides the history of France, for we have traced
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-101"></a>2-101]</span>
+
+the rudiments of our constitution to the first
+moment of the English settlement in Britain.
+But it is with these as with our language. The
+tongue of Ælfred is the very tongue we speak,
+but in spite of its identity with modern English it
+has to be learned like the tongue of a stranger.
+On the other hand, the English of Chaucer is
+almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the
+historian and philologer can study the origin and
+developement of our national speech, in the last a
+schoolboy can enjoy the story of Troilus and
+Cressida or listen to the gay chat of the Canterbury
+Pilgrims. In precisely the same way a
+knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for
+the right understanding of later legislation, its
+origin and its developement, while the principles
+of our Parliamentary system must necessarily be
+studied in the Meetings of Wise Men before the
+Conquest or the Great Council of barons after it.
+But the Parliaments which Edward gathered at
+the close of his reign are not merely illustrative of
+the history of later Parliaments, they are absolutely
+identical with those which still sit at St.
+Stephen's. At the close of his reign King, Lords,
+Commons, the Courts of Justice, the forms of
+public administration, the relations of Church and
+State, all local divisions and provincial jurisdictions,
+in great measure the framework of society
+itself, have taken the shape which they essentially
+retain. In a word the long struggle of the constitution
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-102"></a>2-102]</span>
+
+for actual existence has come to an end.
+The contests which follow are not contests that
+tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual
+fabric of our institutions; they are simply stages
+in the rough discipline by which England has
+learned and is still learning how best to use and
+how wisely to develope the latent powers of its
+national life, how to adjust the balance of its
+social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional
+forms to the varying conditions of the
+time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Earlier Finance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The news of his father's death found Edward
+at Capua in the opening of 1273; but the quiet
+of his realm under a regency of which Roger
+Mortimer was the practical head left him free to
+move slowly homewards. Two of his acts while
+thus journeying through Italy show that his mind
+was already dwelling on the state of English
+finance and of English law. His visit to the Pope
+at Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission
+to levy from the clergy a tenth of their income
+for the three coming years, while he drew from
+Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco Accursi,
+to aid in the task of legal reform. At Paris he
+did homage to Philip the Third for his French
+possessions, and then turning southward he
+devoted a year to the ordering of Gascony. It
+was not till the summer of 1274 that the king
+reached England. But he had already planned
+the work he had to do, and the measures which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-103"></a>2-103]</span>
+
+he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs
+of the spirit in which he was to set about it.
+The First Statute of Westminster was rather a
+code than a statute. It contained no less than
+fifty-one clauses, and was an attempt to summarize
+a number of previous enactments contained in the
+Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the
+Statute of Marlborough, as well as to embody
+some of the administrative measures of Henry the
+Second and his son. But a more pressing need
+than that of a codification of the law was the need
+of a reorganization of finance. While the necessities
+of the Crown were growing with the widening
+of its range of administrative action, the
+revenues of the Crown admitted of no corresponding
+expansion. In the earliest times of our history
+the outgoings of the Crown were as small as its
+income. All local expenses, whether for justice
+or road-making or fortress-building, were paid by
+local funds; and the national "fyrd" served at
+its own cost in the field. The produce of a king's
+private estates with the provisions due to him
+from the public lands scattered over each county,
+whether gathered by the king himself as he
+moved over his realm, or as in later days fixed
+at a stated rate and collected by his sheriff, were
+sufficient to defray the mere expenses of the
+Court. The Danish wars gave the first shock to
+this simple system. To raise a ransom which
+freed the land from the invader, the first land-tax,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-104"></a>2-104]</span>
+
+under the name of the Danegeld, was laid on
+every hide of ground; and to this national taxation
+the Norman kings added the feudal burthens
+of the new military estates created by the Conquest,
+reliefs paid on inheritance, profits of
+marriages and wardship, and the three feudal aids.
+But foreign warfare soon exhausted these means
+of revenue; the barons and bishops in their Great
+Council were called on at each emergency for a
+grant from their lands, and at each grant a corresponding
+demand was made by the king as a
+landlord on the towns, as lying for the most part
+in the royal demesne. The cessation of Danegeld
+under Henry the Second and his levy of scutage
+made little change in the general incidence of
+taxation: it still fell wholly on the land, for even
+the townsmen paid as holders of their tenements.
+But a new principle of taxation was disclosed in
+the tithe levied for a Crusade at the close of
+Henry's reign. Land was no longer the only
+source of wealth. The growth of national prosperity,
+of trade and commerce, was creating a
+mass of personal property which offered irresistible
+temptations to the Angevin financiers. The old
+revenue from landed property was restricted and
+lessened by usage and compositions. Scutage
+was only due for foreign campaigns: the feudal
+aids only on rare and stated occasions: and
+though the fines from the shire-courts grew with
+the growth of society the dues from the public
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-105"></a>2-105]</span>
+
+lands were fixed and incapable of developement.
+But no usage fettered the Crown in dealing with
+personal property, and its growth in value promised
+a growing revenue. From the close of
+Henry the Second's reign therefore this became
+the most common form of taxation. Grants of
+from a seventh to a thirtieth of moveables, household-property,
+and stock were demanded; and it
+was the necessity of procuring their assent to
+these demands which enabled the baronage
+through the reign of Henry the Third to bring a
+financial pressure to bear on the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Indirect Taxation</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in addition to these two forms of direct
+taxation indirect taxation also was coming more
+and more to the front. The right of the king to
+grant licences to bring goods into or to trade within
+the realm, a right springing from the need for his
+protection felt by the strangers who came there for
+purposes of traffic, laid the foundation of our taxes
+on imports. Those on exports were only a part of
+the general system of taxing personal property
+which we have already noticed. How tempting
+this source of revenue was proving we see from a
+provision of the Great Charter which forbids the
+levy of more than the ancient customs on merchants
+entering or leaving the realm. Commerce was in
+fact growing with the growing wealth of the people.
+The crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which
+date from this period shows the prosperity of the
+country. Christian architecture reached its highest
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-106"></a>2-106]</span>
+
+beauty in the opening of Edward's reign; a reign
+marked by the completion of the abbey church
+of Westminster and of the cathedral church at
+Salisbury. An English noble was proud to be
+styled "an incomparable builder," while some
+traces of the art which was rising into life across
+the Alps flowed in, it may be, with the Italian
+ecclesiastics whom the Papacy forced on the English
+Church. The shrine of the Confessor at Westminster,
+the mosaic pavement beside the altar of
+the abbey, the paintings on the walls of its chapterhouse
+remind us of the schools which were springing
+up under Giotto and the Pisans. But the
+wealth which this art progress shows drew trade
+to English shores. England was as yet simply an
+agricultural country. Gascony sent her wines;
+her linens were furnished by the looms of Ghent
+and Liége; Genoese vessels brought to her fairs
+the silks, the velvets, the glass of Italy. In the
+barks of the Hanse merchants came fur and amber
+from the Baltic, herrings, pitch, timber, and naval
+stores from the countries of the north. Spain
+sent us iron and war-horses. Milan sent armour.
+The great Venetian merchant-galleys touched the
+southern coasts and left in our ports the dates of
+Egypt, the figs and currants of Greece, the silk of
+Sicily, the sugar of Cyprus and Crete, the spices
+of the Eastern seas. Capital too came from abroad.
+The bankers of Florence and Lucca were busy
+with loans to the court or vast contracts with the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-107"></a>2-107]</span>
+
+wool-growers. The bankers of Cahors had already
+dealt a death-blow to the usury of the Jew.
+Against all this England had few exports to set.
+The lead supplied by the mines of Derbyshire,
+the salt of the Worcestershire springs, the iron
+of the Weald, were almost wholly consumed at
+home. The one metal export of any worth was
+that of tin from the tin-mines of Cornwall. But
+the production of wool was fast becoming a main
+element of the nation's wealth. Flanders, the
+great manufacturing country of the time, lay
+fronting our eastern coast; and with this market
+close at hand the pastures of England found more
+and more profit in the supply of wool. The
+Cistercian order which possessed vast ranges of
+moorland in Yorkshire became famous as wool-growers;
+and their wool had been seized for
+Richard's ransom. The Florentine merchants were
+developing this trade by their immense contracts;
+we find a single company of merchants contracting
+for the purchase of the Cistercian wool throughout
+the year. It was after counsel with the Italian
+bankers that Edward devised his scheme for drawing
+a permanent revenue from this source. In
+the Parliament of 1275 he obtained the grant of
+half a mark, or six shillings and eightpence, on
+each sack of wool exported; and this grant, a
+grant memorable as forming the first legal foundation
+of our customs-revenue, at once relieved the
+necessities of the Crown.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-108"></a>2-108]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Welsh Campaign</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grant of the wool tax enabled Edward in
+fact to deal with the great difficulty of his realm.
+The troubles of the Barons' war, the need which
+Earl Simon felt of Llewelyn's alliance to hold in
+check the Marcher Barons, had all but shaken off
+from Wales the last traces of dependence. Even
+at the close of the war the threat of an attack
+from the now united kingdom only forced Llewelyn
+to submission on a practical acknowledgement of
+his sovereignty. Although the title which Llewelyn
+ap Jorwerth claimed of Prince of North Wales was
+recognized by the English court in the earlier days
+of Henry the Third, it was withdrawn after 1229
+and its claimant known only as Prince of Aberffraw.
+But the loftier title of Prince of Wales which
+Llewelyn ap Gruffydd assumed in 1256 was
+formally conceded to him in 1267, and his right
+to receive homage from the other nobles of his
+principality was formally sanctioned. Near however
+as he seemed to the final realization of his
+aims, Llewelyn was still a vassal of the English
+Crown, and the accession of Edward to the throne
+was at once followed by the demand of homage.
+But the summons was fruitless; and the next two
+years were wasted in as fruitless negotiation. The
+kingdom, however, was now well in hand. The
+royal treasury was filled again, and in 1277 Edward
+marched on North Wales. The fabric of Welsh
+greatness fell at a single blow. The chieftains
+who had so lately sworn fealty to Llewelyn in the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-109"></a>2-109]</span>
+
+southern and central parts of the country deserted
+him to join his English enemies in their attack;
+an English fleet reduced Anglesea; and the Prince
+was cooped up in his mountain fastnesses and
+forced to throw himself on Edward's mercy. With
+characteristic moderation the conqueror contented
+himself with adding to the English dominions the
+coast-district as far as Conway and with providing
+that the title of Prince of Wales should cease at
+Llewelyn's death. A heavy fine which he had
+incurred by his refusal to do homage was remitted;
+and Eleanor, a daughter of Earl Simon of Montfort
+whom he had sought as his wife but who had been
+arrested on her way to him, was wedded to the
+Prince at Edward's court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Judicial
+Reforms</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For four years all was quiet across the Welsh
+Marches, and Edward was able again to turn his
+attention to the work of internal reconstruction.
+It is probably to this time, certainly to the earlier
+years of his reign, that we may attribute his
+modification of our judicial system. The King's
+Court was divided into three distinct tribunals,
+the Court of Exchequer which took cognizance of
+all causes in which the royal revenue was concerned;
+the Court of Common Pleas for suits between
+private persons; and the King's Bench, which had
+jurisdiction in all matters that affected the sovereign
+as well as in "pleas of the crown" or criminal causes
+expressly reserved for his decision. Each court
+was now provided with a distinct staff of judges.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-110"></a>2-110]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+Of yet greater importance than this change, which
+was in effect but the completion of a process of
+severance that had long been going on, was the
+establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by
+side with that of the common law. In his reform
+of 1178 Henry the Second broke up the older
+King's Court, which had till then served as the
+final Court of Appeal, by the severance of the
+purely legal judges who had been gradually added
+to it from the general body of his councillors.
+The judges thus severed from the Council retained
+the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of "the
+King's Court," but the mere fact of their severance
+changed in an essential way the character of the
+justice they dispensed. The King in Council
+wielded a power which was not only judicial but
+executive; his decisions though based upon custom
+were not fettered by it, they wore the expressions
+of his will, and it was as his will that they were
+carried out by officers of the Crown. But the
+separate bench of judges had no longer this unlimited
+power at their command. They had not
+the king's right as representative of the community
+to make the law for the redress of a wrong. They
+professed simply to declare what the existing law
+was, even if it was insufficient for the full purpose
+of redress. The authority of their decision rested
+mainly on their adhesion to ancient custom or as
+it was styled the "common law" which had grown
+up in the past. They could enforce their decisions
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-111"></a>2-111]</span>
+
+only by directions to an independent officer, the
+sheriff, and here again their right was soon rigidly
+bounded by set form and custom. These bonds
+in fact became tighter every day, for their decisions
+were now beginning to be reported, and the cases
+decided by one bench of judges became authorities
+for their successors. It is plain that such a state
+of things has the utmost value in many ways,
+whether in creating in men's minds that impersonal
+notion of a sovereign law which exercises
+its imaginative force on human action, or in furnishing
+by the accumulation and sacredness of precedents
+a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary
+power. But it threw a terrible obstacle in the
+way of the actual redress of wrong. The increasing
+complexity of human action as civilization
+advanced outstripped the efforts of the law. Sometimes
+ancient custom furnished no redress for a
+wrong which sprang from modern circumstances.
+Sometimes the very pedantry and inflexibility of
+the law itself became in individual cases the highest
+injustice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Equitable
+Jurisdiction</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the consciousness of this that made men
+cling even from the first moment of the independent
+existence of these courts to the judicial power
+which still remained inherent in the Crown itself.
+If his courts fell short in any matter the duty of
+the king to do justice to all still remained, and it
+was this obligation which was recognized in the
+provision of Henry the Second by which all cases
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-112"></a>2-112]</span>
+
+in which his judges failed to do justice were
+reserved for the special cognizance of the royal
+Council itself. To this final jurisdiction of the
+King in Council Edward gave a wide developement.
+His assembly of the ministers, the higher
+permanent officials, and the law officers of the
+Crown for the first time reserved to itself in its
+judicial capacity the correction of all breaches of
+the law which the lower courts had failed to
+repress, whether from weakness, partiality, or
+corruption, and especially of those lawless outbreaks
+of the more powerful baronage which
+defied the common authority of the judges. Such
+powers were of course capable of terrible abuse,
+and it shows what real need there was felt to be
+for their exercise that though regarded with
+jealousy by Parliament the jurisdiction of the
+royal Council appears to have been steadily put
+into force through the two centuries which
+followed. In the reign of Henry the Seventh it
+took legal and statutory form in the shape of the
+Court of Star Chamber, and its powers are still
+exercised in our own day by the Judicial
+Committee of the Privy Council. But the same
+duty of the Crown to do justice where its courts
+fell short of giving due redress for wrong expressed
+itself in the jurisdiction of the Chancellor. This
+great officer of State, who had perhaps originally
+acted only as President of the Council when
+discharging its judicial functions, acquired at a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-113"></a>2-113]</span>
+
+very early date an independent judicial position
+of the same nature. It is by remembering this
+origin of the Court of Chancery that we understand
+the nature of the powers it gradually
+acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially
+those which sprang from the misconduct of
+government officials or of powerful oppressors, fell
+within its cognizance as they fell within that of
+the Royal Council, and to these were added
+disputes respecting the wardship of infants, dower,
+rent-charges, or tithes. Its equitable jurisdiction
+sprang from the defective nature and the technical
+and unbending rules of the common law. As the
+Council had given redress in cases where law
+became injustice, so the Court of Chancery
+interfered without regard to the rules of procedure
+adopted by the common law courts on the petition
+of a party for whose grievance the common law
+provided no adequate remedy. An analogous
+extension of his powers enabled the Chancellor
+to afford relief in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse
+of trust, and this side of his jurisdiction was
+largely extended at a later time by the results of
+legislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical
+bodies. The separate powers of the Chancellor,
+whatever was the original date at which they
+were first exercised, seem to have been thoroughly
+established under Edward the First.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Law and the
+Baronage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What reconciled the nation to the exercise of
+powers such as these by the Crown and its council
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-114"></a>2-114]</span>
+
+was the need which was still to exist for centuries
+of an effective means of bringing the baronage
+within the reach of the law. Constitutionally the
+position of the English nobles had now become
+established. A king could no longer make laws
+or levy taxes or even make war without their
+assent. The nation reposed in them an unwavering
+trust, for they were no longer the brutal
+foreigners from whose violence the strong hand
+of a Norman ruler had been needed to protect his
+subjects; they were as English as the peasant or
+the trader. They had won English liberty by
+their swords, and the tradition of their order
+bound them to look on themselves as its natural
+guardians. The close of the Barons' War solved
+the problem which had so long troubled the realm,
+the problem how to ensure the government of the
+realm in accordance with the provisions of the
+Great Charter, by the transfer of the business of
+administration into the hands of a standing
+committee of the greater barons and prelates,
+acting as chief officers of state in conjunction with
+specially appointed ministers of the Crown. The
+body thus composed was known as the Continual
+Council; and the quiet government of the kingdom
+by this body in the long interval between the
+death of Henry the Third and his son's return
+shows how effective this rule of the nobles was.
+It is significant of the new relation which they
+were to strive to establish between themselves and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-115"></a>2-115]</span>
+
+the Crown that in the brief which announced
+Edward's accession the Council asserted that the
+new monarch mounted his throne "by the will of
+the peers." But while the political influence of
+the baronage as a leading element in the whole
+nation thus steadily mounted, the personal and
+purely feudal power of each individual baron on
+his own estates as steadily fell. The hold which
+the Crown gained on every noble family by its
+rights of wardship and marriage, the circuits of
+the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds
+within which baronial justice saw itself circumscribed,
+the blow dealt by scutage at their military
+power, the prompt intervention of the Council in
+their feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to
+the common level of their fellow subjects. Much
+yet remained to be done; for within the general
+body of the baronage there existed side by side
+with the nobles whose aims were purely national
+nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal
+despotism simply a chance of setting up again
+their feudal privileges; and different as the
+English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a
+feudal <i>noblesse</i> like that of Germany or France
+there is in every military class a natural drift
+towards violence and lawlessness. Throughout
+Edward's reign his strong hand was needed to
+enforce order on warring nobles. Great earls,
+such as those of Gloucester and Hereford, carried
+on private war; in Shropshire the Earl of Arundel
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-116"></a>2-116]</span>
+
+waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the
+lesser and poorer nobles the wealth of the trader,
+the long wain of goods as it passed along the
+highway, remained a tempting prey. Once, under
+cover of a mock tournament of monks against
+canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded in
+introducing themselves into the great merchant
+fair at Boston; at nightfall every booth was on
+fire, the merchants robbed and slaughtered, and
+the booty carried off to ships which lay ready
+at the quay. Streams of gold and silver, ran
+the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down
+the gutters to the sea; "all the money in
+England could hardly make good the loss."
+Even at the close of Edward's reign lawless bands
+of "trail-bastons," or club-men, maintained themselves
+by general outrage, aided the country nobles
+in their feuds, and wrested money and goods
+from the great tradesmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward
+and the
+Baronage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king was strong enough to face and
+imprison the warring earls, to hang the chiefs of
+the Boston marauders, and to suppress the
+outlaws by rigorous commissions. But the repression
+of baronial outrage was only a part of
+Edward's policy in relation to the Baronage.
+Here, as elsewhere, he had to carry out the
+political policy of his house, a policy defined by
+the great measures of Henry the Second, his
+institution of scutage, his general assize of arms,
+his extension of the itinerant judicature of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-117"></a>2-117]</span>
+
+royal judges. Forced by the first to an exact
+discharge of their military duties to the Crown,
+set by the second in the midst of a people trained
+equally with the nobles to arms, their judicial
+tyranny curbed and subjected to the king's
+justice by the third, the barons had been forced
+from their old standpoint of an isolated class to
+the new and nobler position of a people's leaders.
+Edward watched jealously over the ground which
+the Crown had gained. Immediately after his
+landing he appointed a commission of enquiry into
+the judicial franchises then existing, and on its
+report (of which the existing "Hundred-Rolls"
+are the result) itinerant justices were sent in 1278
+to discover by what right these franchises were
+held. The writs of "quo warranto" were roughly
+met here and there. Earl Warenne bared a
+rusty sword and flung it on the justices' table.
+"This, sirs," he said, "is my warrant. By the
+sword our fathers won their lands when they
+came over with the Conqueror, and by the sword
+we will keep them." But the king was far from
+limiting himself to the mere carrying out of the plans
+of Henry the Second. Henry had aimed simply
+at lowering the power of the great feudatories;
+Edward aimed rather at neutralizing their power
+by raising the whole body of landowners to the
+same level. We shall see at a later time the
+measures which were the issues of this policy, but
+in the very opening of his reign a significant step
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-118"></a>2-118]</span>
+
+pointed to the king's drift. In the summer of
+1278 a royal writ ordered all freeholders who held
+lands to the value of twenty pounds to receive
+knighthood at the king's hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward and
+the Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Acts as significant announced Edward's purpose
+of carrying out another side of Henry's policy,
+that of limiting in the same way the independent
+jurisdiction of the Church. He was resolute to
+force it to become thoroughly national by bearing
+its due part of the common national burthens,
+and to break its growing dependence upon Rome.
+But the ecclesiastical body was jealous of its
+position as a power distinct from the power of the
+Crown, and Edward's policy had hardly declared
+itself when in 1279 Archbishop Peckham obtained
+a canon from the clergy by which copies of the
+Great Charter, with its provisions in favour of the
+liberties of the Church, were to be affixed to the
+doors of churches. The step was meant as a
+defiant protest against all interference, and it was
+promptly forbidden. An order issued by the
+Primate to the clergy to declare to their flocks the
+sentences of excommunication directed against all
+who obtained royal writs to obstruct suits in
+church courts, or who, whether royal officers or
+no, neglected to enforce their sentences, was
+answered in a yet more emphatic way. By falling
+into the "dead hand" or "mortmain" of the
+Church land ceased to render its feudal services;
+and in 1279 the Statute "de Religiosis," or as it
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-119"></a>2-119]</span>
+
+is commonly called "of Mortmain," forbade any
+further alienation of land to religious bodies in
+such wise that it should cease to render its due
+service to the king. The restriction was probably
+no beneficial one to the country at large, for
+Churchmen were the best landlords, and it was
+soon evaded by the ingenuity of the clerical
+lawyers; but it marked the growing jealousy of
+any attempt to set aside what was national from
+serving the general need and profit of the nation.
+Its immediate effect was to stir the clergy to a
+bitter resentment. But Edward remained firm,
+and when the bishops proposed to restrict the
+royal courts from dealing with cases of patronage
+or causes which touched the chattels of Churchmen
+he met their proposals by an instant prohibition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquest of
+Wales</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The resentment of the clergy had soon the
+means of showing itself during a new struggle
+with Wales. The persuasions of his brother
+David, who had deserted him in the previous
+war but who deemed his desertion insufficiently
+rewarded by an English lordship, roused Llewelyn
+to a fresh revolt. A prophecy of Merlin was said
+to promise that when English money became
+round a Prince of Wales should be crowned in
+London; and at this moment a new coinage of
+copper money, coupled with a prohibition to
+break the silver penny into halves and quarters,
+as had been commonly done, was supposed to
+fulfil the prediction. In 1282 Edward marched
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-120"></a>2-120]</span>
+
+in overpowering strength into the heart of Wales.
+But Llewelyn held out in Snowdon with the
+stubbornness of despair, and the rout of an English
+force which had crossed into Anglesea prolonged
+the contest into the winter. The cost of the war
+fell on the king's treasury. Edward had called
+for but one general grant through the past eight
+years of his reign; but he was now forced to
+appeal to his people, and by an expedient hitherto
+without precedent two provincial Councils were
+called for this purpose. That for Southern
+England met at Northampton, that for Northern
+at York; and clergy and laity were summoned,
+though in separate session, to both. Two knights
+came from every shire, two burgesses from every
+borough, while the bishops brought their archdeacons,
+abbots, and the proctors of their cathedral
+clergy. The grant of the laity was quick and
+liberal. But both at York and Northampton the
+clergy showed their grudge at Edward's measures
+by long delays in supplying his treasury. Pinched
+however as were his resources and terrible as
+were the sufferings of his army through the winter
+Edward's firmness remained unbroken; and rejecting
+all suggestions of retreat he issued orders
+for the formation of a new army at Caermarthen
+to complete the circle of investment round
+Llewelyn. But the war came suddenly to an
+end. The Prince sallied from his mountain hold
+for a raid upon Radnorshire and fell in a petty
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-121"></a>2-121]</span>
+
+skirmish on the banks of the Wye. With him
+died the independence of his race. After six
+months of flight his brother David was made
+prisoner; and a Parliament summoned at Shrewsbury
+in the autumn of 1283, to which each county
+again sent its two knights and twenty boroughs
+their two burgesses, sentenced him to a traitor's
+death. The submission of the lesser chieftains
+soon followed: and the country was secured by
+the building of strong castles at Conway and
+Caernarvon, and the settlement of English barons
+on the confiscated soil. The Statute of Wales
+which Edward promulgated at Rhuddlan in 1284
+proposed to introduce English law and the English
+administration of justice and government into
+Wales. But little came of the attempt; and it
+was not till the time of Henry the Eighth that
+the country was actually incorporated with England
+and represented in the English Parliament.
+What Edward had really done was to break the
+Welsh resistance. The policy with which he
+followed up his victory (for the "massacre of the
+bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and
+though two later rebellions and a ceaseless strife
+of the natives with the English towns in their
+midst showed that the country was still far from
+being reconciled to its conquest, it ceased to be
+any serious danger to England for a hundred
+years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">New Legislation</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the work of conquest Edward again
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-122"></a>2-122]</span>
+
+turned to the work of legislation. In the midst
+of his struggle with Wales he had shown his care
+for the commercial classes by a Statute of Merchants
+in 1283, which provided for the registration
+of the debts of leaders and for their recovery by
+distraint of the debtor's goods and the imprisonment
+of his person. The close of the war saw two
+measures of even greater importance. The second
+Statute of Westminster which appeared in 1285
+is a code of the same sort as the first, amending
+the Statutes of Mortmain, of Merton, and of
+Gloucester, as well as the laws of dower and
+advowson, remodelling the system of justices of
+assize, and curbing the abuses of manorial jurisdiction.
+In the same year appeared the greatest
+of Edward's measures for the enforcement of
+public order. The Statute of Winchester revived
+and reorganized the old institutions of national
+police and national defence. It regulated the
+action of the hundred, the duty of watch and
+ward, and the gathering of the fyrd or militia of
+the realm as Henry the Second had moulded it
+into form in his Assize of Arms. Every man was
+bound to hold himself in readiness, duly armed,
+for the king's service in case of invasion or revolt,
+and to pursue felons when hue and cry was made
+after them. Every district was held responsible
+for crimes committed within its bounds; the gates
+of each town were to be shut at nightfall; and all
+strangers were required to give an account of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-123"></a>2-123]</span>
+
+themselves to the magistrates of any borough
+which they entered. By a provision which illustrates
+at once the social and physical condition of
+the country at the time all brushwood was ordered
+to be destroyed within a space of two hundred
+feet on either side of the public highway as a
+security for travellers against sudden attacks from
+robbers. To enforce the observance of this act
+knights were appointed in every shire under the
+name of Conservators of the Peace, a name which
+as the benefit of these local magistrates was more
+sensibly felt and their powers were more largely
+extended was changed into that which they still
+retain of Justices of the Peace. So orderly however
+was the realm that Edward was able in 1286
+to pass over sea to his foreign dominions, and to
+spend the next three years in reforming their
+government. But the want of his guiding hand
+was at last felt; and the Parliament of 1289
+refused a new tax till the king came home again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">"Quia Emptores"</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He returned to find the Earls of Gloucester and
+Hereford at war, and his judges charged with
+violence and corruption. The two Earls were
+brought to peace, and Earl Gilbert allied closely to
+the royal house by a marriage with the king's
+daughter Johanna. After a careful investigation
+the judicial abuses were recognized and amended.
+Two of the chief justices were banished from the
+realm and their colleagues imprisoned and fined.
+But these administrative measures were only preludes
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-124"></a>2-124]</span>
+
+to a great legislative act which appeared in
+1290. The Third Statute of Westminster, or, to
+use the name by which it is more commonly
+known, the Statute "Quia Emptores," is one of
+those legislative efforts which mark the progress
+of a wide social revolution in the country at large.
+The number of the greater barons was diminishing
+every day, while the number of the country gentry
+and of the more substantial yeomanry was increasing
+with the increase of the national wealth.
+The increase showed itself in a growing desire to
+become proprietors of land. Tenants of the barons
+received under-tenants on condition of their rendering
+them similar services to those which they
+themselves rendered to their lords; and the baronage,
+while duly receiving the services in compensation
+for which they had originally granted their
+lands in fee, saw with jealousy the feudal profits
+of these new under-tenants, the profits of wardships
+or of reliefs and the like, in a word the
+whole increase in the value of the estate consequent
+on its subdivision and higher cultivation,
+passing into other hands than their own. The
+purpose of the statute "Quia Emptores" was to
+check this process by providing that in any case
+of alienation the sub-tenant should henceforth
+hold, not of the tenant, but directly of the superior
+lord. But its result was to promote instead of
+hindering the transfer and subdivision of land.
+The tenant who was compelled before the passing
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-125"></a>2-125]</span>
+
+of the statute to retain in any case so much of
+the estate as enabled him to discharge his feudal
+services to the overlord of whom he held it, was
+now enabled by a process analogous to the modern
+sale of "tenant-right," to transfer both land and
+services to new holders. However small the
+estates thus created might be, the bulk were held
+directly of the Crown; and this class of lesser
+gentry and freeholders grew steadily from this
+time in numbers and importance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Crown and the Jews</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The year which saw "Quia Emptores" saw a
+step which remains the great blot upon Edward's
+reign. The work abroad had exhausted the royal
+treasury, and he bought a grant from his Parliament
+by listening to their wishes in the matter of
+the Jews. Jewish traders had followed William
+the Conqueror from Normandy, and had been
+enabled by his protection to establish themselves
+in separate quarters or "Jewries" in all larger
+English towns. The Jew had no right or citizenship
+in the land. The Jewry in which he lived
+was exempt from the common law. He was
+simply the king's chattel, and his life and goods
+were at the king's mercy. But he was too valuable
+a possession to be lightly thrown away. If the
+Jewish merchant had no standing-ground in the
+local court the king enabled him to sue before
+a special justiciary; his bonds were deposited for
+safety in a chamber of the royal palace at Westminster;
+he was protected against the popular
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-126"></a>2-126]</span>
+
+hatred in the free exercise of his religion and
+allowed to build synagogues and to manage his
+own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi.
+The royal protection was dictated by no spirit of
+tolerance or mercy. To the kings the Jew was a
+mere engine of finance. The wealth which he
+accumulated was wrung from him whenever the
+crown had need, and torture and imprisonment
+were resorted to when milder means failed. It
+was the gold of the Jew that filled the royal
+treasury at the outbreak of war or of revolt. It
+was in the Hebrew coffers that the foreign kings
+found strength, to hold their baronage at bay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Popular Hatred of the Jews</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the
+earlier years of his settlement, beneficial to the
+nation at large there can be little doubt. His
+arrival was the arrival of a capitalist; and heavy
+as was the usury he necessarily exacted in the
+general insecurity of the time his loans gave an
+impulse to industry. The century which followed
+the Conquest witnessed an outburst of architectural
+energy which covered the land with castles and
+cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed
+their erection to the loans of the Jew. His own
+example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture.
+The buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St.
+Edmund's, still retain their name of "Jews'
+Houses" were almost the first houses of stone
+which superseded the mere hovels of the English
+burghers. Nor was their influence simply
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-127"></a>2-127]</span>
+
+industrial. Through their connexion with the
+Jewish schools in Spain and the East they opened
+a way for the revival of physical sciences. A
+Jewish medical school seems to have existed at
+Oxford; Roger Bacon himself studied under
+English rabbis. But the general progress of civilization
+now drew little help from the Jew, while
+the coming of the Cahorsine and Italian bankers
+drove him from the field of commercial finance.
+He fell back on the petty usury of loans to the
+poor, a trade necessarily accompanied with much
+of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the
+religious hatred against their race. Wild stories
+floated about of children carried off to be circumcised
+or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was
+found slain in a Jewish house was canonized
+by popular reverence as "St. Hugh." The first
+work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish
+quarters and attempt their conversion, but the
+popular fury rose too fast for these gentler means
+of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved
+seventy Jews from hanging by their prayer to
+Henry the Third the populace angrily refused the
+brethren alms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Jewish Defiance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all this growing hate was met with a bold
+defiance. The picture which is commonly drawn
+of the Jew as timid, silent, crouching under
+oppression, however truly it may represent the
+general position of his race throughout mediæval
+Europe, is far from being borne out by historical
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-128"></a>2-128]</span>
+
+fact on this side the Channel. In England the
+attitude of the Jew, almost to the very end, was
+an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance.
+He knew that the royal policy exempted him from
+the common taxation, the common justice, the
+common obligations of Englishmen. Usurer,
+extortioner as the realm held him to be, the royal
+justice would secure him the repayment of his
+bonds. A royal commission visited with heavy
+penalties any outbreak of violence against the
+king's "chattels." The Red King actually forbade
+the conversion of a Jew to the Christian
+faith; it was a poor exchange, he said, that would
+rid him of a valuable property and give him only
+a subject. We see in such a case as that of Oxford
+the insolence that grew out of this consciousness
+of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere the
+Jewry was a town within a town, with its own
+language, its own religion and law, its peculiar
+commerce, its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could
+penetrate into the square of little alleys which lay
+behind the present Town Hall; the Church itself
+was powerless to prevent a synagogue from rising
+in haughty rivalry over against the cloister of St.
+Frideswide. Prior Philip of St. Frideswide complains
+bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at
+his door as the procession of the saint passed by,
+mocking at the miracles which were said to be
+wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking
+firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-129"></a>2-129]</span>
+
+if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers,
+the Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the
+crowd that flocked to St. Frideswide's shrine on
+the ground that such recoveries of life and limb
+were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever
+wrought. Sickness and death in the prior's story
+avenge the saint on her blasphemer, but no earthly
+power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have
+ventured to deal with him. A more daring act of
+fanaticism showed the temper of the Jews even at
+the close of Henry the Third's reign. As the usual
+procession of scholars and citizens returned from
+St. Frideswide's on the Ascension Day of 1268 a
+Jew suddenly burst from a group of his comrades
+in front of the synagogue, and wrenching the
+crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But
+even in presence of such an outrage as this the
+terror of the Crown sheltered the Oxford Jews from
+any burst of popular vengeance. The sentence of
+the king condemned them to set up a cross of marble
+on the spot where the crime was committed, but
+even this sentence was in part remitted, and a less
+offensive place was found for the cross in an open
+plot by Merton College.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Expulsion of the Jews</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up to Edward's day indeed the royal protection
+had never wavered. Henry the Second granted
+the Jews a right of burial outside every city where
+they dwelt. Richard punished heavily a massacre
+of the Jews at York, and organized a mixed court
+of Jews and Christians for the registration of their
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-130"></a>2-130]</span>
+
+contracts. John suffered none to plunder them
+save himself, though he once wrested from them a
+sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The
+troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest
+greater than even the royal greed could reap; the
+Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates; and
+only a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal
+decision which would have enabled them to own
+freeholds. But the sack of Jewry after Jewry
+showed the popular hatred during the Barons' war,
+and at its close fell on the Jews the more terrible
+persecution of the law. To the cry against usury
+and the religious fanaticism which threatened them
+was now added the jealousy with which the nation
+that had grown up round the Charter regarded all
+exceptional jurisdictions or exemptions from the
+common law and the common burthens of the
+realm. As Edward looked on the privileges of the
+Church or the baronage, so his people looked on
+the privileges of the Jews. The growing weight
+of the Parliament told against them. Statute after
+statute hemmed them in. They were forbidden
+to hold real property, to employ Christian servants,
+to move through the streets without the two white
+tablets of wool on their breasts which distinguished
+their race. They were prohibited from building
+new synagogues or eating with Christians or acting
+as physicians to them. Their trade, already
+crippled by the rivalry of the bankers of Cahors,
+was annihilated by a royal order which bade them
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-131"></a>2-131]</span>
+
+renounce usury under pain of death. At last
+persecution could do no more, and Edward, eager
+at the moment to find supplies for his treasury and
+himself swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects,
+bought the grant of a fifteenth from clergy and
+laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his
+realm. No share of the enormities which accompanied
+this expulsion can fall upon the king, for
+he not only suffered the fugitives to take their
+personal wealth with them but punished with the
+halter those who plundered them at sea. But the
+expulsion was none the less cruel. Of the sixteen
+thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few
+reached the shores of France. Many were wrecked,
+others robbed and flung overboard. One shipmaster
+turned out a crew of wealthy merchants on
+to a sandbank and bade them call a new Moses to
+save them from the sea.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v2-map-1.jpg"><img src="images/v2-map-1t.jpg" alt="Scotland in 1290"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Scotland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his
+nobler schemes of legal and administrative reforms,
+Edward was suddenly called away to face complex
+questions which awaited him in the North. At
+the moment which we have reached the kingdom
+of the Scots was still an aggregate of four distinct
+countries, each with its different people, its different
+tongue, its different history. The old Pictish
+kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the original
+Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria
+or Strathclyde, and the Lowlands which stretched
+from the Firth of Forth to the English border, had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-132"></a>2-132]</span>
+
+become united under the kings of the Scots;
+Pictland by inheritance, Cumbria by a grant from
+the English king Eadmund, the Lowlands by conquest,
+confirmed as English tradition alleged by a
+grant from Cnut. The shadowy claim of dependence
+on the English Crown which dated from the
+days when a Scotch king "commended" himself
+and his people to Ælfred's son Eadward, a claim
+strengthened by the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm
+as a "fellow worker" of the English sovereign "by
+sea and land," may have been made more real
+through this last convention. But whatever change
+the acquisition of the Lowlands made in the relation
+of the Scot kings to the English sovereigns, it
+certainly affected in a very marked way their
+relation both to England and to their own realm.
+Its first result was the fixing of the royal residence
+in their new southern dominion at Edinburgh; and
+the English civilization which surrounded them
+from the moment of this settlement on what was
+purely English ground changed the Scot kings in
+all but blood into Englishmen. The marriage of
+King Malcolm with Margaret, the sister of Eadgar
+Ætheling, not only hastened this change but
+opened a way to the English crown. Their children
+were regarded by a large party within England as
+representatives of the older royal race and as
+claimants of the throne, and this danger grew as
+William's devastation of the North not only drove
+fresh multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-133"></a>2-133]</span>
+
+Lowlands but filled the Scotch court with English
+nobles who fled thither for refuge. So formidable
+indeed became the pretensions of the Scot kings that
+they forced the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into
+a complete change of policy. The Conqueror and
+William the Red had met the threats of the Scot
+sovereigns by invasions which ended again and
+again in an illusory homage, but the marriage of
+Henry the First with the Scottish Matilda robbed
+the claims of the Scottish line of much of their
+force while it enabled him to draw their kings into
+far closer relations with the Norman throne. King
+David not only abandoned the ambitious dreams
+of his predecessors to place himself at the head of
+his niece Matilda's party in her contest with
+Stephen, but as Henry's brother-in-law he figured
+as the first noble of the English Court and found
+English models and English support in the work
+of organization which he attempted within his
+own dominions. As the marriage with Margaret
+had changed Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain into
+an English king, so that of Matilda brought about
+the conversion of David into a Norman and feudal
+sovereign. His court was filled with Norman
+nobles from the South, such as the Balliols and
+Bruces who were destined to play so great a part
+afterwards but who now for the first time obtained
+fiefs in the Scottish realm, and a feudal jurisprudence
+modelled on that of England was introduced
+into the Lowlands.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-134"></a>2-134]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Scotch and
+English
+Crowns</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fresh connexion between Scotland and the
+English sovereigns began with the grant of lordships
+within England itself to the Scot kings or
+their sons. The Earldom of Northumberland was
+held by David's son Henry, that of Huntingdon
+by David, brother of William the Lion. Homage
+was sometimes rendered, whether for these lordships,
+for the Lowlands, or for the whole Scottish
+realm, but it was the capture of William the Lion
+during the revolt of the English baronage which first
+suggested to the ambition of Henry the Second the
+project of a closer dependence of Scotland on the
+English Crown. To gain his freedom William consented
+to hold his kingdom of Henry and his heirs.
+The prelates and lords of Scotland did homage to
+Henry as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal
+in all Scotch causes was allowed to the superior
+court of the English suzerain. From this bondage
+however Scotland was freed by the prodigality
+of Richard who allowed her to buy back the freedom
+she had forfeited. Both sides fell into their
+old position, but both were ceasing gradually to
+remember the distinctions between the various
+relations in which the Scot king stood for his
+different provinces to the English Crown. Scotland
+had come to be thought of as a single country;
+and the court of London transferred to the whole
+of it those claims of direct feudal suzerainty which
+at most applied only to Strathclyde, while the
+court of Edinburgh looked on the English Lowlands
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-135"></a>2-135]</span>
+
+as holding no closer relation to England
+than the Pictish lands beyond the Forth. Any
+difficulties which arose were evaded by a legal
+compromise. The Scot kings repeatedly did
+homage to the English sovereign but with a
+reservation of rights which were prudently left
+unspecified. The English king accepted the
+homage on the assumption that it was rendered
+to him as overlord of the Scottish realm, and this
+assumption was neither granted nor denied. For
+nearly a hundred years the relations of the two
+countries were thus kept peaceful and friendly,
+and the death of Alexander the Third seemed
+destined to remove even the necessity of protests
+by a closer union of the two kingdoms. Alexander
+had wedded his only daughter to the King of
+Norway, and after long negotiation the Scotch
+Parliament proposed the marriage of Margaret,
+"The Maid of Norway," the girl who was the
+only issue of this marriage and so heiress of the
+kingdom, with the son of Edward the First. It
+was however carefully provided in the marriage
+treaty which was concluded at Brigham in 1290
+that Scotland should remain a separate and free
+kingdom, and that its laws and customs should
+be preserved inviolate. No military aid was to
+be claimed by the English king, no Scotch appeal
+to be carried to an English court. But this project
+was abruptly frustrated by the child's death
+during her voyage to Scotland in the following
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-136"></a>2-136]</span>
+
+October, and with the rise of claimant after
+claimant of the vacant throne Edward was drawn
+into far other relations to the Scottish realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Scotch
+Succession</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of
+Scotland only three could be regarded as serious
+claimants. By the extinction of the line of
+William the Lion the right of succession passed
+to the daughters of his brother David. The claim
+of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, rested on his
+descent from the elder of these; that of Robert
+Bruce, Lord of Annandale, on his descent from
+the second; that of John Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny,
+on his descent from the third. It is
+clear that at this crisis every one in Scotland or
+out of it recognized some sort of overlordship in
+Edward, for the Norwegian king, the Primate
+of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch Earls had
+already appealed to him before Margaret's death;
+and her death was followed by the consent both
+of the claimants and the Council of Regency to
+refer the question of the succession to his decision
+in a Parliament at Norham. But the overlordship
+which the Scots acknowledged was something far
+less direct and definite than the superiority which
+Edward claimed at the opening of this conference
+in May 1291. His claim was supported by excerpts
+from monastic chronicles and by the slow
+advance of an English army; while the Scotch
+lords, taken by surprise, found little help in the
+delay which was granted them. At the opening
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-137"></a>2-137]</span>
+
+of June therefore in common with nine of the
+claimants they formally admitted Edward's direct
+suzerainty. To the nobles in fact the concession
+must have seemed a small one, for like the principal
+claimants they were for the most part
+Norman in blood, with estates in both countries,
+and looking for honours and pensions from the
+English Court. From the Commons who were
+gathered with the nobles at Norham no such
+admission of Edward's claims could be extorted;
+but in Scotland, feudalized as it had been by
+David, the Commons were as yet of little weight
+and their opposition was quietly passed by. All
+the rights of a feudal suzerain were at once
+assumed by the English king; he entered into
+the possession of the country as into that of a
+disputed fief to be held by its overlord till the
+dispute was settled, his peace was sworn throughout
+the land, its castles delivered into his charge,
+while its bishops and nobles swore homage to him
+directly as their lord superior. Scotland was thus
+reduced to the subjection which she had experienced
+under Henry the Second; but the full
+discussion which followed over the various claims
+to the throne showed that while exacting to the
+full what he believed to be his right Edward
+desired to do justice to the country itself. The
+body of commissioners which the king named to
+report on the claims to the throne were mainly
+Scotch. A proposal for the partition of the realm
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-138"></a>2-138]</span>
+
+among the claimants was rejected as contrary to
+Scotch law. On the report of the commissioners
+after a twelvemonth's investigation in favour of
+Balliol as representative of the elder branch at the
+close of the year 1292, his homage was accepted
+for the whole kingdom of Scotland with a full
+acknowledgement of the services due from him to
+its overlord. The castles were at once delivered
+to the new monarch, and for a time there was
+peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward and
+Scotland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the accession of Balliol and the rendering
+of his homage for the Scottish realm the greatness
+of Edward reached its height. He was lord of
+Britain as no English king had been before. The
+last traces of Welsh independence were trodden
+under foot. The shadowy claims of supremacy
+over Scotland were changed into a direct overlordship.
+Across the one sea Edward was lord of
+Guienne, across the other of Ireland, and in
+England itself a wise and generous policy had
+knit the whole nation round his throne. Firmly
+as he still clung to prerogatives which the baronage
+were as firm not to own, the main struggle
+for the Charter was over. Justice and good
+government were secured. The personal despotism
+which John had striven to build up, the imperial
+autocracy which had haunted the imagination of
+Henry the Third, were alike set aside. The rule
+of Edward, vigorous and effective as it was, was
+a rule of law, and of law enacted not by the royal
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-139"></a>2-139]</span>
+
+will, but by the common council of the realm.
+Never had English ruler reached a greater height
+of power, nor was there any sign to warn the
+king of the troubles which awaited him. France,
+jealous as it was of his greatness and covetous of
+his Gascon possessions, he could hold at bay.
+Wales was growing tranquil. Scotland gave few
+signs of discontent or restlessness in the first year
+that followed the homage of its king. Under
+John Balliol it had simply fallen back into the
+position of dependence which it held under
+William the Lion; and Edward had no purpose
+of pushing further his rights as suzerain than
+Henry the Second had done. One claim of the
+English Crown indeed was soon a subject of dispute
+between the lawyers of the Scotch and of
+the English Council boards. Edward would have
+granted as freely as Balliol himself that though
+Scotland was a dependent kingdom it was far
+from being an ordinary fief of the English Crown.
+By feudal custom a distinction had always been
+held to exist between the relations of a dependent
+king to a superior lord and those of a vassal noble
+to his sovereign. At Balliol's homage indeed
+Edward had disclaimed any right to the ordinary
+feudal incidents of a fief, those of wardship or
+marriage, and in this disclaimer he was only repeating
+the reservations of the marriage treaty
+of Brigham. There were other customs of the
+Scotch realm as incontestable as these. Even after
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-140"></a>2-140]</span>
+
+the treaty of Falaise the Scotch king had not
+been held bound to attend the council of the
+English baronage, to do service in English warfare,
+or to contribute on the part of his Scotch realm
+to English aids. If no express acknowledgement
+of these rights had been made by Edward, for
+some time after his acceptance of Balliol's homage
+they were practically observed. The claim of
+independent justice was more doubtful, as it was
+of higher import than these. The judicial independence
+of Scotland had been expressly reserved
+in the marriage treaty. It was certain that no
+appeal from a Scotch King's Court to that of his
+overlord had been allowed since the days of
+William the Lion. But in the jurisprudence of
+the feudal lawyers the right of ultimate appeal
+was the test of sovereignty, and Edward regarded
+Balliol's homage as having placed him precisely
+in the position of William the Lion and subjected
+his decisions to those of his overlord. He was
+resolute therefore to assert the supremacy of his
+court and to receive Scotch appeals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The French
+Attack</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even here however the quarrel seemed likely to
+end only in legal bickering. Balliol at first gave
+way, and it was not till 1293 that he alleged
+himself forced by the resentment both of his
+Baronage and his people to take up an attitude of
+resistance. While appearing therefore formally at
+Westminster he refused to answer an appeal
+before the English courts save by advice of his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-141"></a>2-141]</span>
+
+Council. But real as the resentment of his barons
+may have been, it was not Scotland which really
+spurred Balliol to this defiance. His wounded
+pride had made him the tool of a power beyond
+the sea. The keenness with which France had
+watched every step of Edward's success in
+the north sprang not merely from a natural
+jealousy of his greatness but from its bearing on a
+great object of French ambition. One fragment
+of Eleanor's inheritance still remained to her
+descendants, Guienne and Gascony, the fair lands
+along the Garonne and the territory which
+stretched south of that river to the Pyrenees. It
+was this territory that now tempted the greed of
+Philip the Fair, and it was in feeding the strife
+between England and the Scotch king that Philip
+saw an opening for winning it. French envoys
+therefore brought promises of aid to the Scotch
+Court; and no sooner had these intrigues moved
+Balliol to resent the claims of his overlord than
+Philip found a pretext for open quarrel with
+Edward in the frays which went constantly on in
+the Channel between the mariners of Normandy
+and those of the Cinque Ports. They culminated
+at this moment in a great sea-fight which proved
+fatal to eight thousand Frenchmen, and for this
+Philip haughtily demanded redress. Edward saw
+at once the danger of his position. He did his best
+to allay the storm by promise of satisfaction to
+France, and by addressing threats of punishment
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-142"></a>2-142]</span>
+
+to the English seamen. But Philip still clung to
+his wrong, while the national passion which was
+to prove for a hundred years to come strong
+enough to hold down the royal policy of peace
+showed itself in a characteristic defiance with
+which the seamen of the Cinque Ports met
+Edward's menaces. "Be the King's Council well
+advised," ran this remonstrance, "that if wrong or
+grievance be done them in any fashion against
+right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and
+all that they have, and go seek through the seas
+where they shall think to make their profit." In
+spite therefore of Edward's efforts the contest
+continued, and Philip found in it an opportunity
+to cite the king before his court at Paris for
+wrongs done to him as suzerain. It was hard for
+Edward to dispute the summons without weakening
+the position which his own sovereign courts
+had taken up towards the Scotch king, and in a
+final effort to avert the conflict the king submitted
+to a legal decision of the question, and to a formal
+cession of Guienne into Philip's hands for forty
+days in acknowledgement of his supremacy. Bitter
+as the sacrifice must have been it failed to win
+peace. The forty days had no sooner passed than
+Philip refused to restore the fortresses which had
+been left in pledge. In February 1294 he declared
+the English king contumacious, and in May
+declared his fiefs forfeited to the French Crown.
+Edward was driven to take up arms, but a revolt
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-143"></a>2-143]</span>
+
+in Wales deferred the expedition to the following
+year. No sooner however was it again taken in
+hand than it became clear that a double danger
+had to be met. The summons which Edward
+addressed to the Scotch barons to follow him in
+arms to Guienne was disregarded. It was in
+truth, as we have seen, a breach of customary law,
+and was probably meant to force Scotland into
+an open declaration of its connexion with France.
+A second summons was followed by a more formal
+refusal. The greatness of the danger threw
+Edward on England itself. For a war in Guienne
+and the north he needed supplies; but he needed
+yet more the firm support of his people in a
+struggle which, little as he foresaw its ultimate
+results, would plainly be one of great difficulty
+and danger. In 1295 he called a Parliament to
+counsel with him on the affairs of the realm, but
+with the large statesmanship which distinguished
+him he took this occasion of giving the Parliament
+a shape and organization which has left its
+assembly the most important event in English
+history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Great
+Council</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To realize its importance we must briefly
+review the changes by which the Great Council
+of the Norman kings had been gradually transforming
+itself into what was henceforth to be
+known as the English Parliament. Neither the
+Meeting of the Wise Men before the Conquest
+nor the Great Council of the Barons after it had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-144"></a>2-144]</span>
+
+been in any legal or formal way representative
+bodies. The first theoretically included all free
+holders of land, but it shrank at an early time
+into a gathering of earls, higher nobles, and
+bishops, with the officers and thegns of the royal
+household. Little change was made in the composition
+of this assembly by the Conquest, for
+the Great Council of the Norman kings was supposed
+to include all tenants who held directly
+of the Crown, the bishops and greater abbots
+(whose character as independent spiritual members
+tended more and more to merge in their position
+as barons), and the high officers of the Court.
+But though its composition remained the same,
+the character of the assembly was essentially
+altered; from a free gathering of "Wise Men" it
+sank to a Royal Court of feudal vassals. Its
+functions too seem to have become almost nominal
+and its powers to have been restricted to the
+sanctioning, without debate or possibility of
+refusal, all grants demanded from it by the
+Crown. But nominal as such a sanction might
+be, the "counsel and consent" of the Great
+Council was necessary for the legal validity of
+every considerable fiscal or political measure. Its
+existence therefore remained an effectual protest
+against the imperial theories advanced by the
+lawyers of Henry the Second which declared all
+legislative power to reside wholly in the sovereign.
+It was in fact under Henry that these assemblies
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-145"></a>2-145]</span>
+
+became more regular, and their functions more
+important. The reforms which marked his reign
+were issued in the Great Council, and even
+financial matters were suffered to be debated
+there. But it was not till the grant of the Great
+Charter that the powers of this assembly over
+taxation were formally recognized, and the
+principle established that no burthen beyond the
+customary feudal aids might be imposed "save by
+the Common Council of the Realm."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Greater and Lesser Barons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The same document first expressly regulated
+its form. In theory, as we have seen, the Great
+Council consisted of all who held land directly of
+the Crown. But the same causes which restricted
+attendance at the Witenagemot to the greater
+nobles told on the actual composition of the
+Council of Barons. While the attendance of the
+ordinary tenants in chief, the Knights or "Lesser
+Barons" as they were called, was burthensome
+from its expense to themselves, their numbers and
+their dependence on the higher nobles made the
+assembly of these knights dangerous to the
+Crown. As early therefore as the time of Henry
+the First we find a distinction recognized between
+the "Greater Barons," of whom the Council was
+usually composed, and the "Lesser Barons" who
+formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown.
+But though the attendance of the latter had
+become rare their right of attendance remained
+intact.  While enacting that the prelates and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-146"></a>2-146]</span>
+
+greater barons should be summoned by special
+writs to each gathering of the Council a remarkable
+provision of the Great Charter orders a
+general summons to be issued through the Sheriff
+to all direct tenants of the Crown. The provision
+was probably intended to rouse the lesser Baronage
+to the exercise of rights which had practically
+passed into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted
+in later issues of the Charter we may doubt
+whether the principle it embodied ever received
+more than a very limited application. There are
+traces of the attendance of a few of the lesser
+knighthood, gentry perhaps of the neighbourhood
+where the assembly was held, in some of its
+meetings under Henry the Third, but till a late
+period in the reign of his successor the Great
+Council practically remained a gathering of the
+greater barons, the prelates, and the high officers
+of the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Constitutional Influence of Finance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The change which the Great Charter had
+failed to accomplish was now however brought
+about by the social circumstances of the time.
+One of the most remarkable of these was a steady
+decrease in the number of the greater nobles.
+The bulk of the earldoms had already lapsed to
+the Crown through the extinction of the families
+of their possessors; of the greater baronies, many
+had practically ceased to exist by their division
+among female co-heiresses, many through the
+constant struggle of the poorer nobles to rid
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-147"></a>2-147]</span>
+
+themselves of their rank by a disclaimer so as to
+escape the burthen of higher taxation and attendance
+in Parliament which it involved. How far
+this diminution had gone we may see from the
+fact that hardly more than a hundred barons sat
+in the earlier Councils of Edward's reign. But
+while the number of those who actually exercised
+the privilege of assisting in Parliament was rapidly
+diminishing, the numbers and wealth of the
+"lesser baronage," whose right of attendance had
+become a mere constitutional tradition, was as
+rapidly increasing. The long peace and prosperity
+of the realm, the extension of its commerce and
+the increased export of wool, were swelling the
+ranks and incomes of the country gentry as well as
+of the freeholders and substantial yeomanry. We
+have already noticed the effects of the increase of
+wealth in begetting a passion for the possession of
+land which makes this reign so critical a period in
+the history of the English freeholder; but the
+same tendency had to some extent existed in the
+preceding century, and it was a consciousness of
+the growing importance of this class of rural
+proprietors which induced the barons at the
+moment of the Great Charter to make their
+fruitless attempt to induce them to take part in
+the deliberations of the Great Council. But
+while the barons desired their presence as an aid
+against the Crown, the Crown itself desired it as
+a means of rendering taxation more efficient. So
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-148"></a>2-148]</span>
+
+long as the Great Council remained a mere
+assembly of magnates it was necessary for the
+King's ministers to treat separately with the
+other orders of the state as to the amount and
+assessment of their contributions. The grant
+made in the Great Council was binding only on
+the barons and prelates who made it; but before
+the aids of the boroughs, the Church, or the
+shires could reach the royal treasury, a separate
+negotiation had to be conducted by the officers of
+the Exchequer with the reeves of each town, the
+sheriff and shire-court of each county, and the
+archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of this
+sort would be the more tedious and disappointing
+as the necessities of the Crown increased in the
+later years of Edward, and it became a matter of
+fiscal expediency to obtain the sanction of any
+proposed taxation through the presence of these
+classes in the Great Council itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effort however to revive the old personal
+attendance of the lesser baronage which had broken
+down half a century before could hardly be renewed
+at a time when the increase of their
+numbers made it more impracticable than ever;
+but a means of escape from this difficulty was
+fortunately suggested by the very nature of the
+court through which alone a summons could be
+addressed to the landed knighthood. Amidst the
+many judicial reforms of Henry or Edward the
+Shire Court remained unchanged. The haunted
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-149"></a>2-149]</span>
+
+mound or the immemorial oak round which the
+assembly gathered (for the court was often held in
+the open air) were the relics of a time before the
+free kingdom had sunk into a shire and its Meetings
+of the Wise into a County Court. But save
+that the king's reeve had taken the place of the
+king and that the Norman legislation had displaced
+the Bishop and set four Coroners by the
+Sheriff's side, the gathering of the freeholders remained
+much as of old. The local knighthood, the
+yeomanry, the husbandmen of the county, were
+all represented in the crowd that gathered round
+the Sheriff, as guarded by his liveried followers he
+published the king's writs, announced his demand
+of aids, received the presentment of criminals and
+the inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation
+of each district, or listened solemnly to
+appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who
+held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of
+the hundred or the soke. It was in the County
+Court alone that the Sheriff could legally summon
+the lesser baronage to attend the Great Council,
+and it was in the actual constitution of this
+assembly that the Crown found a solution of the
+difficulty which we have stated. For the principle
+of representation by which it was finally solved
+was coeval with the Shire Court itself. In all
+cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn
+assessors of the Sheriff, as members of a class,
+though not formally deputed for that purpose,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-150"></a>2-150]</span>
+
+practically represented the judicial opinion of the
+county at large. From every hundred came
+groups of twelve sworn deputies, the "jurors"
+through whom the presentments of the district
+were made to the royal officer and with whom the
+assessment of its share in the general taxation was
+arranged. The husbandmen on the outskirts of
+the crowd, clad in the brown smock frock which
+still lingers in the garb of our carters and ploughmen,
+were broken up into little knots of five, a
+reeve and four assistants, each of which knots
+formed the representative of a rural township.
+If in fact we regard the Shire Courts as lineally
+the descendants of our earliest English Witenagemots,
+we may justly claim the principle of parliamentary
+representation as among the oldest of our
+institutions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Knights of the Shire</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was easy to give this principle a further
+extension by the choice of representatives of the
+lesser barons in the shire courts to which they
+were summoned; but it was only slowly and
+tentatively that this process was applied to the
+reconstitution of the Great Council. As early as
+the close of John's reign there are indications of
+the approaching change in the summons of "four
+discreet knights" from every county. Fresh need
+of local support was felt by both parties in the
+conflict of the succeeding reign, and Henry and
+his barons alike summoned knights from each shire
+"to meet on the common business of the realm."
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-151"></a>2-151]</span>
+
+It was no doubt with the same purpose that the
+writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights
+in each shire for his famous Parliament of 1265.
+Something like a continuous attendance may be
+dated from the accession of Edward, but it was
+long before the knights were regarded as more
+than local deputies for the assessment of taxation
+or admitted to a share in the general business of
+the Great Council. The statute "Quia Emptores,"
+for instance, was passed in it before the knights
+who had been summoned could attend. Their
+participation in the deliberative power of Parliament,
+as well as their regular and continuous
+attendance, dates only from the Parliament of
+1295. But a far greater constitutional change in
+their position had already taken place through the
+extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at
+large. The one class entitled to a seat in the
+Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the
+lesser baronage; and it was of the lesser baronage
+alone that the knights were in theory the representatives.
+But the necessity of holding their
+election in the County Court rendered any restriction
+of the electoral body physically impossible.
+The court was composed of the whole body of
+freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish the
+"aye, aye" of the yeoman from the "aye, aye"
+of the lesser baron. From the first moment therefore
+of their attendance we find the knights regarded
+not as mere representatives of the baronage
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-152"></a>2-152]</span>
+
+but as knights of the shire, and by this silent
+revolution the whole body of the rural freeholders
+were admitted to a share in the government of the
+realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Boroughs and the Crown</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a
+far more radical revolution in the admission into
+the Great Council of representatives from the
+boroughs. The presence of knights from each
+shire was the recognition of an older right, but no
+right of attendance or share in the national
+"counsel and assent" could be pleaded for the
+burgesses of the towns. On the other hand the
+rapid developement of their wealth made them
+every day more important as elements in the
+national taxation. From all payment of the dues
+or fines exacted by the king as the original lord
+of the soil on which they had in most cases grown
+up the towns had long since freed themselves by
+what was called the purchase of the "farm of the
+borough"; in other words, by the commutation of
+these uncertain dues for a fixed sum paid annually
+to the Crown and apportioned by their own magistrates
+among the general body of the burghers.
+All that the king legally retained was the right
+enjoyed by every great proprietor of levying a
+corresponding taxation on his tenants in demesne
+under the name of "a free aid" whenever a grant
+was made for the national necessities by the barons
+of the Great Council. But the temptation of
+appropriating the growing wealth of the mercantile
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-153"></a>2-153]</span>
+
+class proved stronger than legal restrictions,
+and we find both Henry the Third and his son
+assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure and
+without any authority from the Council even over
+London itself. The burgesses could refuse indeed
+the invitation to contribute to the "free aids"
+demanded by the royal officers, but the suspension
+of their markets or trading privileges brought
+them in the end to submission. Each of these
+"free aids" however had to be extorted after a
+long wrangle between the borough and the officers
+of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven
+to comply with what they considered an extortion
+they could generally force the Crown by evasions
+and delays to a compromise and abatement of its
+original demands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Burgesses in Parliament</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The same financial reasons therefore existed for
+desiring the presence of borough representatives
+in the Great Council as existed in the case of the
+shires; but it was the genius of Earl Simon which
+first broke through the older constitutional tradition
+and summoned two burgesses from each town
+to the Parliament of 1265. Time had indeed to
+pass before the large and statesmanlike conception
+of the great patriot could meet with full acceptance.
+Through the earlier part of Edward's reign we find
+a few instances of the presence of representatives
+from the towns, but their scanty numbers and the
+irregularity of their attendance show that they
+were summoned rather to afford financial information
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-154"></a>2-154]</span>
+
+to the Great Council than as representatives
+in it of an Estate of the Realm. But every year
+pleaded stronger and stronger for their inclusion,
+and in the Parliament of 1295 that of 1265 found
+itself at last reproduced. "It was from me that
+he learnt it," Earl Simon had cried, as he recognized
+the military skill of Edward's onset at Evesham;
+"it was from me that he learnt it," his spirit
+might have exclaimed as he saw the king gathering
+at last two burgesses "from every city, borough,
+and leading town" within his realm to sit side by
+side with the knights, nobles, and barons of the
+Great Council. To the Crown the change was
+from the first an advantageous one. The grants
+of subsidies by the burgesses in Parliament proved
+more profitable than the previous extortions of
+the Exchequer. The proportions of their grant
+generally exceeded that of the other estates.
+Their representatives too proved far more compliant
+with the royal will than the barons or
+knights of the shire; only on one occasion during
+Edward's reign did the burgesses waver from their
+general support of the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Reluctance to attend</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was easy indeed to control them, for the
+selection of boroughs to be represented remained
+wholly in the king's hands, and their numbers
+could be increased or diminished at the king's
+pleasure. The determination was left to the
+sheriff, and at a hint from the royal Council a
+sheriff of Wilts would cut down the number of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-155"></a>2-155]</span>
+
+represented boroughs in his shire from eleven to
+three, or a sheriff of Bucks declare he could find
+but a single borough, that of Wycombe, within the
+bounds of his county. Nor was this exercise of
+the prerogative hampered by any anxiety on the
+part of the towns to claim representative privileges.
+It was hard to suspect that a power before which
+the Crown would have to bow lay in the ranks of
+soberly-clad traders, summoned only to assess the
+contributions of their boroughs, and whose attendance
+was as difficult to secure as it seemed burthensome
+to themselves and the towns who sent them.
+The mass of citizens took little or no part in their
+choice, for they were elected in the county court
+by a few of the principal burghers deputed for the
+purpose; but the cost of their maintenance, the
+two shillings a day paid to the burgess by his town
+as four were paid to the knight by his county, was
+a burden from which the boroughs made desperate
+efforts to escape. Some persisted in making no
+return to the sheriff. Some bought charters of
+exemption from the troublesome privilege. Of the
+165 who were summoned by Edward the First
+more than a third ceased to send representatives
+after a single compliance with the royal summons.
+During the whole time from the reign of Edward
+the Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the
+sheriff of Lancashire declined to return the names
+of any boroughs at all within that county "on
+account of their poverty."  Nor were the representatives
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-156"></a>2-156]</span>
+
+themselves more anxious to appear than
+their boroughs to send them. The busy country
+squire and the thrifty trader were equally reluctant
+to undergo the trouble and expense of a journey
+to Westminster. Legal measures were often
+necessary to ensure their presence. Writs still
+exist in abundance such as that by which Walter
+le Rous is "held to bail in eight oxen and four
+cart-horses to come before the King on the day
+specified" for attendance in Parliament. But in
+spite of obstacles such as these the presence of
+representatives from the boroughs may be regarded
+as continuous from the Parliament of 1295. As
+the representation of the lesser barons had widened
+through a silent change into that of the shire, so
+that of the boroughs--restricted in theory to those
+in the royal demesne--seems practically from
+Edward's time to have been extended to all who
+were in a condition to pay the cost of their representatives'
+support. By a change as silent within
+the Parliament itself the burgess, originally summoned
+to take part only in matters of taxation,
+was at last admitted to a full share in the deliberations
+and authority of the other orders of the
+State.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Parliament and the Clergy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The admission of the burgesses and knights of
+the shire to the assembly of 1295 completed the
+fabric of our representative constitution. The
+Great Council of the Barons became the Parliament
+of the Realm. Every order of the state
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-157"></a>2-157]</span>
+
+found itself represented in this assembly, and took
+part in the grant of supplies, the work of legislation,
+and in the end the control of government.
+But though in all essential points the character of
+Parliament has remained the same from that time
+to this, there were some remarkable particulars
+in which the assembly of 1295 differed widely
+from the present Parliament at St. Stephen's.
+Some of these differences, such as those which
+sprang from the increased powers and changed
+relations of the different orders among themselves,
+we shall have occasion to consider at a later time.
+But a difference of a far more startling kind than
+these lay in the presence of the clergy. If there
+is any part in the parliamentary scheme of Edward
+the First which can be regarded as especially his
+own, it is his project for the representation of the
+ecclesiastical order. The King had twice at least
+summoned its "proctors" to Great Councils before
+1295, but it was then only that the complete
+representation of the Church was definitely
+organized by the insertion of a clause in the writ
+which summoned a bishop to Parliament requiring
+the personal attendance of all archdeacons, deans,
+or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for
+each cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy
+within his diocese. The clause is repeated in the
+writs of the present day, but its practical effect
+was foiled almost from the first by the resolute
+opposition of those to whom it was addressed.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-158"></a>2-158]</span>
+
+What the towns failed in doing the clergy actually
+did. Even when forced to comply with the royal
+summons, as they seem to have been forced during
+Edward's reign, they sat jealously by themselves,
+and their refusal to vote supplies in any but their
+own provincial assemblies, or convocations, of
+Canterbury and York left the Crown without a
+motive for insisting on their continued attendance.
+Their presence indeed, though still at times granted
+on some solemn occasions, became so pure a
+formality that by the end of the fifteenth century
+it had sunk wholly into desuetude. In their
+anxiety to preserve their existence as an isolated
+and privileged order the clergy flung away a power
+which, had they retained it, would have ruinously
+hampered the healthy developement of the state.
+To take a single instance, it is difficult to see how
+the great changes of the Reformation could have
+been brought about had a good half of the House
+of Commons consisted purely of churchmen, whose
+numbers would have been backed by the weight of
+their property as possessors of a third of the landed
+estates of the realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Parliament at Westminster</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A hardly less important difference may be found
+in the gradual restriction of the meetings of
+Parliament to Westminster. The names of
+Edward's statutes remind us of its convocation at
+the most various quarters, at Winchester, Acton
+Burnell, Northampton. It was at a later time that
+Parliament became settled in the straggling village
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-159"></a>2-159]</span>
+
+which had grown up in the marshy swamp of the
+Isle of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled
+pile towered over the Thames and the new Westminster
+which was still rising in Edward's day on
+the site of the older church of the Confessor. It
+is possible that, while contributing greatly to its
+constitutional importance, this settlement of the
+Parliament may have helped to throw into the
+background its character as a supreme court of
+appeal. The proclamation by which it was called
+together invited "all who had any grace to demand
+of the King in Parliament, or any plaint to make
+of matters which could not be redressed or determined
+by ordinary course of law, or who had been
+in any way aggrieved by any of the King's
+ministers or justices or sheriffs, or their bailiffs, or
+any other officer, or have been unduly assessed,
+rated, charged, or surcharged to aids, subsidies,
+or taxes," to deliver their petitions to receivers
+who sat in the Great Hall of the Palace of Westminster.
+The petitions were forwarded to the
+King's Council, and it was probably the extension
+of the jurisdiction of that body and the rise of the
+Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient right
+of the subject to the formal election of "Triers of
+Petitions" at the opening of every new Parliament
+by the House of Lords, a usage which is still
+continued. But it must have been owing to some
+memory of the older custom that the subject
+always looked for redress against injuries from the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-160"></a>2-160]</span>
+
+Crown or its ministers to the Parliament of the
+realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquest of Scotland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The subsidies granted by the Parliament of
+1295 furnished the king with the means of warfare
+with both Scotland and France while they
+assured him of the sympathy of his people in the
+contest. But from the first the reluctance of
+Edward to enter on the double war was strongly
+marked. The refusal of the Scotch baronage to
+obey his summons had been followed on Balliol's
+part by two secret steps which made a struggle
+inevitable, by a request to Rome for absolution
+from his oath of fealty and by a treaty of alliance
+with Philip the Fair. As yet however no open
+breach had taken place, and while Edward in 1296
+summoned his knighthood to meet him in the
+north he called a Parliament at Newcastle in the
+hope of bringing about an accommodation with the
+Scot king. But all thought of accommodation
+was roughly ended by the refusal of Balliol to
+attend the Parliament, by the rout of a small body
+of English troops, and by the Scotch investment
+of Carlisle. Taken as he was by surprise, Edward
+showed at once the vigour and rapidity of his
+temper. His army marched upon Berwick. The
+town was a rich and well-peopled one, and although
+a wooden stockade furnished its only rampart the
+serried ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope
+of an easy conquest. Their taunts indeed stung
+the king to the quick. As his engineers threw
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-161"></a>2-161]</span>
+
+up rough entrenchments for the besieging army
+the burghers bade him wait till he won the town
+before he began digging round it. "Kynge
+Edward," they shouted, "waune thou havest
+Berwick, pike thee; waune thou havest geten,
+dike thee." But the stockade was stormed with
+the loss of a single knight, nearly eight thousand
+of the citizens were mown down in a ruthless
+carnage, and a handful of Flemish traders who
+held the town-hall stoutly against all assailants
+were burned alive in it. The massacre only ceased
+when a procession of priests bore the host to the
+king's presence, praying for mercy. Edward with
+a sudden and characteristic burst of tears called off
+his troops; but the town was ruined for ever, and
+the greatest merchant city of northern Britain
+sank from that time into a petty seaport.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Berwick Edward received Balliol's formal
+defiance. "Has the fool done this folly?" the
+king cried in haughty scorn; "if he will not
+come to us, we will come to him." The terrible
+slaughter however had done its work, and his
+march northward was a triumphal progress.
+Edinburgh, Stirling, and Perth opened their gates,
+Bruce joined the English army, and Balliol himself
+surrendered and passed without a blow from his
+throne to an English prison. No further punishment
+however was exacted from the prostrate
+realm. Edward simply treated it as a fief, and
+declared its forfeiture to be the legal consequence
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-162"></a>2-162]</span>
+
+of Balliol's treason. It lapsed in fact to its
+suzerain; and its earls, barons, and gentry swore
+homage in Parliament at Berwick to Edward as
+their king. The sacred stone on which its older
+sovereigns had been installed, an oblong block
+of limestone which legend asserted to have been
+the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and
+descended upon him, was removed from Scone and
+placed in Westminster by the shrine of the
+Confessor. It was enclosed by Edward's order in
+a stately seat, which became from that hour the
+coronation chair of English kings. To the king
+himself the whole business must have seemed
+another and easier conquest of Wales, and the
+mercy and just government which had followed
+his first success followed his second also. The
+government of the new dependency was entrusted
+to John of Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head
+of an English Council of Regency. Pardon was
+freely extended to all who had resisted the
+invasion, and order and public peace were rigidly
+enforced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Confirmation of the Charters</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was,
+had more than exhausted the aids granted by the
+Parliament. The treasury was utterly drained.
+The struggle indeed widened as every month went
+on; the costly fight with the French in Gascony
+called for supplies, while Edward was planning a
+yet costlier attack on northern France with the aid
+of Flanders. Need drove him on his return from
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-163"></a>2-163]</span>
+
+Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion
+which seemed to recall the times of John.
+His first blow fell on the Church. At the close of
+1294 he had already demanded half their annual
+income from the clergy, and so terrible was his
+wrath at their resistance that the Dean of St.
+Paul's, who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped
+dead of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose
+the King's demand," said a royal envoy in the
+midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that
+he may be noted as an enemy to the King's peace."
+The outraged Churchmen fell back on an untenable
+plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and
+alleged the bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by
+Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a bull which
+forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their
+ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for refusing to
+comply with further taxation. In 1297 Archbishop
+Winchelsey refused on the ground of this
+bull to make any grant, and Edward met his
+refusal by a general outlawry of the whole order.
+The King's Courts were closed, and all justice
+denied to those who refused the king aid. By
+their actual plea the clergy had put themselves
+formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon
+forced them to submission; but their aid did little
+to recruit the exhausted treasury. The pressure
+of the war steadily increased, and far wider measures
+of arbitrary taxation were needful to equip
+an expedition which Edward prepared to lead in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-164"></a>2-164]</span>
+
+person to Flanders. The country gentlemen were
+compelled to take up knighthood or to compound
+for exemption from the burthensome honour, and
+forced contributions of cattle and corn were demanded
+from the counties. Edward no doubt
+purposed to pay honestly for these supplies, but
+his exactions from the merchant class rested on
+a deliberate theory of his royal rights. He looked
+on the customs as levied absolutely at his pleasure,
+and the export duty on wool--now the staple
+produce of the country--was raised to six times
+its former amount. Although he infringed no
+positive provision of charter or statute in his
+action, it was plain that his course really undid all
+that had been gained by the Barons' war. But
+the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward
+found stout resistance within his realm. The
+barons drew together and called a meeting for the
+redress of their grievances. The two greatest of
+the English nobles, Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of
+Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, placed
+themselves at the head of the opposition. The
+first was Constable, the second Earl Marshal, and
+Edward bade them lead a force to Gascony as his
+lieutenants while he himself sailed to Flanders.
+Their departure would have left the Baronage
+without leaders, and the two earls availed themselves
+of a plea that they were not bound to foreign
+service save in attendance on the king to refuse
+obedience to the royal orders. "By God, Sir
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-165"></a>2-165]</span>
+
+Earl," swore the king to the Earl Marshal, "you
+shall either go or hang!" "By God, Sir King,"
+was the cool reply, "I will neither go nor hang!"
+Both parties separated in bitter anger; the king
+to seize fresh wool, to outlaw the clergy, and to
+call an army to his aid; the barons to gather in
+arms, backed by the excommunication of the
+Primate. But the strife went no further than
+words. Ere the Parliament he had convened
+could meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness;
+Winchelsey offered his mediation; and
+Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the
+Charter of Forests as the price of a grant from
+the clergy and a subsidy from the Commons. With
+one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of which
+his nature was capable the king stood before his
+people in Westminster Hall and owned with a
+burst of tears that he had taken their substance
+without due warrant of law. His passionate
+appeal to their loyalty wrested a reluctant assent
+to the prosecution, of the war, and in August
+Edward sailed for Flanders, leaving his son regent
+of the realm. But the crisis had taught the need
+of further securities against the royal power, and
+as Edward was about to embark the barons demanded
+his acceptance of additional articles to the
+Charter, expressly renouncing his right of taxing
+the nation without its own consent. The king
+sailed without complying, but Winchelsey joined
+the two earls and the citizens of London in forbidding
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-166"></a>2-166]</span>
+
+any levy of supplies till the Great Charter
+with these clauses was again confirmed, and the
+trouble in Scotland as well as the still pending
+strife with France left Edward helpless in the
+barons' hands. The Great Charter and the Charter
+of the Forests were solemnly confirmed by him at
+Ghent in November; and formal pardon was issued
+to the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Revolt of Scotland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The confirmation of the Charter, the renunciation
+of any right to the exactions by which the
+people were aggrieved, the pledge that the king
+would no more take "such aids, tasks, and prizes
+but by common assent of the realm," the promise
+not to impose on wool any heavy customs or
+"maltôte" without the same assent, was the close
+of the great struggle which had begun at Runnymede.
+The clauses so soon removed from the
+Great Charter were now restored; and, evade them
+as they might, the kings were never able to free
+themselves from the obligation to seek aid solely
+from the general consent of their subjects. It was
+Scotland which had won this victory for English
+freedom. At the moment when Edward and the
+earls stood face to face the king saw his work in
+the north suddenly undone. Both the justice and
+injustice of the new rule proved fatal to it. The
+wrath of the Scots, already kindled by the intrusion
+of English priests into Scotch livings and by the
+grant of lands across the border to English barons,
+was fanned to fury by the strict administration of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-167"></a>2-167]</span>
+
+law and the repression of feuds and cattle-lifting.
+The disbanding too of troops, which was caused
+by the penury of the royal exchequer, united with
+the licence of the soldiery who remained to quicken
+the national sense of wrong. The disgraceful submission
+of their leaders brought the people themselves
+to the front. In spite of a hundred years
+of peace the farmer of Fife or the Lowlands and
+the artizan of the towns remained stout-hearted
+Northumbrian Englishmen. They had never consented
+to Edward's supremacy, and their blood
+rose against the insolent rule of the stranger.
+The genius of an outlaw knight, William Wallace,
+saw in their smouldering discontent a hope of freedom
+for his country, and his daring raids on outlying
+parties of the English soldiery roused the
+country at last into revolt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wallace</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we
+know little or nothing; the very traditions of his
+gigantic stature and enormous strength are dim
+and unhistorical. But the instinct of the Scotch
+people has guided it aright in choosing him for its
+national hero. He was the first to assert freedom
+as a national birthright, and amidst the despair
+of nobles and priests to call the people itself to
+arms. At the head of an army drawn principally
+from the coast districts north of the Tay, which
+were inhabited by a population of the same blood
+as that of the Lowlands, Wallace in September
+1297 encamped near Stirling, the pass between the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-168"></a>2-168]</span>
+
+north and the south, and awaited the English
+advance. It was here that he was found by the
+English army. The offers of John of Warenne
+were scornfully rejected: "We have come," said
+the Scottish leader, "not to make peace, but to
+free our country." The position of Wallace behind
+a loop of Forth was in fact chosen with consummate
+skill. The one bridge which crossed the river was
+only broad enough to admit two horsemen abreast;
+and though the English army had been passing
+from daybreak but half its force was across at noon
+when Wallace closed on it and cut it after a short
+combat to pieces in sight of its comrades. The
+retreat of the Earl of Surrey over the border left
+Wallace head of the country he had freed, and for
+a few months he acted as "Guardian of the Realm"
+in Balliol's name, and headed a wild foray into
+Northumberland in which the barbarous cruelties
+of his men left a bitter hatred behind them which
+was to wreak its vengeance in the later bloodshed
+of the war. His reduction of Stirling Castle at
+last called Edward to the field. In the spring of
+1298 the king's diplomacy had at last wrung a
+truce for two years from Philip the Fair; and he
+at once returned to England to face the troubles
+in Scotland. Marching northward with a larger
+host than had ever followed his banner, he was
+enabled by treachery to surprise Wallace as he fell
+back to avoid an engagement, and to force him on
+the twenty-second of July to battle near Falkirk.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-169"></a>2-169]</span>
+
+The Scotch force consisted almost wholly of foot,
+and Wallace drew up his spearmen in four great
+hollow circles or squares, the outer ranks kneeling
+and the whole supported by bowmen within, while
+a small force of horse were drawn up as a reserve
+in the rear. It was the formation of Waterloo,
+the first appearance in our history since the day of
+Senlac of "that unconquerable British infantry"
+before which chivalry was destined to go down.
+For a moment it had all Waterloo's success. "I
+have brought you to the ring, hop (dance) if you
+can," are words of rough humour that reveal the
+very soul of the patriot leader, and the serried
+ranks answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of
+Durham who led the English van shrank wisely
+from the look of the squares. "Back to your mass,
+Bishop," shouted the reckless knights behind him,
+but the body of horse dashed itself vainly on the
+wall of spears. Terror spread through the English
+army, and its Welsh auxiliaries drew off in a body
+from the field. But the generalship of Wallace
+was met by that of the king. Drawing his bowmen
+to the front, Edward riddled the Scottish
+ranks with arrows and then hurled his cavalry
+afresh on the wavering line. In a moment all
+was over, the maddened knights rode in and out
+of the broken ranks, slaying without mercy.
+Thousands fell on the field, and Wallace himself
+escaped with difficulty, followed by a handful of
+men.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-170"></a>2-170]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Second Conquest of Scotland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his
+work was done. He had roused Scotland into life,
+and even a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered.
+Edward remained master only of the ground he
+stood on: want of supplies forced him at last to
+retreat; and in the summer of the following year,
+1299, when Balliol, released from his English
+prison, withdrew into France, a regency of the
+Scotch nobles under Robert Bruce and John
+Comyn continued the struggle for independence.
+Troubles at home and danger from abroad stayed
+Edward's hand. The barons still distrusted his
+sincerity, and though at their demand he renewed
+the Confirmation in the spring of 1299, his attempt
+to add an evasive clause saving the right of the
+Crown proved the justice of their distrust. In
+spite of a fresh and unconditional renewal of it a
+strife over the Forest Charter went on till the
+opening of 1301 when a new gathering of the
+barons in arms with the support of Archbishop
+Winchelsey wrested from him its full execution.
+What aided freedom within was as of old the peril
+without. France was still menacing, and a claim
+advanced by Pope Boniface the Eighth at its
+suggestion to the feudal superiority over Scotland
+arrested a new advance of the king across the
+border. A quarrel however which broke out
+between Philip le Bel and the Papacy removed all
+obstacles. It enabled Edward to defy Boniface
+and to wring from France a treaty in which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-171"></a>2-171]</span>
+
+Scotland was abandoned. In 1304 he resumed
+the work of invasion, and again the nobles flung
+down their arms as he marched to the North.
+Comyn, at the head of the Regency, acknowledged
+his sovereignty, and the surrender of Stirling
+completed the conquest of Scotland. But the
+triumph of Edward was only the prelude to the
+carrying out of his designs for knitting the two
+countries together by a generosity and wisdom
+which reveal the greatness of his statesmanship.
+A general amnesty was extended to all who had
+shared in the resistance. Wallace, who refused to
+avail himself of Edward's mercy, was captured
+and condemned to death at Westminster on charges
+of treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The head of
+the great patriot, crowned in mockery with a
+circlet of laurel, was placed upon London Bridge.
+But the execution of Wallace was the one blot on
+Edward's clemency. With a masterly boldness he
+entrusted the government of the country to a
+council of Scotch nobles, many of whom were
+freshly pardoned for their share in the war, and
+anticipated the policy of Cromwell by allotting
+ten representatives to Scotland in the Common
+Parliament of his realm. A Convocation was
+summoned at Perth for the election of these
+representatives, and a great judicial scheme which
+was promulgated in this assembly adopted the
+amended laws of King David as the base of a new
+legislation, and divided the country for judicial
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-172"></a>2-172]</span>
+
+purposes into four districts, Lothian, Galloway,
+the Highlands, and the land between the Highlands
+and the Forth, at the head of each of which were
+placed two justiciaries, the one English and the
+other Scotch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Rising of Bruce</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the conquest and settlement of Scotland
+the glory of Edward seemed again complete. The
+bitterness of his humiliation at home indeed still
+preyed upon him, and in measure after measure
+we see his purpose of renewing the strife with the
+baronage. In 1303 he found a means of evading
+his pledge to levy no new taxes on merchandise
+save by assent of the realm in a consent of the
+foreign merchants, whether procured by royal
+pressure or no, to purchase by stated payments
+certain privileges of trading. In this "New
+Custom" lay the origin of our import duties. A
+formal absolution from his promises which he
+obtained from Pope Clement the Fifth in 1305
+showed that he looked on his triumph in the North
+as enabling him to reopen the questions which he
+had yielded. But again Scotland stayed his hand.
+Only four months had passed since its submission,
+and he was preparing for a joint Parliament of
+the two nations at Carlisle, when the conquered
+country suddenly sprang again to arms. Its new
+leader was Robert Bruce, a grandson of one of
+the original claimants of the crown. The Norman
+house of Bruce formed a part of the Yorkshire
+baronage, but it had acquired through intermarriages
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-173"></a>2-173]</span>
+
+the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship
+of Annandale. Both the claimant and his son had
+been pretty steadily on the English side in the
+contest with Balliol and Wallace, and Robert had
+himself been trained in the English court and stood
+high in the king's favour. But the withdrawal
+of Balliol gave a new force to his claims upon the
+crown, and the discovery of an intrigue which he
+had set on foot with the Bishop of St. Andrews so
+roused Edward's jealousy that Bruce fled for his
+life across the border. Early in 1306 he met
+Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to whose treachery
+he attributed the disclosure of his plans, in the
+church of the Grey Friars at Dumfries, and after
+the interchange of a few hot words struck him
+with his dagger to the ground. It was an outrage
+that admitted of no forgiveness, and Bruce for
+very safety was forced to assume the crown six
+weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. The news
+roused Scotland again to arms, and summoned
+Edward to a fresh contest with his unconquerable
+foe. But the murder of Comyn had changed the
+king's mood to a terrible pitilessness. He threatened
+death against all concerned in the outrage,
+and exposed the Countess of Buchan, who had set
+the crown on Bruce's head, in a cage or open
+chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers
+of Berwick. At the solemn feast which celebrated
+his son's knighthood Edward vowed on the swan
+which formed the chief dish at the banquet to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-174"></a>2-174]</span>
+
+devote the rest of his days to exact vengeance
+from the murderer himself. But even at the
+moment of the vow Bruce was already flying for
+his life to the western islands. "Henceforth" he
+said to his wife at their coronation "thou art
+Queen of Scotland and I King." "I fear" replied
+Mary Bruce "we are only playing at royalty like
+children in their games." The play was soon
+turned into bitter earnest. A small English force
+under Aymer de Valence sufficed to rout the
+disorderly levies which gathered round the new
+monarch, and the flight of Bruce left his followers
+at Edward's mercy. Noble after noble was sent
+to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred
+with royalty. "His only privilege," burst forth
+the king, "shall be that of being hanged on a
+higher gallows than the rest." Knights and priests
+were strung up side by side by the English
+justiciaries; while the wife and daughters of
+Robert Bruce were flung into Edward's prisons.
+Bruce himself had offered to capitulate to Prince
+Edward. But the offer only roused the old king
+to fury. "Who is so bold," he cried, "as to treat
+with our traitors without our knowledge?" and
+rising from his sick-bed he led his army northwards
+in the summer of 1307 to complete the conquest.
+But the hand of death was upon him, and in the
+very sight of Scotland the old man breathed his
+last at Burgh-upon-Sands.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-175"></a>2-175]</span>
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk4"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4542669"></a>BOOK IV</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4542674"></a>THE PARLIAMENT</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4542680"></a>1307-1461</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-177"></a>2-177]</span>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk4-Auth"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4542747"></a> </li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4542752"></a>AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+For Edward the Second we have three important contemporaries:
+Thomas de la More, Trokelowe's Annals, and the
+life by a monk of Malmesbury printed by Hearne. The
+sympathies of the first are with the King, those of the last
+two with the Barons. Murimuth's short Chronicle is also
+contemporary. John Barbour's "Bruce," the great legendary
+storehouse for his hero's adventures, is historically
+worthless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Important as it is, the reign of Edward the Third is by
+no means fortunate in its annalists. The concluding part
+of the Chronicle of Walter of Hemingford or Heminburgh
+seems to have been jotted down as news of the passing
+events reached its author: it ends at the battle of Crécy.
+Hearne has published another contemporary account, that
+of Robert of Avesbury, which closes in 1356. A third
+account by Knyghton, a canon of Leicester, will be found
+in the collection of Twysden. At the end of this century
+and the beginning of the next the annals which had been
+carried on in the Abbey of St. Albans were thrown together
+by Walsingham in the "Historia Anglicana" which bears
+his name, a compilation whose history may be found in the
+prefaces to the "Chronica Monasterii S. Albani" issued in
+the Rolls Series. An anonymous chronicler whose work is
+printed in the 22nd volume of the "Archæologia" has given
+us the story of the Good Parliament, another account is
+preserved in the "Chronica Angliæ from 1328 to 1388,"
+published in the Rolls Series, and fresh light has been
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-178"></a>2-178]</span>
+
+recently thrown on the time by the publication of a
+Chronicle by Adam of Usk which extends from 1377 to
+1404. Fortunately the scantiness of historical narrative is
+compensated by the growing fulness and abundance of our
+State papers. Rymer's Foedera is rich in diplomatic and
+other documents for this period, and from this time we have
+a storehouse of political and social information in the Parliamentary
+Rolls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the French war itself our primary authority is the
+Chronicle of Jehan le Bel, a canon of the church of St.
+Lambert of Liége, who himself served in Edward's campaign
+against the Scots and spent the rest of his life at the court
+of John of Hainault. Up to the Treaty of Brétigny, where
+it closes, Froissart has done little more than copy this work,
+making however large additions from his own enquiries,
+especially in the Flemish and Breton campaigns and in the
+account of Crécy. Froissart was himself a Hainaulter of
+Valenciennes; he held a post in Queen Philippa's household
+from 1361 to 1369, and under this influence produced in
+1373 the first edition of his well-known Chronicle. A later
+edition is far less English in tone, and a third version, begun
+by him in his old age after long absence from England, is
+distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity
+and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of his
+details; as an historical authority he is of little value. The
+"Fasciculi Zizaniorum" in the Rolls Series with the documents
+appended to it is a work of primary authority for
+the history of Wyclif and his followers: a selection from
+his English tracts has been made by Mr. T. Arnold for the
+University of Oxford, which has also published his "Trias."
+The version of the Bible that bears his name has been edited
+with a valuable preface by the Rev. J. Forshall and Sir F.
+Madden. William Langland's poem, "The Complaint of
+Piers the Ploughman" (edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early
+English Text Society), throws a flood of light on the social
+state of England after the Treaty of Brétigny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The "Annals of Richard the Second and Henry the
+Fourth," now published by the Master of the Rolls, are our
+main authority for the period which follows Edward's death.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-179"></a>2-179]</span>
+
+They serve as the basis of the St. Albans compilation which
+bears the name of Walsingham, and from which the "Life
+of Richard" by a monk of Evesham is for the most part
+derived. The same violent Lancastrian sympathy runs
+through Walsingham and the fifth book of Knyghton's
+Chronicle. The French authorities on the other hand are
+vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this
+time, is supplemented by the metrical history of Creton
+("Archæologia," vol. xx.), and by the "Chronique de la
+Traison et Mort de Richart" (English Historical Society),
+both works of French authors and published in France in
+the time of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of
+arousing French feeling against the House of Lancaster and
+the war-policy which it had revived. The popular feeling
+in England may be seen in "Political Songs from Edward
+III. to Richard III." (Rolls Series). A poem on "The Deposition
+of Richard II." which has been published by the
+Camden Society is now ascribed to William Langland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With Henry the Fifth our historic materials become
+more abundant. We have the "Gesta Henrici Quinti" by
+Titus Livius, a chaplain in the royal army; a life by Elmham,
+prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical in
+arrangement and facts with the former work; a biography
+by Robert Redman; a metrical chronicle by Elmham (published
+in Rolls Series in "Memorials of Henry the Fifth");
+and the meagre chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne.
+The King's Norman campaigns may be studied in M.
+Puiseux's "Siége de Rouen" (Caen, 1867). The "Wars of
+the English in France" and Blondel's work "De Reductione
+Normanniæ" (both in Rolls Series) give ample information
+on the military side of this and the next reign. But with
+the accession of Henry the Sixth we again enter on a period
+of singular dearth in its historical authorities. The "Procès
+de Jeanne d'Arc" (published by the Société de l'Histoire de
+France) is the only real authority for her history. For
+English affairs we are reduced to the meagre accounts of
+William of Worcester, of the Continuator of the Crowland
+Chronicle, and of Fabyan. Fabyan is a London alderman
+with a strong bias in favour of the House of Lancaster, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-180"></a>2-180]</span>
+
+his work is useful for London only. The Continuator is
+one of the best of his class; and though connected with the
+house of York, the date of his work, which appeared soon
+after Bosworth Field, makes him fairly impartial; but he is
+sketchy and deficient in information. The more copious
+narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in
+literary ability, but of later date, and strongly Lancastrian
+in tone. For the struggle between Edward and Warwick,
+the valuable narrative of "The Arrival of Edward the
+Fourth" (Camden Society) may be taken as the official
+account on the royal side. The Paston Letters are the first
+instance in English history of a family correspondence, and
+throw great light on the social condition of the time.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-181"></a>2-181]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk4-Ch1"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4543058"></a>CHAPTER I</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543064"></a>EDWARD II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543070"></a>1307-1327</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Parliament and the Kings</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his calling together the estates of the realm
+Edward the First determined the course of English
+history. From the first moment of its appearance
+the Parliament became the centre of English
+affairs. The hundred years indeed which follow
+its assembly at Westminster saw its rise into a
+power which checked and overawed the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the kings in whose reigns the Parliament
+gathered this mighty strength not one was likely
+to look with indifference on the growth of a rival
+authority, and the bulk of them were men who in
+other times would have roughly checked it. What
+held their hand was the need of the Crown. The
+century and a half that followed the gathering of
+the estates at Westminster was a time of almost
+continual war, and of the financial pressure that
+springs from war. It was indeed war that had
+gathered them. In calling his Parliament Edward
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-182"></a>2-182]</span>
+
+the First sought mainly an effective means of
+procuring supplies for that policy of national
+consolidation which had triumphed in Wales and
+which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. But
+the triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive
+one, and the strife brought wider strifes in its
+train. When Edward wrung from Balliol an
+acknowledgement of his suzerainty he foresaw
+little of the war with France, the war with Spain,
+the quarrel with the Papacy, the upgrowth of
+social, of political, of religious revolution within
+England itself, of which that acknowledgement
+was to be the prelude. But the thicker troubles
+gathered round England the more the royal
+treasury was drained, and now that arbitrary
+taxation was impossible the one means of filling it
+lay in a summons of the Houses. The Crown was
+chained to the Parliament by a tie of absolute
+need. From the first moment of parliamentary
+existence the life and power of the estates
+assembled at Westminster hung on the question
+of supplies. So long as war went on no ruler
+could dispense with the grants which fed the war
+and which Parliament alone could afford. But it
+was impossible to procure supplies save by redressing
+the grievances of which Parliament complained
+and by granting the powers which Parliament
+demanded. It was in vain that king after king,
+conscious that war bound them to the Parliament,
+strove to rid themselves of the war. So far was
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-183"></a>2-183]</span>
+
+the ambition of our rulers from being the cause of
+the long struggle that, save in the one case of
+Henry the Fifth, the desperate effort of every
+ruler was to arrive at peace. Forced as they were
+to fight, their restless diplomacy strove to draw
+from victory as from defeat a means of escape
+from the strife that was enslaving the Crown.
+The royal Council, the royal favourites, were
+always on the side of peace. But fortunately for
+English freedom peace was impossible. The pride
+of the English people, the greed of France, foiled
+every attempt at accommodation. The wisest
+ministers sacrificed themselves in vain. King
+after king patched up truces which never grew
+into treaties, and concluded marriages which
+brought fresh discord instead of peace. War went
+ceaselessly on, and with the march of war went on
+the ceaseless growth of the Parliament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Robert Bruce</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The death of Edward the First arrested only
+for a moment the advance of his army to the
+north. The Earl of Pembroke led it across the
+border, and found himself master of the country
+without a blow. Bruce's career became that of a
+desperate adventurer, for even the Highland chiefs
+in whose fastnesses he found shelter were bitterly
+hostile to one who claimed to be king of their
+foes in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that
+transformed the murderer of Comyn into the noble
+leader of a nation's cause. Strong and of commanding
+presence, brave and genial in temper,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-184"></a>2-184]</span>
+
+Bruce bore the hardships of his career with a
+courage and hopefulness that never failed. In the
+legends that clustered round his name we see him
+listening in Highland glens to the bay of the
+bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass single-handed
+against a crowd of savage clansmen.
+Sometimes the small band which clung to him
+were forced to support themselves by hunting and
+fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their
+enemies tracked them to their lair. Bruce himself
+had more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail
+and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags.
+Little by little, however, the dark sky cleared.
+The English pressure relaxed. James Douglas,
+the darling of Scottish story, was the first of the
+Lowland Barons to rally to the Bruce, and his
+daring gave heart to the king's cause. Once he
+surprised his own house, which had been given to
+an Englishman, ate the dinner which was prepared
+for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed
+their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate.
+Then he staved in the wine-vats that the wine
+might mingle with their blood, and set house and
+wood-pile on fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward the Second</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the
+work of freedom; but the revival of the country
+went steadily on. Pembroke and the English
+forces were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had
+broken out in England between the new king and
+his baronage. The moral purpose which had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-185"></a>2-185]</span>
+
+raised his father to grandeur was wholly wanting
+in Edward the Second; he was showy, idle, and
+stubborn in temper; but he was far from being
+destitute of the intellectual quickness which
+seemed inborn in the Plantagenets. He had no
+love for his father, but he had seen him in the
+later years of his reign struggling against the
+pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as
+to taxation, and procuring absolution from his
+promise to observe the clauses added to the
+Charter. The son's purpose was the same, that of
+throwing off what he looked on as the yoke of the
+baronage; but the means by which he designed to
+bring about his purpose was the choice of a
+minister wholly dependent on the Crown. We
+have already noticed the change by which the
+"clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the
+ministers of arbitrary government under the
+Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly
+superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual
+Council. At the close of the late reign a
+direct demand on the part of the barons to nominate
+the great officers of state had been curtly
+rejected, but the royal choice had been practically
+limited in the selection of its ministers to the
+class of prelates and nobles, and however closely
+connected with royalty they might be such officers
+always to a great extent shared the feelings and
+opinions of their order. The aim of the young
+king seems to have been to undo the change
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-186"></a>2-186]</span>
+
+which had been silently brought about, and to
+imitate the policy of the contemporary sovereigns
+of France by choosing as his ministers men of an
+inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown
+for their power, and representatives of nothing but
+the policy and interests of their master. Piers
+Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from a family of
+Guienne, had been his friend and companion
+during his father's reign, at the close of which he
+had been banished from the realm for his share in
+intrigues which divided Edward from his son. At
+the accession of the new king he was at once
+recalled, created Earl of Cornwall, and placed at
+the head of the administration. When Edward
+crossed the sea to wed Isabella of France, the
+daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage planned
+by his father to provide against any further intervention
+of France in his difficulties with Scotland,
+the new minister was left as Regent in his room.
+The offence given by this rapid promotion was
+embittered by his personal temper. Gay, genial,
+thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the
+quickness and audacity of Southern Gaul. The
+older ministers were dismissed, all claims of precedence
+or inheritance were set aside in the
+distribution of offices at the coronation, while
+taunts and defiances goaded the proud baronage
+to fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and his
+lance unhorsed his opponents in tourney after
+tourney. His reckless wit flung nicknames about
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-187"></a>2-187]</span>
+
+the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was "the Actor,"
+Pembroke "the Jew," Warwick "the Black Dog."
+But taunt and defiance broke helplessly against
+the iron mass of the baronage. After a few
+months of power the formal demand of the
+Parliament for his dismissal could not be resisted,
+and in May 1308 Gaveston was formally banished
+from the realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Thomas of Lancaster</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Edward was far from abandoning his
+favourite. In Ireland he was unfettered by the
+baronage, and here Gaveston found a refuge as
+the King's Lieutenant while Edward sought to
+obtain his recall by the intervention of France and
+the Papacy. But the financial pressure of the
+Scotch war again brought the king and his
+Parliament together in the spring of 1309. It
+was only by conceding the rights which his father
+had sought to establish of imposing import duties
+on the merchants by their own assent that he
+procured a subsidy. The firmness of the baronage
+sprang from their having found a head. In no
+point had the policy of Henry the Third more
+utterly broken down than in his attempt to
+weaken the power of the nobles by filling the
+great earldoms with kinsmen of the royal house.
+He had made Simon of Montfort his brother-in-law
+only to furnish a leader to the nation in the
+Barons' war. In loading his second son, Edmund
+Crouchback, with honours and estates he raised a
+family to greatness which overawed the Crown.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-188"></a>2-188]</span>
+
+Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster;
+after Evesham he had received the forfeited
+Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of
+Derby on the extinction of the house of Ferrers.
+His son, Thomas of Lancaster, was the son-in-law
+of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these
+lordships the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the
+weight of these great baronies was added his
+royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a
+titular king of Sicily. His mother was dowager
+queen of Navarre. His half-sister by the mother's
+side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel
+and mother of the English queen Isabella. He was
+himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not
+far from the succession to the throne. Had Earl
+Thomas been a wiser and a nobler man, his adhesion
+to the cause of the baronage might have guided
+the king into a really national policy. As it was
+his weight proved irresistible. When Edward at
+the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston the
+Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal
+Council, and a Parliament which met in the
+spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the
+realm should be entrusted for a year to a body of
+twenty-one "Ordainers" with Archbishop Winchelsey
+at their head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward and the Ordainers</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to
+the North. A triumph in Scotland would have
+given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he
+had little of his father's military skill, the wasted
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-189"></a>2-189]</span>
+
+country made it hard to keep an army together,
+and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his
+southern realm to meet the Parliament of 1311
+and the "Ordinances" which the twenty-one laid
+before it. By this long and important statute
+Gaveston was banished, other advisers were driven
+from the Council, and the Florentine bankers whose
+loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at
+bay sent out of the realm. The customs duties
+imposed by Edward the First were declared to be
+illegal. Its administrative provisions showed the
+relations which the barons sought to establish between
+the new Parliament and the Crown. Parliaments
+were to be called every year, and in these
+assemblies the king's servants were to be brought,
+if need were, to justice. The great officers of state
+were to be appointed with the counsel and consent
+of the baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament.
+The same consent of the barons in Parliament was
+to be needful ere the king could declare war or
+absent himself from the realm. As the Ordinances
+show, the baronage still looked on Parliament
+rather as a political organization of the nobles than
+as a gathering of the three Estates of the realm.
+The lower clergy pass unnoticed; the Commons
+are regarded as mere taxpayers whose part was
+still confined to the presentation of petitions of
+grievances and the grant of money. But even in
+this imperfect fashion the Parliament was a real
+representation of the country.  The barons no
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-190"></a>2-190]</span>
+
+longer depended for their force on the rise of some
+active leader, or gathered in exceptional assemblies
+to wrest reforms from the Crown by threat of war.
+Their action was made regular and legal. Even if
+the Commons took little part in forming decisions,
+their force when formed hung on the assent of the
+knights and burgesses to them; and the grant
+which alone could purchase from the Crown the
+concessions which the Baronage demanded lay
+absolutely within the control of the Third Estate.
+It was this which made the king's struggles so
+fruitless. He assented to the Ordinances, and then
+withdrawing to the North recalled Gaveston and
+annulled them. But Winchelsey excommunicated
+the favourite, and the barons, gathering in arms,
+besieged him in Scarborough. His surrender in
+May 1312 ended the strife. The "Black Dog" of
+Warwick had sworn that the favourite should feel
+his teeth; and Gaveston flung himself in vain at
+the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, praying for pity
+"from his gentle lord." In defiance of the terms
+of his capitulation he was beheaded on Blacklow
+Hill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Bannockburn</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king's burst of grief was as fruitless as his
+threats of vengeance; a feigned submission of the
+conquerors completed the royal humiliation, and
+the barons knelt before Edward in Westminster
+Hall to receive a pardon which seemed the deathblow
+of the royal power. But if Edward was
+powerless to conquer the baronage he could still
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-191"></a>2-191]</span>
+
+by evading the observance of the Ordinances
+throw the whole realm into confusion. The two
+years that follow Gaveston's death are among the
+darkest in our history. A terrible succession of
+famines intensified the suffering which sprang from
+the utter absence of all rule as dissension raged
+between the barons and the king. At last a
+common peril drew both parties together. The
+Scots had profited by the English troubles, and
+Bruce's "harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of
+its Earl, who had joined the English army, fairly
+turned the tide of success in his favour. Edinburgh,
+Roxburgh, Perth, and most of the Scotch fortresses
+fell one by one into King Robert's hands. The
+clergy met in council and owned him as their lawful
+lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who still
+held to the English cause were coerced into submission,
+and Bruce found himself strong enough
+to invest Stirling, the last and the most important
+of the Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward.
+Stirling was in fact the key of Scotland, and its
+danger roused England out of its civil strife to an
+effort for the recovery of its prey. At the close
+of 1313 Edward recognized the Ordinances, and a
+liberal grant from the Parliament enabled him to
+take the field. Lancaster indeed still held aloof
+on the ground that the king had not sought the
+assent of Parliament to the war, but thirty thousand
+men followed Edward to the North, and a host of
+wild marauders were summoned from Ireland and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-192"></a>2-192]</span>
+
+Wales. The army which Bruce gathered to oppose
+this inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen,
+and was stationed to the south of Stirling on a
+rising ground flanked by a little brook, the Bannockburn,
+which gave its name to the engagement.
+The battle took place on the twenty-fourth of June
+1314. Again two systems of warfare were brought
+face to face as they had been brought at Falkirk,
+for Robert like Wallace drew up his forces in
+hollow squares or circles of spearmen. The English
+were dispirited at the very outset by the failure of
+an attempt to relieve Stirling and by the issue of
+a single combat between Bruce and Henry de
+Bohun, a knight who bore down upon him as he
+was riding peacefully along the front of his army.
+Robert was mounted on a small hackney and held
+only a light battle-axe in his hand, but warding off
+his opponent's spear he cleft his skull with so
+terrible a blow that the handle of his axe was
+shattered in his grasp. At the opening of the
+battle the English archers were thrown forward to
+rake the Scottish squares, but they were without
+support and were easily dispersed by a handful of
+horse whom Bruce held in reserve for the purpose.
+The body of men-at-arms next flung themselves on
+the Scottish front, but their charge was embarrassed
+by the narrow space along which the line was
+forced to move, and the steady resistance of the
+squares soon threw the knighthood into disorder.
+"The horses that were stickit," says an exulting
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-193"></a>2-193]</span>
+
+Scotch writer, "rushed and reeled right rudely."
+In the moment of failure the sight of a body of
+camp-followers, whom they mistook for reinforcements
+to the enemy, spread panic through the
+English host. It broke in a headlong rout. Its
+thousands of brilliant horsemen were soon floundering
+in pits which guarded the level ground to
+Bruce's left, or riding in wild haste for the border.
+Few however were fortunate enough to reach it.
+Edward himself, with a body of five hundred
+knights, succeeded in escaping to Dunbar and the
+sea. But the flower of his knighthood fell into
+the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and the
+footmen were ruthlessly cut down by the country
+folk as they fled. For centuries to come the rich
+plunder of the English camp left its traces on the
+treasure-rolls and the vestment-rolls of castle and
+abbey throughout the Lowlands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Fall of Lancaster</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland:
+but terrible as the blow was England could not
+humble herself to relinquish her claim on the
+Scottish crown. Edward was eager indeed for a
+truce, but with equal firmness Bruce refused all
+negotiation while the royal title was withheld from
+him and steadily pushed on the recovery of his
+southern dominions. His progress was unhindered.
+Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and Lancaster
+at the head of the Ordainers became supreme.
+But it was still impossible to trust the king or to
+act with him, and in the dead-lock of both parties
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-194"></a>2-194]</span>
+
+the Scots plundered as they would. Their ravages
+in the North brought shame on England such as it
+had never known. At last Bruce's capture of
+Berwick in the spring of 1318 forced the king to
+give way. The Ordinances were formally accepted,
+an amnesty granted, and a small number of peers
+belonging to the barons' party added to the great
+officers of state. Had a statesman been at the
+head of the baronage the weakness of Edward
+might have now been turned to good purpose.
+But the character of the Earl of Lancaster seems
+to have fallen far beneath the greatness of his
+position. Distrustful of his cousin, yet himself incapable
+of governing, he stood sullenly aloof from
+the royal Council and the royal armies, and Edward
+was able to lay his failure in recovering Berwick
+during the campaign of 1319 to the Earl's charge.
+His influence over the country was sensibly
+weakened; and in this weakness the new advisers
+on whom the king was leaning saw a hope of
+destroying his power. These were a younger and
+elder Hugh Le Despenser, son and grandson of the
+Justiciar who had fallen beside Earl Simon at
+Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they may
+have been, they were able men, and their policy
+was of a higher stamp than the wilful defiance of
+Gaveston. It lay, if we may gather it from the
+faint indications which remain, in a frank recognition
+of the power of the three Estates as opposed
+to the separate action of the baronage. The rise
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-195"></a>2-195]</span>
+
+of the younger Hugh, on whom the king bestowed
+the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of
+its coheiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester,
+was rapid enough to excite general jealousy;
+and in 1321 Lancaster found little difficulty in
+extorting by force of arms his exile from the kingdom.
+But the tide of popular sympathy was already
+wavering, and it was turned to the royal
+cause by an insult offered to the queen, against
+whom Lady Badlesmere closed the doors of Ledes
+Castle. The unexpected energy shown by Edward
+in avenging this insult gave fresh strength to his
+cause. At the opening of 1322 he found himself
+strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lancaster
+convoked the baronage to force him again
+into exile, the weakness of their party was shown
+by some negotiations into which the Earl entered
+with the Scots and by his precipitate retreat to
+the north on the advance of the royal army. At
+Boroughbridge his forces were arrested and dispersed,
+and Thomas himself, brought captive before
+Edward at Pontefract, was tried and condemned
+to death as a traitor. "Have mercy on me, King
+of Heaven," cried Lancaster, as, mounted on a grey
+pony without a bridle, he was hurried to execution,
+"for my earthly king has forsaken me." His
+death was followed by that of a number of his
+adherents and by the captivity of others; while a
+Parliament at York annulled the proceedings
+against the Despensers and repealed the Ordinances.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-196"></a>2-196]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The
+Despensers</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to
+the victorious confidence of the royalists, that we
+owe the famous provision which reveals the policy
+of the Despensers, the provision that all laws concerning
+"the estate of our Lord the King and his
+heirs or for the estate of the realm and the people
+shall be treated, accorded, and established in Parliaments
+by our Lord the King and by the consent
+of the prelates, earls, barons, and commonalty of
+the realm according as hath been hitherto accustomed."
+It would seem from the tenor of this
+remarkable enactment that much of the sudden
+revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the
+assumption of all legislative action by the baronage
+alone. The same policy was seen in a reissue in
+the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most
+beneficial provisions of the Ordinances which had
+been formally repealed. But the arrogance of the
+Despensers gave new offence; and the utter failure
+of a fresh campaign against Scotland again weakened
+the Crown. The barbarous forays in which the
+borderers under Earl Douglas were wasting Northumberland
+woke a general indignation; and a
+grant from the Parliament at York enabled Edward
+to march with a great army to the North. But
+Bruce as of old declined an engagement till the
+wasted Lowlands starved the invaders into a
+ruinous retreat. The failure forced England in the
+spring of 1323 to stoop to a truce for thirteen
+years, in the negotiation of which Bruce was suffered
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-197"></a>2-197]</span>
+
+to take the royal title. We see in this act
+of the Despensers the first of a series of such
+attempts by which minister after minister strove
+to free the Crown from the bondage under which
+the war-pressure laid it to the growing power of
+Parliament; but it ended, as these after attempts
+ended, only in the ruin of the counsellors who
+planned it. The pride of the country had been
+roused by the struggle, and the humiliation of such
+a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.
+It led the way to the sudden catastrophe
+which closed this disastrous reign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Isabella</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his
+father, had been hampered not only by internal
+divisions but by the harassing intervention of
+France. The rising under Bruce had been backed
+by French aid as well as by a revival of the old
+quarrel over Guienne, and on the accession of
+Charles the Fourth in 1322 a demand of homage
+for Ponthieu and Gascony called Edward over sea.
+But the Despensers dared not let him quit the
+realm, and a fresh dispute as to the right of possession
+in the Agénois brought about the seizure of the
+bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the part of
+the French. The quarrel verged upon open war,
+and to close it Edward's queen, Isabella, a sister of
+the French king, undertook in 1325 to revisit her
+home and bring about a treaty of peace between
+the two countries. Isabella hated the Despensers;
+she was alienated from her husband; but hatred
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-198"></a>2-198]</span>
+
+and alienation were as yet jealously concealed. At
+the close of the year the terms of peace seemed to
+be arranged; and though declining to cross the sea,
+Edward evaded the difficulty created by the demand
+for personal homage by investing his son with the
+Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and despatching
+him to join his mother at Paris. The boy did
+homage to King Charles for the two Duchies, the
+question of the Agénois being reserved for legal
+decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and
+son to England. Neither threats nor prayers however
+could induce either wife or child to return to
+his court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of
+the Marcher barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers,
+had taken refuge in France; and his influence
+over the queen made her the centre of a
+vast conspiracy. With the young Edward in her
+hands she was able to procure soldiers from the
+Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to
+his daughter; the Italian bankers supplied funds;
+and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail in
+the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the
+baronage was revealed when the primate and nobles
+hurried to her standard on her landing at Orwell.
+Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of
+London whose aid he implored, the king fled
+hastily to the west and embarked with the Despensers
+for Lundy Island, which Despenser had
+fortified as a possible refuge; but contrary winds
+flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he fell
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-199"></a>2-199]</span>
+
+into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the
+brother of the Earl whom they had slain. The
+younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at
+once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the
+king placed in ward at Kenilworth till his fate
+could be decided by a Parliament summoned for
+that purpose at Westminster in January 1327.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Deposition
+of Edward</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the
+constitutional usage of the earlier English freedom,
+and asserted their right to depose a king who had
+proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice
+was raised in Edward's behalf, and only four prelates
+protested when the young Prince was proclaimed
+king by acclamation and presented as
+their sovereign to the multitudes without. The
+revolution took legal form in a bill which charged
+the captive monarch with indolence, incapacity, the
+loss of Scotland, the violation of his coronation
+oath and oppression of the Church and baronage;
+and on the approval of this it was resolved that
+the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had ceased and
+that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of
+Windsor. A deputation of the Parliament proceeded
+to Kenilworth to procure the assent of the
+discrowned king to his own deposition, and Edward
+"clad in a plain black gown" bowed quietly to his
+fate. Sir William Trussel at once addressed him
+in words which better than any other mark the
+nature of the step which the Parliament had
+taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor of the earls,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-200"></a>2-200]</span>
+
+barons, and others, having for this full and sufficient
+power, do render and give back to you,
+Edward, once King of England, the homage and
+fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and
+acquit and discharge them thereof in the best
+manner that law and custom will give. And I
+now make protestation in their name that they
+will no longer be in your fealty and allegiance, nor
+claim to hold anything of you as king, but will
+account you hereafter as a private person, without
+any manner of royal dignity." A significant act followed
+these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount,
+the steward of the household, broke his staff of
+office, a ceremony used only at a king's death,
+and declared that all persons engaged in the royal
+service were discharged. The act of Blount was
+only an omen of the fate which awaited the miserable
+king. In the following September he was
+murdered in Berkeley Castle.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-201"></a>2-201]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk4-Ch2"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4544333"></a>CHAPTER II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4544338"></a>EDWARD THE THIRD</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4544344"></a>1327-1347</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Estate of the Commons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed
+to the world the power which the English Parliament
+had gained. In thirty years from their first
+assembly at Westminster the Estates had wrested
+from the Crown the last relic of arbitrary taxation,
+had forced on it new ministers and a new system
+of government, had claimed a right of confirming
+the choice of its councillors and of punishing their
+misconduct, and had established the principle that
+redress of grievances precedes a grant of supply.
+Nor had the time been less important in the internal
+growth of Parliament. Step by step the practical
+sense of the Houses themselves completed the
+work of Edward by bringing about change after
+change in its composition. The very division
+into a House of Lords and a House of Commons
+formed no part of the original plan of Edward the
+First; in the earlier Parliaments each of the four
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-202"></a>2-202]</span>
+
+orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses
+met, deliberated, and made their grants apart from
+each other. This isolation however of the Estates
+soon showed signs of breaking down. Though the
+clergy held steadily aloof from any real union with
+its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire were
+drawn by the similarity of their social position into
+a close connexion with the lords. They seem in
+fact to have been soon admitted by the baronage
+to an almost equal position with themselves,
+whether as legislators or counsellors of the Crown.
+The burgesses on the other hand took little part
+at first in Parliamentary proceedings, save in those
+which related to the taxation of their class. But
+their position was raised by the strifes of the reign
+of Edward the Second when their aid was needed
+by the baronage in its struggle with the Crown;
+and their right to share fully in all legislative
+action was asserted in the statute of 1322. From
+this moment no proceedings can have been considered
+as formally legislative save those conducted
+in full Parliament of all the estates. In subjects
+of public policy however the barons were still regarded
+as the sole advisers of the Crown, though the
+knights of the shire were sometimes consulted with
+them. But the barons and knighthood were not
+fated to be drawn into a single body whose weight
+would have given an aristocratic impress to the
+constitution. Gradually, through causes with
+which we are imperfectly acquainted, the knights
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-203"></a>2-203]</span>
+
+of the shire drifted from their older connexion with
+the baronage into so close and intimate a union
+with the representatives of the towns that at the
+opening of the reign of Edward the Third the two
+orders are found grouped formally together, under
+the name of "The Commons." It is difficult to
+overestimate the importance of this change. Had
+Parliament remained broken up into its four orders
+of clergy, barons, knights, and citizens, its power
+would have been neutralized at every great crisis by
+the jealousies and difficulty of co-operation among
+its component parts. A permanent union of the
+knighthood and the baronage on the other hand
+would have converted Parliament into the mere
+representative of an aristocratic caste, and would
+have robbed it of the strength which it has drawn
+from its connexion with the great body of the
+commercial classes. The new attitude of the
+knighthood, their social connexion as landed gentry
+with the baronage, their political union with the
+burgesses, really welded the three orders into one,
+and gave that unity of feeling and action to our
+Parliament on which its power has ever since
+mainly depended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Scotch War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The weight of the two Houses was seen in
+their settlement of the new government by the
+nomination of a Council with Earl Henry of
+Lancaster at its head. The Council had at once
+to meet fresh difficulties in the North. The truce
+so recently made ceased legally with Edward's
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-204"></a>2-204]</span>
+
+deposition; and the withdrawal of his royal title
+in further offers of peace warned Bruce of the
+new temper of the English rulers. Troops
+gathered on either side, and the English Council
+sought to pave the way for an attack by dividing
+Scotland against itself. Edward Balliol, a son of
+the former king John, was solemnly received as
+a vassal-king of Scotland at the English court.
+Robert was disabled by leprosy from taking the
+field in person, but the insult roused him to hurl
+his marauders again over the border under Douglas
+and Sir Thomas Randolph. The Scotch army has
+been painted for us by an eye-witness whose
+description is embodied in the work of Jehan le
+Bel. "It consisted of four thousand men-at-arms,
+knights, and esquires, well mounted, besides
+twenty thousand men bold and hardy, armed after
+the manner of their country, and mounted upon
+little hackneys that are never tied up or dressed,
+but turned immediately after the day's march to
+pasture on the heath or in the fields.... They
+bring no carriages with them on account of the
+mountains they have to pass in Northumberland,
+neither do they carry with them any provisions of
+bread or wine, for their habits of sobriety are such
+in time of war that they will live for a long time
+on flesh half-sodden without bread, and drink the
+river water without wine. They have therefore
+no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress the
+flesh of the cattle in their skins after they have
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-205"></a>2-205]</span>
+
+flayed them, and being sure to find plenty of them
+in the country which they invade they carry none
+with them. Under the flaps of his saddle each
+man carries a broad piece of metal, behind him a
+little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too
+much of the sodden flesh and their stomach appears
+weak and empty, they set this plate over the fire,
+knead the meal with water, and when the plate is
+hot put a little of the paste upon it in a thin cake
+like a biscuit, which they eat to warm their
+stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they
+perform a longer day's march than other soldiers."
+Though twenty thousand horsemen and forty
+thousand foot marched under their boy-king to
+protect the border, the English troops were utterly
+helpless against such a foe as this. At one time
+the whole army lost its way in the border wastes:
+at another all traces of the enemy disappeared,
+and an offer of knighthood and a hundred marks
+was made to any who could tell where the
+Scots were encamped. But when they were
+found their position behind the Wear proved
+unassailable, and after a bold sally on the English
+camp Douglas foiled an attempt at intercepting
+him by a clever retreat. The English levies broke
+hopelessly up, and a fresh foray into Northumberland
+forced the English Court in 1328 to submit
+to peace. By the treaty of Northampton which
+was solemnly confirmed by Parliament in September
+the independence of Scotland was recognized,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-206"></a>2-206]</span>
+
+and Robert Bruce owned as its king.
+Edward formally abandoned his claim of feudal
+superiority over Scotland; while Bruce promised
+to make compensation for the damage done in the
+North, to marry his son David to Edward's sister
+Joan, and to restore their forfeited estates to
+those nobles who had sided with the English
+king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Fall of
+Mortimer</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the pride of England had been too much
+roused by the struggle with the Scots to bear this
+defeat easily, and the first result of the treaty of
+Northampton was the overthrow of the government
+which concluded it. This result was hastened by
+the pride of Roger Mortimer, who was now
+created Earl of March, and who had made himself
+supreme through his influence over Isabella and
+his exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all
+practical share in the administration of the realm.
+The first efforts to shake Roger's power were
+unsuccessful. The Earl of Lancaster stood, like
+his brother, at the head of the baronage; the
+parliamentary settlement at Edward's accession
+had placed him first in the royal Council; and it
+was to him that the task of defying Mortimer
+naturally fell. At the close of 1328 therefore
+Earl Henry formed a league with the Archbishop
+of Canterbury and with the young king's uncles,
+the Earls of Norfolk and Kent, to bring Mortimer
+to account for the peace with Scotland and the
+usurpation of the government as well as for the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-207"></a>2-207]</span>
+
+late king's murder, a murder which had been the
+work of his private partizans and which had
+profoundly shocked the general conscience. But
+the young king clave firmly to his mother, the
+Earls of Norfolk and Kent deserted to Mortimer,
+and powerful as it seemed the league broke up
+without result. A feeling of insecurity however
+spurred the Earl of March to a bold stroke at his
+opponents. The Earl of Kent, who was persuaded
+that his brother, Edward the Second, still lived a
+prisoner in Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge
+of conspiracy to restore him to the throne, tried
+before a Parliament filled with Mortimer's adherents,
+and sent to the block. But the death of a
+prince of the royal blood roused the young king
+to resentment at the greed and arrogance of a
+minister who treated Edward himself as little
+more than a state-prisoner. A few months after
+his uncle's execution the king entered the Council
+chamber in Nottingham Castle with a force which
+he had introduced through a secret passage in the
+rock on which it stands, and arrested Mortimer
+with his own hands. A Parliament which was at
+once summoned condemned the Earl of March to
+a traitor's death, and in November 1330 he was
+beheaded at Tyburn, while the queen-mother was
+sent for the rest of her life into confinement at
+Castle Rising.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward and
+France</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young as he was, and he had only reached his
+eighteenth year, Edward at once assumed the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-208"></a>2-208]</span>
+
+control of affairs. His first care was to restore
+good order throughout the country, which under
+the late government had fallen into ruin, and to
+free his hands by a peace with France for further
+enterprises in the North. A formal peace had
+been concluded by Isabella after her husband's
+fall; but the death of Charles the Fourth soon
+brought about new jealousies between the two
+courts. The three sons of Philip the Fair had
+followed him on the throne in succession, but all
+had now died without male issue, and Isabella, as
+Philip's daughter, claimed the crown for her son.
+The claim in any case was a hard one to make
+out. Though her brothers had left no sons, they
+had left daughters, and if female succession were
+admitted these daughters of Philip's sons would
+precede a son of Philip's daughter. Isabella met
+this difficulty by a contention that though females
+could transmit the right of succession they could
+not themselves possess it, and that her son, as the
+nearest living male descendant of Philip the Fair,
+and born in the lifetime of the king from whom
+he claimed, could claim in preference to females
+who were related to Philip in as near a degree.
+But the bulk of French jurists asserted that only
+male succession gave right to the French throne.
+On such a theory the right inheritable from Philip
+the Fair was exhausted; and the crown passed to
+the son of Philip's younger brother, Charles of
+Valois, who in fact peacefully mounted the throne
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-209"></a>2-209]</span>
+
+as Philip the Sixth. Purely formal as the claim
+which Isabella advanced seems to have been, it
+revived the irritation between the two courts, and
+though Edward's obedience to a summons which
+Philip addressed to him to do homage for Aquitaine
+brought about an agreement that both
+parties should restore the gains they had made
+since the last treaty the agreement was never
+carried out. Fresh threats of war ended in the
+conclusion of a new treaty of peace, but the
+question whether liege or simple homage was due
+for the duchies remained unsettled when the fall
+of Mortimer gave the young king full mastery of
+affairs. His action was rapid and decisive. Clad
+as a merchant, and with but fifteen horsemen at
+his back, Edward suddenly made his appearance
+in 1331 at the French court and did homage as
+fully as Philip required. The question of the
+Agénois remained unsettled, though the English
+Parliament insisted that its decision should rest
+with negotiation and not with war, but on all
+other points a complete peace was made; and the
+young king rode back with his hands free for an
+attack which he was planning on the North.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">New Scotch
+War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The provisions of the Treaty of Northampton
+for the restitution of estates had never been fully
+carried out. Till this was done the English court
+held that the rights of feudal superiority over
+Scotland which it had yielded in the treaty
+remained in force; and at this moment an opening
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-210"></a>2-210]</span>
+
+seemed to present itself for again asserting these
+rights with success. Fortune seemed at last to
+have veered to the English side. The death of
+Robert Bruce only a year after the Treaty of
+Northampton left the Scottish throne to his son
+David, a child of but eight years old. The death
+of the king was followed by the loss of Randolph
+and Douglas; and the internal difficulties of the
+realm broke out in civil strife. To the great
+barons on either side the border the late peace
+involved serious losses, for many of the Scotch
+houses held large estates in England as many of
+the English lords held large estates in Scotland,
+and although the treaty had provided for their
+claims they had in each case been practically set
+aside. It is this discontent of the barons at the
+new settlement which explains the sudden success
+of Edward Balliol in a snatch which he made at
+the Scottish throne. Balliol's design was known
+at the English court, where he had found shelter for
+some years; and Edward, whether sincerely or
+no, forbade his barons from joining him and posted
+troops on the border to hinder his crossing it.
+But Balliol found little difficulty in making his
+attack by sea. He sailed from England at the
+head of a body of nobles who claimed estates in
+the North, landed in August 1332 on the shores of
+Fife, and after repulsing with immense loss an
+army which attacked him near Perth was crowned
+at Scone two months after his landing, while
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-211"></a>2-211]</span>
+
+David Bruce fled helplessly to France. Edward
+had given no open aid to this enterprise, but the
+crisis tempted his ambition, and he demanded and
+obtained from Balliol an acknowledgement of the
+English suzerainty. The acknowledgement however
+was fatal to Balliol himself. Surprised at
+Annan by a party of Scottish nobles, their sudden
+attack drove him in December over the border
+after a reign of but five months; and Berwick,
+which he had agreed to surrender to Edward, was
+strongly garrisoned against an English attack.
+The sudden breakdown of his vassal-king left
+Edward face to face with a new Scotch war. The
+Parliament which he summoned to advise on the
+enforcement of his claim showed no wish to plunge
+again into the contest and met him only with
+evasions and delays. But Edward had gone too
+far to withdraw. In March 1333 he appeared
+before Berwick, and besieged the town. A Scotch
+army under the regent, Sir Archibald Douglas,
+brother to the famous Sir James, advanced to its
+relief in July and attacked a covering force which
+was encamped on the strong position of Halidon
+Hill. The English bowmen however vindicated
+the fame they had first won at Falkirk and were
+soon to crown in the victory of Crécy. The
+Scotch only struggled through the marsh which
+covered the English front to be riddled with a
+storm of arrows and to break in utter rout. The
+battle decided the fate of Berwick. From that
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-212"></a>2-212]</span>
+
+time the town has remained English territory. It
+was in fact the one part of Edward's conquests
+which was preserved in the end by the English
+crown. But fragment as it was, it was always
+viewed legally as representing the realm of which it
+once formed a part. As Scotland, it had its
+chancellor, chamberlain, and other officers of State:
+and the peculiar heading of Acts of Parliament
+enacted for England "and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed"
+still preserves the memory of its
+peculiar position. But the victory did more than
+give Berwick to England. The defeat of Douglas
+was followed by the submission of a large part of
+the Scotch nobles, by the flight of the boy-king
+David, and by the return of Balliol unopposed to
+the throne. Edward exacted a heavy price for
+his aid. All Scotland south of the Firth of Forth
+was ceded to England, and Balliol did homage as
+vassal-king for the rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Scotland
+freed</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at the moment of this submission that
+the young king reached the climax of his success.
+A king at fourteen, a father at seventeen, he had
+carried out at eighteen a political revolution in
+the overthrow of Mortimer, and restored at
+twenty-two the ruined work of his grandfather.
+The northern frontier was carried to its old line
+under the Northumbrian kings. His kingdom
+within was peaceful and orderly; and the strife
+with France seemed at an end. During the next
+three years Edward persisted in the line of policy
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-213"></a>2-213]</span>
+
+he had adopted, retaining his hold over Southern
+Scotland, aiding his sub-king Balliol in campaign
+after campaign against the despairing efforts of
+the nobles who still adhered to the house of
+Bruce, a party who were now headed by Robert
+the Steward of Scotland and by Earl Randolph
+of Moray. His perseverance was all but crowned
+with success, when Scotland was again saved by
+the intervention of France. The successes of
+Edward roused anew the jealousy of the French
+court. David Bruce found a refuge with Philip;
+French ships appeared off the Scotch coast and
+brought aid to the patriot nobles; and the old
+legal questions about the Agénois and Aquitaine
+were mooted afresh by the French council. For
+a time Edward staved off the contest by repeated
+embassies; but his refusal to accept Philip as a
+mediator between England and the Scots stirred
+France to threats of war. In 1335 fleets gathered
+on its coast; descents were made on the English
+shores; and troops and galleys were hired in
+Italy and the north for an invasion of England.
+The mere threat of war saved Scotland. Edward's
+forces there were drawn to the south to meet the
+looked-for attack from across the Channel; and
+the patriot party freed from their pressure at
+once drew together again. The actual declaration
+of war against France at the close of 1337 was
+the knell of Balliol's greatness; he found himself
+without an adherent and withdrew two years
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-214"></a>2-214]</span>
+
+later to the court of Edward, while David returned
+to his kingdom in 1342 and won back the
+chief fastnesses of the Lowlands. From that
+moment the freedom of Scotland was secured.
+From a war of conquest and patriotic resistance
+the struggle died into a petty strife between two
+angry neighbours, which became a mere episode
+in the larger contest which it had stirred between
+England and France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The
+Hundred
+Years War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether in its national or in its European
+bearings it is difficult to overestimate the importance
+of the contest which was now to open
+between these two nations. To England it
+brought a social, a religious, and in the end
+a political revolution. The Peasant Revolt,
+Lollardry, and the New Monarchy were direct
+issues of the Hundred Years War. With it
+began the military renown of England; with it
+opened her struggle for the mastery of the seas.
+The pride begotten by great victories and a
+sudden revelation of warlike prowess roused the
+country not only to a new ambition, a new
+resolve to assert itself as a European power, but
+to a repudiation of the claims of the Papacy and
+an assertion of the ecclesiastical independence both
+of Church and Crown which paved the way for
+and gave its ultimate form to the English Reformation.
+The peculiar shape which English
+warfare assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and
+archer over noble and knight, gave new force to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-215"></a>2-215]</span>
+
+the political advance of the Commons. On the
+other hand the misery of the war produced the
+first great open feud between labour and capital.
+The glory of Crécy or Poitiers was dearly bought
+by the upgrowth of English pauperism. The warlike
+temper nursed on foreign fields begot at
+home a new turbulence and scorn of law, woke
+a new feudal spirit in the baronage, and sowed in
+the revolution which placed a new house on the
+throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the
+succession which troubled England to the days
+of Elizabeth. Nor was the contest of less import
+in the history of France. If it struck her for
+the moment from her height of pride, it raised
+her in the end to the front rank among the states
+of Europe. It carried her boundaries to the
+Rhone and the Pyrenees. It wrecked alike the
+feudal power of her <i>noblesse</i> and the hopes of
+constitutional liberty which might have sprung
+from the emancipation of the peasant or the
+action of the burgher. It founded a royal
+despotism which reached its height in Richelieu
+and finally plunged France into the gulf of the
+Revolution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Imperial
+Alliance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen
+at the moment when Philip and Edward declared
+war. But from the very first the war took
+European dimensions. The young king saw
+clearly the greater strength of France. The
+weakness of the Empire, the captivity of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-216"></a>2-216]</span>
+
+Papacy at Avignon, left her without a rival
+among European powers. The French chivalry
+was the envy of the world, and its military fame
+had just been heightened by a victory over the
+Flemish communes at Cassel. In numbers, in
+wealth, the French people far surpassed their
+neighbours over the Channel. England can
+hardly have counted more than four millions of
+inhabitants, France boasted of twenty. The
+clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions
+is explained by the fact that their subjects in
+Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have
+equalled in number their subjects in England.
+There was the same disproportion in the wealth
+of the two countries and, as men held then, in
+their military resources. Edward could bring
+only eight thousand men-at-arms to the field.
+Philip, while a third of his force was busy elsewhere,
+could appear at the head of forty thousand.
+Of the revolution in warfare which was to reverse
+this superiority, to make the footman rather than
+the horseman the strength of an army, the world
+and even the English king, in spite of Falkirk
+and Halidon, as yet recked little. Edward's
+whole energy was bent on meeting the strength
+of France by a coalition of powers against her,
+and his plans were helped by the dread which
+the great feudatories of the empire who lay
+nearest to him, the Duke of Brabant, the Counts
+of Hainault and Gelders, the Markgrave of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-217"></a>2-217]</span>
+
+Juliers, felt of French annexation. They listened
+willingly enough to his offers. Sixty thousand
+crowns purchased the alliance of Brabant. Lesser
+subsidies bought that of the two counts and the
+Markgrave. The king's work was helped indeed
+by his domestic relations. The Count of Hainault
+was Edward's father-in-law; he was also the
+father-in-law of the Count of Gelders. But the
+marriage of a third of the Count's daughters
+brought the English king a more important
+ally. She was wedded to the Emperor, Lewis of
+Bavaria, and the connexion that thus existed
+between the English and Imperial Courts facilitated
+the negotiations which ended in a formal
+alliance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Its Relation
+to the
+Papacy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the league had a more solid ground. The
+Emperor, like Edward, had his strife with France.
+His strife sprang from the new position of the
+Papacy. The removal of the Popes to Avignon
+which followed on the quarrel of Boniface the
+Eighth with Philip le Bel and the subjection to
+the French court which resulted from it affected
+the whole state of European politics. In the
+ever-recurring contest between the Papacy and
+the Empire France had of old been the lieutenant
+of the Roman See. But with the settlement at
+Avignon the relation changed, and the Pope
+became the lieutenant of France. Instead of the
+Papacy using the French kings in its war of ideas
+against the Empire the French kings used the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-218"></a>2-218]</span>
+
+Papacy as an instrument in their political rivalry
+with the Emperors. But if the position of the
+Pope drew Lewis to the side of England, it had
+much to do with drawing Edward to the side of
+Lewis. It was this that made the alliance, fruitless
+as it proved in a military sense, so memorable
+in its religious results. Hitherto England had
+been mainly on the side of the Popes in their
+strife against the Emperors. Now that the Pope
+had become a tool in the hands of a power which
+was to be its great enemy, the country was driven
+to close alliances with the Empire and to an evergrowing
+alienation from the Roman See. In
+Scotch affairs the hostility of the Popes had been
+steady and vexatious ever since Edward the
+First's time, and from the moment that this fresh
+struggle commenced they again showed their
+French partizanship. When Lewis made a last
+appeal for peace, Philip of Valois made Benedict
+XII. lay down as a condition that the Emperor
+should form no alliance with an enemy of France.
+The quarrel of both England and Germany with
+the Papacy at once grew ripe. The German Diet
+met to declare that the Imperial power came from
+God alone, and that the choice of an Emperor
+needed no Papal confirmation, while Benedict
+replied by a formal excommunication of Lewis.
+England on the other hand entered on a religious
+revolution when she stood hand in hand with an
+excommunicated power. It was significant that
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-219"></a>2-219]</span>
+
+though worship ceased in Flanders on the Pope's
+interdict, the English priests who were brought
+over set the interdict at nought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Failure of
+the Alliance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The negotiation of this alliance occupied the
+whole of 1337; it ended in a promise of the
+Emperor on payment of 3000 gold florins to
+furnish two thousand men-at-arms. In the opening
+of 1338 an attack of Philip on the Agénois
+forced Edward into open war. His profuse expenditure
+however brought little fruit. Though
+Edward crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the
+year was spent in negotiations with the princes of
+the Lower Rhine and in an interview with the
+Emperor at Coblentz, where Lewis appointed him
+Vicar-General of the Emperor for all territories
+on the left bank of the Rhine. The occupation
+of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French king
+gave a formal ground for calling the princes of
+this district to Edward's standard. But already
+the great alliance showed signs of yielding.
+Edward, uneasy at his connexion with an
+Emperor under the ban of the Church and
+harassed by vehement remonstrances from the
+Pope, entered again into negotiations with France
+in the winter of 1338; and Lewis, alarmed in
+his turn, listened to fresh overtures from Benedict,
+who held out vague hopes of reconciliation while
+he threatened a renewed excommunication if
+Lewis persisted in invading France. The non-arrival
+of the English subsidy decided the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-220"></a>2-220]</span>
+
+Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and
+the attitude of Lewis told on the temper of
+Edward's German allies. Though all joined him
+in the summer of 1339 on his formal summons of
+them as Vicar-General of the Empire, and his
+army when it appeared before Cambray numbered
+forty thousand men, their ardour cooled as the
+town held out. Philip approached it from the
+south, and on Edward's announcing his resolve
+to cross the river and attack him he was at once
+deserted by the two border princes who had most
+to lose from a contest with France, the Counts of
+Hainault and Namur. But the king was still
+full of hope. He pushed forward to the country
+round St. Quentin between the head waters of the
+Somme and the Oise with the purpose of forcing
+a decisive engagement. But he found Philip
+strongly encamped, and declaring their supplies
+exhausted his allies at once called for a retreat.
+It was in vain that Edward moved slowly for a
+week along the French border. Philip's position
+was too strongly guarded by marshes and entrenchments
+to be attacked, and at last the allies would
+stay no longer. At the news that the French
+king had withdrawn to the south the whole army
+in turn fell back upon Brussels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">England and
+the Papacy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes
+which Edward had drawn from his alliance with
+the Empire. With the exhaustion of his subsidies
+the princes of the Low Countries became inactive.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-221"></a>2-221]</span>
+
+The Duke of Brabant became cooler in his friendship.
+The Emperor himself, still looking to an
+accommodation with the Pope and justly jealous
+of Edward's own intrigues at Avignon, wavered
+and at last fell away. But though the alliance
+ended in disappointment it had given a new impulse
+to the grudge against the Papacy which
+began with its extortions in the reign of Henry
+the Third. The hold of Rome on the loyalty of
+England was sensibly weakening. Their transfer
+from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed the
+Popes of half the awe which they had inspired
+among Englishmen. Not only did it bring them
+nearer and more into the light of common day,
+but it dwarfed them into mere agents of French
+policy. The old bitterness at their exactions was
+revived by the greed to which they were driven
+through their costly efforts to impose a French
+and Papal Emperor on Germany as well as to
+secure themselves in their new capital on the
+Rhone. The mighty building, half fortress, half
+palace, which still awes the traveller at Avignon
+has played its part in our history. Its erection
+was to the rise of Lollardry what the erection of
+St. Peter's was to the rise of Lutheranism. Its
+massive walls, its stately chapel, its chambers
+glowing with the frescoes of Simone Memmi, the
+garden which covered its roof with a strange
+verdure, called year by year for fresh supplies of
+gold; and for this as for the wider and costlier
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-222"></a>2-222]</span>
+
+schemes of Papal policy gold could be got only
+by pressing harder and harder on the national
+churches the worst claims of the Papal court, by
+demands of first-fruits and annates from rectory
+and bishoprick, by pretensions to the right of
+bestowing all benefices which were in ecclesiastical
+patronage and by the sale of these presentations,
+by the direct taxation of the clergy, by the intrusion
+of foreign priests into English livings, by
+opening a mart for the disposal of pardons, dispensations,
+and indulgences, and by encouraging
+appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction to
+the Papal court. No grievance was more bitterly
+felt than this grievance of appeals. Cases of the
+most trifling importance were called for decision
+out of the realm to a tribunal whose delays were
+proverbial and whose fees were enormous. The
+envoy of an Oxford College which sought only a
+formal licence to turn a vicarage into a rectory
+had not only to bear the expense and toil of a
+journey which then occupied some eighteen days
+but was kept dangling at Avignon for three-and-twenty
+weeks. Humiliating and vexatious however
+as these appeals were, they were but one
+among the means of extortion which the Papal
+court multiplied as its needs grew greater. The
+protest of a later Parliament, exaggerated as its
+statements no doubt are, shows the extent of the
+national irritation, if not of the grievances which
+produced it. It asserted that the taxes levied by
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-223"></a>2-223]</span>
+
+the Pope amounted to five times the amount of
+those levied by the king; that by reservations
+during the life of actual holders the Pope disposed
+of the same bishoprick four or five times over,
+receiving each time the first-fruits. "The brokers
+of the sinful city of Rome promote for money
+unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices to
+the value of a thousand marks, while the poor
+and learned hardly obtain one of twenty. So
+decays sound learning. They present aliens who
+neither see nor care to see their parishioners,
+despise God's services, convey away the treasure
+of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens.
+The Pope's revenue from England alone
+is larger than that of any prince in Christendom.
+God gave his sheep to be pastured, not to be
+shaven and shorn." At the close of this reign
+indeed the deaneries of Lichfield, Salisbury, and
+York, the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which
+was reputed the wealthiest English benefice, together
+with a host of prebends and preferments,
+were held by Italian cardinals and priests, while
+the Pope's collector from his office in London
+sent twenty thousand marks a year to the Papal
+treasury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Protest
+of the
+Parliament</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the greed of the Popes was no new
+grievance, though the increase of these exactions
+since the removal to Avignon gave it a new force.
+What alienated England most was their connexion
+with and dependence on France. From the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-224"></a>2-224]</span>
+
+first outset of the troubles in the North their
+attitude had been one of hostility to the English
+projects. France was too useful a supporter of
+the Papal court to find much difficulty in inducing
+it to aid in hampering the growth of English
+greatness. Boniface the Eighth released Balliol
+from his oath of fealty, and forbade Edward to
+attack Scotland on the ground that it was a fief
+of the Roman See. His intervention was met
+by a solemn and emphatic protest from the English
+Parliament; but it none the less formed a
+terrible obstacle in Edward's way. The obstacle
+was at last removed by the quarrel of Boniface
+with Philip the Fair; but the end of this quarrel
+only threw the Papacy more completely into the
+hands of France. Though Avignon remained imperial
+soil, the removal of the Popes to this city
+on the verge of their dominions made them mere
+tools of the French kings. Much no doubt of
+the endless negotiation which the Papal court
+carried on with Edward the Third in his strife
+with Philip of Valois was an honest struggle for
+peace. But to England it seemed the mere interference
+of a dependant on behalf of "our enemy
+of France." The people scorned a "French
+Pope," and threatened Papal legates with stoning
+when they landed on English shores. The alliance
+of Edward with an excommunicated Emperor,
+the bold defiance with which English priests said
+mass in Flanders when an interdict reduced the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-225"></a>2-225]</span>
+
+Flemish priests to silence, were significant tokens
+of the new attitude which England was taking up
+in the face of Popes who were leagued with its
+enemy. The old quarrel over ecclesiastical wrongs
+was renewed in a formal and decisive way. In
+1343 the Commons petitioned for the redress of
+the grievance of Papal appointments to vacant
+livings in despite of the rights of patrons or the
+Crown; and Edward formally complained to the
+Pope of his appointing "foreigners, most of them
+suspicious persons, who do not reside on their
+benefices, who do not know the faces of the flocks
+entrusted to them, who do not understand their
+language, but, neglecting the cure of souls, seek
+as hirelings only their worldly hire." In yet
+sharper words the king rebuked the Papal greed.
+"The successor of the Apostles was set over the
+Lord's sheep to feed and not to shear them."
+The Parliament declared "that they neither could
+nor would tolerate such things any longer"; and
+the general irritation moved slowly towards those
+statutes of Provisors and Praemunire which
+heralded the policy of Henry the Eighth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Flanders</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But for the moment the strife with the Papacy
+was set aside in the efforts which were needed for
+a new struggle with France. The campaign of
+1339 had not only ended in failure, it had dispelled
+the trust of Edward in an Imperial alliance.
+But as this hope faded away a fresh hope
+dawned on the king from another quarter.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-226"></a>2-226]</span>
+
+Flanders, still bleeding from the defeat of its
+burghers by the French knighthood, was his
+natural ally. England was the great wool-producing
+country of the west, but few woollen
+fabrics were woven in England. The number of
+weavers' gilds shows that the trade was gradually
+extending, and at the very outset of his reign
+Edward had taken steps for its encouragement.
+He invited Flemish weavers to settle in his
+country, and took the new immigrants, who
+chose the eastern counties for the seat of their
+trade, under his royal protection. But English
+manufactures were still in their infancy and nine-tenths
+of the English wool went to the looms of
+Bruges or of Ghent. We may see the rapid
+growth of this export trade in the fact that the
+king received in a single year more than £30,000
+from duties levied on wool alone. The woolsack
+which forms the Chancellor's seat in the House of
+Lords is said to witness to the importance which
+the government attached to this new source of
+wealth. A stoppage of this export threw half
+the population of the great Flemish towns out of
+work, and the irritation caused in Flanders by the
+interruption which this trade sustained through
+the piracies that Philip's ships were carrying on
+in the Channel showed how effective the threat
+of such a stoppage would be in securing their
+alliance. Nor was this the only ground for
+hoping for aid from the Flemish towns. Their
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-227"></a>2-227]</span>
+
+democratic spirit jostled roughly with the feudalism
+of France. If their counts clung to the
+French monarchy, the towns themselves, proud
+of their immense population, their thriving industry,
+their vast wealth, drew more and more
+to independence. Jacques van Arteveldt, a great
+brewer of Ghent, wielded the chief influence in
+their councils, and his aim was to build up a confederacy
+which might hold France in check along
+her northern border.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Flemish
+Alliance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His plans had as yet brought no help from the
+Flemish towns, but at the close of 1339 they set
+aside their neutrality for open aid. The great
+plan of Federation which Van Arteveldt had been
+devising as a check on the aggression of France
+was carried out in a treaty concluded between
+Edward, the Duke of Brabant, the cities of
+Brussels, Antwerp, Louvain, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres,
+and seven others. By this remarkable treaty it
+was provided that war should be begun and ended
+only by mutual consent, free commerce be encouraged
+between Flanders and Brabant, and no
+change made in their commercial arrangements
+save with the consent of the whole league. By
+a subsequent treaty the Flemish towns owned
+Edward as King of France, and declared war
+against Philip of Valois. But their voice was
+decisive on the course of the campaign which
+opened in 1340. As Philip held the Upper
+Scheldt by the occupation of Cambray, so he held
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-228"></a>2-228]</span>
+
+the Lower Scheldt by that of Tournay, a fortress
+which broke the line of commerce between
+Flanders and Brabant. It was a condition of the
+Flemish alliance therefore that the war should
+open with the capture of Tournay. It was only
+at the cost of a fight however that Edward could
+now cross the Channel to undertake the siege.
+France was as superior in force at sea as on land;
+and a fleet of two hundred vessels gathered at
+Sluys to intercept him. But the fine seamanship
+of the English sailors justified the courage of their
+king in attacking this fleet with far smaller
+forces; the French ships were utterly destroyed
+and twenty thousand Frenchmen slain in the encounter.
+It was with the lustre of this great
+victory about him that Edward marched upon
+Tournay. Its siege however proved as fruitless as
+that of Cambray in the preceding year, and after
+two months of investment his vast army of one
+hundred thousand men broke up without either
+capturing the town or bringing Philip when he
+approached it to an engagement. Want of money
+forced Edward to a truce for a year, and he
+returned beggared and embittered to England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward's
+distress</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been worsted in war as in diplomacy.
+One naval victory alone redeemed years of failure
+and expense. Guienne was all but lost, England
+was suffering from the terrible taxation, from the
+ruin of commerce, from the ravages of her coast.
+Five years of constant reverses were hard blows
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-229"></a>2-229]</span>
+
+for a king of twenty-eight who had been glorious
+and successful at twenty-three. His financial
+difficulties indeed were enormous. It was in vain
+that, availing himself of an Act which forbade the
+exportation of wool "till by the King and his
+Council it is otherwise provided," he turned for
+the time the wool-trade into a royal monopoly
+and became the sole wool exporter, buying at £3
+and selling at £20 the sack.  The campaign of
+1339 brought with it a crushing debt: that of
+1340 proved yet more costly. Edward attributed
+his failure to the slackness of his ministers in
+sending money and supplies, and this to their
+silent opposition to the war. But wroth as he
+was on his return, a short struggle between the
+ministers and the king ended in a reconciliation,
+and preparations for renewed hostilities went on.
+Abroad indeed nothing could be done.  The
+Emperor finally withdrew from Edward's friendship.
+A new Pope, Clement the Sixth, proved
+even more French in sentiment than his predecessor.
+Flanders alone held true of all England's
+foreign allies. Edward was powerless to attack
+Philip in the realm he claimed for his own; what
+strength he could gather was needed to prevent
+the utter ruin of the English cause in Scotland on
+the return of David Bruce. Edward's soldiers
+had been driven from the open country and confined
+to the fortresses of the Lowlands. Even
+these were at last reft away. Perth was taken by
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-230"></a>2-230]</span>
+
+siege, and the king was too late to prevent the
+surrender of Stirling. Edinburgh was captured
+by a stratagem. Only Roxburgh and Berwick
+were saved by a truce which Edward was driven
+to conclude with the Scots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Progress of
+Parliament</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But with the difficulties of the Crown the
+weight of the two Houses made itself more and
+more sensibly felt. The almost incessant warfare
+which had gone on since the accession of Edward
+the Third consolidated and developed the power
+which they had gained from the dissensions of
+his father's reign. The need of continual grants
+brought about an assembly of Parliament year by
+year, and the subsidies that were accorded to the
+king showed the potency of the financial engine
+which the Crown could now bring into play. In
+a single year the Parliament granted twenty
+thousand sacks, or half the wool of the realm.
+Two years later the Commons voted an aid of
+thirty thousand sacks. In 1339 the barons
+granted the tenth sheep and fleece and lamb.
+The clergy granted two tenths in one year, and a
+tenth for three years in the next. But with each
+supply some step was made to greater political
+influence. In his earlier years Edward showed no
+jealousy of the Parliament. His policy was to
+make the struggle with France a national one by
+winning for it the sympathy of the people at
+large; and with this view he not only published
+in the County Courts the efforts he had made for
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-231"></a>2-231]</span>
+
+peace, but appealed again and again for the sanction
+and advice of Parliament in his enterprise.
+In 1331 he asked the Estates whether they would
+prefer negotiation or war: in 1338 he declared
+that his expedition to Flanders was made by the
+assent of the Lords and at the prayer of the
+Commons. The part of the last in public affairs
+grew greater in spite of their own efforts to
+remain obscure. From the opening of the reign a
+crowd of enactments for the regulation of trade,
+whether wise or unwise, shows the influence of
+the burgesses. But the final division of Parliament
+into two Houses, a change which was completed
+by 1341, necessarily increased the weight
+of the Commons. The humble trader who shrank
+from counselling the Crown in great matters of
+policy gathered courage as he found himself
+sitting side by side with the knights of the shire.
+It was at the moment when this great change was
+being brought about that the disasters of the war
+spurred the Parliament to greater activity. The
+enormous grants of 1340 were bought by the
+king's assent to statutes which provided remedies
+for grievances of which the Commons complained.
+The most important of these put an end to the
+attempts which Edward had made like his grandfather
+to deal with the merchant class apart from
+the Houses. No charge or aid was henceforth
+to be made save by the common assent of the
+Estates assembled in Parliament. The progress
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-232"></a>2-232]</span>
+
+of the next year was yet more important. The
+strife of the king with his ministers, the foremost
+of whom was Archbishop Stratford, ended in the
+Primate's refusal to make answer to the royal
+charges save in full Parliament, and in the assent
+of the king to a resolution of the Lords that none
+of their number, whether ministers of the Crown
+or no, should be brought to trial elsewhere than
+before his peers. The Commons demanded and
+obtained the appointment of commissioners elected
+in Parliament to audit the grants already made.
+Finally it was enacted that at each Parliament the
+ministers should hold themselves accountable for
+all grievances; that on any vacancy the king
+should take counsel with his lords as to the choice
+of the new minister; and that, when chosen, each
+minister should be sworn in Parliament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Close of the
+truce</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the moment which we have reached therefore
+the position of the Parliament had become
+far more important than at Edward's accession.
+Its form was settled. The third estate had gained
+a fuller parliamentary power. The principle of
+ministerial responsibility to the Houses had been
+established by formal statute. But the jealousy
+of Edward was at last completely roused, and
+from this moment he looked on the new power as
+a rival to his own. The Parliament of 1341 had
+no sooner broken up than he revoked by Letters
+Patent the statutes it had passed as done in prejudice
+of his prerogative and only assented to for
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-233"></a>2-233]</span>
+
+the time to prevent worse confusion. The regular
+assembly of the estates was suddenly interrupted,
+and two years passed without a Parliament. It
+was only the continual presence of war which
+from this time drove Edward to summon the
+Houses at all. Though the truce still held good
+between England and France a quarrel of succession
+to the Duchy of Britanny which broke out in
+1341 and called Philip to the support of one
+claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and Edward
+to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort,
+dragged on year after year. In Flanders
+things went ill for the English cause. The dissensions
+between the great and the smaller towns,
+and in the greater towns themselves between the
+weavers and fullers, dissensions which had taxed
+the genius of Van Arteveldt through the nine
+years of his wonderful rule, broke out in 1345
+into a revolt at Ghent in which the great statesman
+was slain. With him fell a design for the
+deposition of the Count of Flanders and the reception
+of the Prince of Wales in his stead which he
+was ardently pressing, and whose political results
+might have been immense. Deputies were at
+once sent to England to excuse Van Arteveldt's
+murder and to promise loyalty to Edward; but
+the king's difficulties had now reached their
+height. His loans from the Florentine bankers
+amounted to half a million. His claim on the
+French crown found not a single adherent save
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-234"></a>2-234]</span>
+
+among the burghers of the Flemish towns. The
+overtures which he made for peace were contemptuously
+rejected, and the expiration of the
+truce in 1345 found him again face to face with
+France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward marches on Paris</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was perhaps this breakdown of all
+foreign hope that contributed to Edward's success
+in the fresh outbreak of war. The war opened in
+Guienne, and Henry of Lancaster, who was now
+known as the Earl of Derby, and who with the
+Hainaulter Sir Walter Maunay took the command
+in that quarter, at once showed the abilities of a
+great general. The course of the Garonne was
+cleared by his capture of La Réole and Aiguillon,
+that of the Dordogne by the reduction of Bergerac,
+and a way opened for the reconquest of Poitou by
+the capture of Angoulême. These unexpected
+successes roused Philip to strenuous efforts, and a
+hundred thousand men gathered under his son,
+John, Duke of Normandy, for the subjugation
+of the South. Angoulême was won back, and
+Aiguillon besieged when Edward sailed to the aid
+of his hard-pressed lieutenant. It was with an
+army of thirty thousand men, half English, half
+Irish and Welsh, that he commenced a march
+which was to change the whole face of the war.
+His aim was simple. Flanders was still true to
+Edward's cause, and while Derby was pressing on
+in the south a Flemish army besieged Bouvines
+and threatened France from the north. The king
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-235"></a>2-235]</span>
+
+had at first proposed to land in Guienne and
+relieve the forces in the south; but suddenly
+changing his design he disembarked at La Hogue
+and advanced through Normandy. By this skilful
+movement Edward not only relieved Derby
+but threatened Paris, and left himself able to
+co-operate with either his own army in the south
+or the Flemings in the north. Normandy was
+totally without defence, and after the sack of
+Caen, which was then one of the wealthiest towns
+in France, Edward marched upon the Seine. His
+march threatened Rouen and Paris, and its strategical
+value was seen by the sudden panic of the
+French king. Philip was wholly taken by surprise.
+He attempted to arrest Edward's march
+by an offer to restore the Duchy of Aquitaine as
+Edward the Second had held it, but the offer was
+fruitless. Philip was forced to call his son to the
+rescue. John at once raised the siege of Aiguillon,
+and the French army moved rapidly to the north,
+its withdrawal enabling Derby to capture Poitiers
+and make himself thorough master of the south.
+But John was too distant from Paris for his forces
+to avail Philip in his emergency, for Edward,
+finding the bridges on the Lower Seine broken,
+pushed straight on Paris, rebuilt the bridge of
+Poissy, and threatened the capital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Crécy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this crisis however France found an unexpected
+help in a body of German knights. The
+long strife between Lewis of Bavaria and the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-236"></a>2-236]</span>
+
+Papacy had ended at last in Clement's carrying
+out his sentence of deposition by the nomination
+and coronation as emperor of Charles of Luxemburg,
+a son of King John of Bohemia, the well-known
+Charles IV. of the Golden Bull. But against this
+Papal assumption of a right to bestow the German
+Crown Germany rose as one man. Not a town
+opened its gates to the Papal claimant, and driven
+to seek help and refuge from Philip of Valois he
+found himself at this moment on the eastern
+frontier of France with his father and 500 knights.
+Hurrying to Paris this German force formed the
+nucleus of an army which assembled at St. Denys;
+and which was soon reinforced by 15,000 Genoese
+cross-bowmen who had been hired from among the
+soldiers of the Lord of Monaco on the sunny Riviera
+and arrived at this hour of need. With this host
+rapidly gathering in his front Edward abandoned
+his march on Paris, which had already served its
+purpose in relieving Derby, and threw himself
+across the Seine to carry out the second part of his
+programme by a junction with the Flemings at
+Gravelines and a campaign in the north. But the
+rivers in his path were carefully guarded, and it
+was only by surprising the ford of Blanche-Taque
+on the Somme that the king escaped the necessity
+of surrendering to the vast host which was now
+hastening in pursuit. His communications however
+were no sooner secured than he halted on the
+twenty-sixth of August at the little village of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-237"></a>2-237]</span>
+
+Crécy in Ponthieu and resolved to give battle.
+Half of his army, which had been greatly reduced
+in strength by his rapid marches, consisted of light-armed
+footmen from Ireland and Wales; the bulk
+of the remainder was composed of English bowmen.
+The king ordered his men-at-arms to dismount,
+and drew up his forces on a low rise sloping gently
+to the south-east, with a deep ditch covering its
+front, and its flanks protected by woods and a little
+brook. From a windmill on the summit of this
+rise Edward could overlook the whole field of battle.
+Immediately beneath him lay his reserve, while at
+the base of the slope was placed the main body of
+the army in two divisions, that to the right commanded
+by the young Prince of Wales, Edward
+"the Black Prince," as he was called, that to the
+left by the Earl of Northampton. A small ditch
+protected the English front, and behind it the
+bowmen were drawn up "in the form of a harrow"
+with small bombards between them "which with
+fire threw little iron balls to frighten the horses,"
+the first instance known of the use of artillery in
+field-warfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The halt of the English army took Philip by
+surprise, and he attempted for a time to check the
+advance of his army. But the attempt was fruitless
+and the disorderly host rolled on to the English
+front. The sight of his enemies indeed stirred
+Philip's own blood to fury, "for he hated them."
+The fight began at vespers. The Genoese cross-bowmen
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-238"></a>2-238]</span>
+
+were ordered to open the attack, but the
+men were weary with their march, a sudden storm
+wetted and rendered useless their bowstrings, and
+the loud shouts with which they leapt forward to
+the encounter were met with dogged silence in the
+English ranks. Their first arrow-flight however
+brought a terrible reply. So rapid was the English
+shot "that it seemed as if it snowed." "Kill me
+these scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Genoese
+fell back; and his men-at-arms plunged butchering
+into their broken ranks while the Counts of Aleniçon
+and Flanders at the head of the French knighthood
+fell hotly on the Prince's line. For an instant his
+small force seemed lost, and he called his father to
+support him. But Edward refused to send him aid.
+"Is he dead, or unhorsed, or so wounded that he
+cannot help himself?" he asked the envoy. "No,
+sir," was the reply, "but he is in a hard passage of
+arms, and sorely needs your help." "Return to
+those that sent you," said the king, "and bid them
+not send to me again so long as my son lives! Let
+the boy win his spurs, for, if God so order it, I will
+that the day may be his and that the honour may
+be with him and them to whom I have given it in
+charge." Edward could see in fact from his higher
+ground that all went well. The English bowmen
+and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while
+the Welshmen stabbed the French horses in the
+melly and brought knight after knight to the
+ground. Soon the French host was wavering in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-239"></a>2-239]</span>
+
+a fatal confusion. "You are my vassals, my
+friends," cried the blind John of Bohemia to the
+German nobles around him, "I pray and beseech
+you to lead me so far into the fight that I may
+strike one good blow with this sword of mine!"
+Linking their bridles together, the little company
+plunged into the thick of the combat to fall as
+their fellows were falling. The battle went steadily
+against the French. At last Philip himself hurried
+from the field, and the defeat became a rout.
+Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men--a
+number equal to the whole English force--lay
+dead upon the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Yeoman</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"God has punished us for our sins," cries the
+chronicler of St. Denys in a passion of bewildered
+grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he
+had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But
+the fall of France was hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible
+as the ruin at a single blow of a
+system of warfare, and with it of the political and
+social fabric which had risen out of that system.
+Feudalism rested on the superiority of the horseman
+to the footman, of the mounted noble to the
+unmounted churl. The real fighting power of a
+feudal army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage
+and landowners who took the field, each with his
+group of esquires and mounted men-at-arms. A host
+of footmen followed them, but they were ill armed,
+ill disciplined, and seldom called on to play any
+decisive part on the actual battle-field. In France,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-240"></a>2-240]</span>
+
+and especially at the moment we have reached,
+the contrast between the efficiency of these two
+elements of warfare was more striking than elsewhere.
+Nowhere was the chivalry so splendid,
+nowhere was the general misery and oppression of
+the poor more terribly expressed in the worthlessness
+of the mob of footmen who were driven by
+their lords to the camp. In England, on the other
+hand, the failure of feudalism to win a complete
+hold on the country was seen in the persistence of
+the older national institutions which based its
+defence on the general levy of its freemen. If the
+foreign kings added to this a system of warlike
+organization grounded on the service due from its
+military tenants to the Crown, they were far from
+regarding this as superseding the national "fyrd."
+The Assize of Arms, the Statute of Winchester,
+show with what care the fyrd was held in a state
+of efficiency. Its force indeed as an engine of war
+was fast rising between the age of Henry the Second
+and that of Edward the Third. The social changes
+on which we have already dwelt, the facilities given
+to alienation and the subdivision of lands, the
+transition of the serf into a copyholder and of the
+copyholder by redemption of his services into a
+freeholder, the rise of a new class of "farmers" as
+the lords ceased to till their demesne by means of
+bailiffs and adopted the practice of leasing it at a
+rent or "farm" to one of the customary tenants,
+the general increase of wealth which was telling
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-241"></a>2-241]</span>
+
+on the social position even of those who still remained
+in villenage, undid more and more the
+earlier process which had degraded the free ceorl
+of the English Conquest into the villein of the
+Norman Conquest, and covered the land with a
+population of yeomen, some freeholders, some with
+services that every day became less weighty and
+already left them virtually free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Bow</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such men, proud of their right to justice and
+an equal law, called by attendance in the county
+court to a share in the judicial, the financial, and
+the political life of the realm, were of a temper
+to make soldiers of a different sort from the
+wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords of
+the Continent; and they were equipped with a
+weapon which as they wielded it was enough of
+itself to make a revolution in the art of war. The
+bow, identified as it became with English warfare,
+was the weapon not of Englishmen but of their
+Norman conquerors. It was the Norman arrow-flight
+that decided the day of Senlac. But in the
+organization of the national army it had been
+assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders
+who were liable to serve at the king's summons;
+and we see how closely it had become associated with
+them in the picture of Chaucer's yeoman. "In
+his hand he bore a mighty bow." Its might lay
+not only in the range of the heavy war-shaft, a
+range we are told of four hundred yards, but in
+its force. The English archer, taught from very
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-242"></a>2-242]</span>
+
+childhood "how to draw, how to lay his body to
+the bow," his skill quickened by incessant practice
+and constant rivalry with his fellows, raised the
+bow into a terrible engine of war. Thrown out
+along the front in a loose order that alone showed
+their vigour and self-dependence, the bowmen
+faced and riddled the splendid line of knighthood
+as it charged upon them. The galled horses
+"reeled right rudely." Their riders found even
+the steel of Milan a poor defence against the grey-goose
+shaft. Gradually the bow dictated the very
+tactics of an English battle. If the mass of cavalry
+still plunged forward, the screen of archers broke
+to right and left and the men-at-arms who lay in
+reserve behind them made short work of the
+broken and disordered horsemen, while the light
+troops from Wales and Ireland flinging themselves
+into the melly with their long knives and darts
+brought steed after steed to the ground. It was
+this new military engine that Edward the Third
+carried to the fields of France. His armies were
+practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the short
+period of feudal service was insufficient for foreign
+campaigns, and yeoman and baron were alike
+drawn by a high rate of pay. An archer's daily
+wages equalled some five shillings of our present
+money. Such payment when coupled with the
+hope of plunder was enough to draw yeomen from
+thorpe and farm; and though the royal treasury
+was drained as it had never been drained before
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-243"></a>2-243]</span>
+
+the English king saw himself after the day of
+Crécy the master of a force without rival in the
+stress of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Siege of
+Calais</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To England her success was the beginning of a
+career of military glory, which fatal as it was
+destined to prove to the higher sentiments and
+interests of the nation gave it a warlike energy
+such as it had never known before. Victory followed
+victory. A few months after Crécy a Scotch
+army marched over the border and faced on the
+seventeenth of October an English force at Neville's
+Cross. But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight
+of the English archers, and the Scotch king David
+Bruce was taken prisoner. The withdrawal of the
+French from the Garonne enabled Henry of Derby
+to recover Poitou. Edward meanwhile with a
+decision which marks his military capacity marched
+from the field of Crécy to form the siege of Calais.
+No measure could have been more popular with
+the English merchant class, for Calais was a great
+pirate-haven and in a single year twenty-two
+privateers from its port had swept the Channel.
+But Edward was guided by weightier considerations
+than this. In spite of his victory at Sluys
+the superiority of France at sea had been a constant
+embarrassment. From this difficulty the
+capture of Calais would do much to deliver him,
+for Dover and Calais together bridled the Channel.
+Nor was this all. Not only would the possession
+of the town give Edward a base of operations
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-244"></a>2-244]</span>
+
+against France, but it afforded an easy means of
+communication with the only sure allies of England,
+the towns of Flanders. Flanders seemed at this
+moment to be wavering. Its Count had fallen at
+Crécy, but his son Lewis le Mâle, though his
+sympathies were as French as his father's, was
+received in November by his subjects with the
+invariable loyalty which they showed to their
+rulers; and his own efforts to detach them from
+England were seconded by the influence of the
+Duke of Brabant. But with Edward close at hand
+beneath the walls of Calais the Flemish towns
+stood true. They prayed the young Count to
+marry Edward's daughter, imprisoned him on his
+refusal, and on his escape to the French Court in
+the spring of 1347 they threw themselves heartily
+into the English cause. A hundred thousand
+Flemings advanced to Cassel and ravaged the
+French frontier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The danger of Calais roused Philip from the
+panic which had followed his defeat, and with a
+vast army he advanced to the north. But Edward's
+lines were impregnable. The French king failed
+in another attempt to dislodge the Flemings, and
+was at last driven to retreat without a blow.
+Hopeless of further succour, the town after a year's
+siege was starved into surrender in August 1347.
+Mercy was granted to the garrison and the people
+on condition that six of the citizens gave themselves
+into the English king's hands. "On them," said
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-245"></a>2-245]</span>
+
+Edward with a burst of bitter hatred, "I will do
+my will." At the sound of the town bell, Jehan
+le Bel tells us, the folk of Calais gathered round
+the bearer of these terms, "desiring to hear their
+good news, for they were all mad with hunger.
+When the said knight told them his news, then
+began they to weep and cry so loudly that it was
+great pity. Then stood up the wealthiest burgess
+of the town, Master Eustache de St. Pierre by
+name, and spake thus before all: 'My masters,
+great grief and mishap it were for all to leave such
+a people as this is to die by famine or otherwise;
+and great charity and grace would he win from
+our Lord who could defend them from dying.
+For me, I have great hope in the Lord that if I
+can save this people by my death I shall have
+pardon for my faults, wherefore will I be the first
+of the six, and of my own will put myself barefoot
+in my shirt and with a halter round my neck
+in the mercy of King Edward.'" The list of devoted
+men was soon made up, and the victims were led
+before the king. "All the host assembled together;
+there was great press, and many bade
+hang them openly, and many wept for pity. The
+noble King came with his train of counts and
+barons to the place, and the Queen followed him,
+though great with child, to see what there would
+be. The six citizens knelt down at once before the
+King, and Master Eustache spake thus:--'Gentle
+King, here we be six who have been of the old
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-246"></a>2-246]</span>
+
+bourgeoisie of Calais and great merchants; we
+bring you the keys of the town and castle of
+Calais, and render them to you at your pleasure.
+We set ourselves in such wise as you see purely at
+your will, to save the remnant of the people that
+has suffered much pain. So may you have pity
+and mercy on us for your high nobleness' sake.'
+Certes there was then in that place neither lord
+nor knight that wept not for pity, nor who could
+speak for pity; but the King had his heart so
+hardened by wrath that for a long while he could
+not reply; than he commanded to cut off their
+heads. All the knights and lords prayed him with
+tears, as much as they could, to have pity on them,
+but he would not hear. Then spoke the gentle
+knight, Master Walter de Maunay, and said, 'Ha,
+gentle sire! bridle your wrath; you have the
+renown and good fame of all gentleness; do not a
+thing whereby men can speak any villany of you!
+If you have no pity, all men will say that you have
+a heart full of all cruelty to put these good citizens
+to death that of their own will are come to render
+themselves to you to save the remnant of the
+people.' At this point the King changed countenance
+with wrath, and said 'Hold your peace,
+Master Walter! it shall be none otherwise. Call
+the headsman. They of Calais have made so many of
+my men die, that they must die themselves!' Then
+did the noble Queen of England a deed of noble
+lowliness, seeing she was great with child, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-247"></a>2-247]</span>
+
+wept so tenderly for pity that she could no longer
+stand upright; therefore she cast herself on her
+knees before her lord the King and spake on this
+wise: 'Ah, gentle sire, from the day that I passed
+over sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked
+for nothing: now pray I and beseech you, with
+folded hands, for the love of our Lady's Son to
+have mercy upon them.' The gentle King waited a
+while before speaking, and looked on the Queen
+as she knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then
+began his heart to soften a little, and he said,
+'Lady, I would rather you had been otherwhere;
+you pray so tenderly that I dare not refuse you;
+and though I do it against my will, nevertheless
+take them, I give them to you.' Then took he
+the six citizens by the halters and delivered them
+to the Queen, and released from death all those of
+Calais for the love of her; and the good lady bade
+them clothe the six burgesses and make them good
+cheer."
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-248"></a>2-248]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk4-Ch3"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4547268"></a>CHAPTER III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4547274"></a>THE PEASANT REVOLT</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4547280"></a>1347-1381</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward the
+Third</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still in the vigour of manhood, for he was but
+thirty-five, Edward the Third stood at the height
+of his renown. He had won the greatest victory
+of his age. France, till now the first of European
+states, was broken and dashed from her pride of
+place at a single blow. The kingdom seemed to
+lie at Edward's mercy, for Guienne was recovered,
+Flanders was wholly on his side, and Britanny,
+where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the
+success of his rival and the English party which
+supported him, opened the road to Paris. At
+home his government was popular, and Scotland,
+the one enemy he had to dread, was bridled by
+the capture of her king. How great his renown
+was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the
+death of Lewis of Bavaria the electors offered him
+the Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a
+general of a high order, and he had shown himself
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-249"></a>2-249]</span>
+
+as consummate a strategist in the campaign as a
+tactician in the field. But to the world about him
+he was even more illustrious as the foremost
+representative of the showy chivalry of his day.
+He loved the pomp of tournaments; he revived
+the Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated
+his victories by the creation of a new order
+of knighthood. He had varied the sterner operations
+of the siege of Calais by a hand-to-hand
+combat with one of the bravest of the French
+knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches
+Edward for us as he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet
+which was sweeping the narrow seas. We see the
+king sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet,
+his head covered by a black beaver hat "which
+became him well," and calling on Sir John Chandos
+to troll out the songs he had brought with him
+from Germany, till the Spanish ships heave in
+sight and a furious fight begins which ends in a
+victory that leaves Edward "King of the Seas."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the
+subtle, busy diplomatist. None of our kings was
+so restless a negotiator. From the first hour of
+Edward's rule the threads of his diplomacy ran
+over Europe in almost inextricable confusion. And
+to all who dealt with him he was equally false and
+tricky. Emperor was played off against Pope and
+Pope against Emperor, the friendship of the
+Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure
+on their counts, the national wrath against the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-250"></a>2-250]</span>
+
+exactions of the Roman See was employed to bridle
+the French sympathies of the court of Avignon, and
+when the statutes which it produced had served their
+purpose they were set aside for a bargain in which
+King and Pope shared the plunder of the Church between
+them. His temper was as false in his dealings
+with his people as in his dealings with the European
+powers. Edward aired to country and parliament
+his English patriotism. "Above all other lands and
+realms," he made his chancellor say, "the King
+had most tenderly at heart his land of England, a
+land more full of delight and honour and profit to
+him than any other." His manners were popular;
+he donned on occasion the livery of a city gild; he
+dined with a London merchant. His perpetual
+parliaments, his appeals to them and to the country
+at large for counsel and aid, seemed to promise a
+ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the
+people he ruled. But when once Edward passed
+from sheer carelessness and gratification at the
+new source of wealth which the Parliament opened
+to a sense of what its power really was becoming,
+he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any
+king that had gone before him. He sold his assent
+to its demands for heavy subsidies, and when he
+had pocketed the money coolly declared the
+statutes he had sanctioned null and void. The
+constitutional progress which was made during his
+reign was due to his absorption in showy schemes
+of foreign ambition, to his preference for war and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-251"></a>2-251]</span>
+
+diplomatic intrigue over the sober business of civil
+administration. The same shallowness of temper,
+the same showiness and falsehood, ran through his
+personal character. The king who was a model
+of chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble
+showed himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of
+Calais. Even the courtesy to his Queen which
+throws its halo over the story of their deliverance
+went hand in hand with a constant disloyalty to
+her. When once Philippa was dead his profligacy
+threw all shame aside. He paraded a mistress as
+Queen of Beauty through the streets of London,
+and set her in pomp over tournaments as the
+Lady of the Sun. The nobles were quick to follow
+their lord's example. "In those days," writes a
+chronicler of the time, "arose a rumour and
+clamour among the people that wherever there
+was a tournament there came a great concourse of
+ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not
+of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and
+fifty in number, as if they were a part of the
+tournament, ladies clad in diverse and wonderful
+male apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps
+and bands wound cord-wise round their heads, and
+girdles bound with gold and silver, and daggers in
+pouches across their body. And thus they rode
+on choice coursers to the place of tourney; and so
+spent and wasted their goods and vexed their bodies
+with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of
+the people sounded everywhere. But they neither
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-252"></a>2-252]</span>
+
+feared God nor blushed at the chaste voice of the
+people."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Black
+Death</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The "chaste voice of the people" was soon to
+grow into the stern moral protest of the Lollards,
+but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by
+the king's success. The truce which followed
+the capture of Calais seemed a mere rest in the
+career of victories which opened before Edward.
+England was drunk with her glory and with the
+hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen had been
+brought after the sack of that town to London.
+"There was no woman," says Walsingham, "who
+had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and
+utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign
+cities." The court revelled in gorgeous tournaments
+and luxury of dress; and the establishment
+in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found
+its home in the new castle that Edward was
+raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of
+the spurious "Chivalry" of the day. But it was
+at this moment of triumph that the whole colour
+of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most
+terrible plague the world has ever witnessed
+advanced from the East, and after devastating
+Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to
+the Baltic swooped at the close of 1348 upon
+Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and
+the panic-struck words of the statutes passed after
+its visitation have been amply justified by modern
+research. Of the three or four millions who then
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-253"></a>2-253]</span>
+
+formed the population of England more than one-half
+were swept away in its repeated visitations.
+Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns
+where filthy and undrained streets afforded a
+constant haunt to leprosy and fever. In the
+burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter
+Maunay purchased for the citizens of London,
+a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the
+Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses
+are said to have been interred. Thousands of
+people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the
+living were hardly able to bury the dead. But
+the Black Death fell on the villages almost as
+fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half
+of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have
+perished; in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds
+of the parishes changed their incumbents. The
+whole organization of labour was thrown out of
+gear. The scarcity of hands produced by the
+terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to
+perform the services due for their lands, and only
+a temporary abandonment of half the rent by the
+landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes
+to refrain from the abandonment of their farms.
+For a time cultivation became impossible. "The
+sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and
+corn," says a contemporary, "and there were none
+left who could drive them." Even when the first
+burst of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages
+consequent on the enormous diminution in the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-254"></a>2-254]</span>
+
+supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding
+rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed
+the course of industrial employments. Harvests
+rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled
+not merely from scarcity of hands but from the
+strife which now for the first time revealed itself
+between capital and labour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Its Social
+Results</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so
+keenly felt as in its bearing on the social revolution
+which had been steadily going on for a century
+past throughout the country. At the moment we
+have reached the lord of a manor had been reduced
+over a large part of England to the position of a
+modern landlord, receiving a rental in money
+from his tenants and supplying their place in the
+cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers.
+He was driven by the progress of enfranchisement
+to rely for the purposes of cultivation on the
+supply of hired labour, and hitherto this supply
+had been abundant and cheap. But with the
+ravages of the Black Death and the decrease of
+population labour at once became scarce and dear.
+There was a general rise of wages, and the farmers
+of the country as well as the wealthier craftsmen
+of the town saw themselves threatened with ruin
+by what seemed to their age the extravagant
+demands of the labour class. Meanwhile the
+country was torn with riot and disorder. An
+outbreak of lawless self-indulgence which followed
+everywhere in the wake of the plague told especially
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-255"></a>2-255]</span>
+
+upon the "landless men," workers wandering
+in search of work who found themselves for the
+first time masters of the labour market; and the
+wandering labourer or artizan turned easily into
+the "sturdy beggar," or the bandit of the woods.
+A summary redress for these evils was at once
+provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation.
+"Because a great part of the people," runs this
+ordinance, "and principally of labourers and
+servants, is dead of the plague, some, seeing the
+need of their lords and the scarcity of servants,
+are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive
+wages, and others are rather begging in idleness
+than supporting themselves by labour, we have
+ordained that any able-bodied man or woman, of
+whatsoever condition, free or serf, under sixty
+years of age, not living of merchandise nor following
+a trade nor having of his own wherewithal to
+live, either his own land with the culture of which
+he could occupy himself, and not serving another,
+shall if so required serve another for such wages
+as was the custom in the twentieth year of our
+reign or five or six years before."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Statute of
+Labourers</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the failure of this ordinance to effect
+its ends which brought about at the close of 1349
+the passing of the Statute of Labourers. "Every
+man or woman," runs this famous provision, "of
+whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in body,
+and within the age of threescore years, ... and
+not having of his own whereof he may live, nor
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-256"></a>2-256]</span>
+
+land of his own about the tillage of which he
+may occupy himself, and not serving any other,
+shall be bound to serve the employer who shall
+require him to do so, and shall take only the
+wages which were accustomed to be taken in the
+neighbourhood where he is bound to serve" two
+years before the plague began. A refusal to obey
+was punished by imprisonment. But sterner
+measures were soon found to be necessary. Not
+only was the price of labour fixed by the Parliament
+of 1351 but the labour class was once more
+tied to the soil. The labourer was forbidden to
+quit the parish where he lived in search of better
+paid employment; if he disobeyed he became a
+"fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the
+hands of justices of the peace. To enforce such
+a law literally must have been impossible, for corn
+rose to so high a price that a day's labour at the
+old wages would not have purchased wheat enough
+for a man's support. But the landowners did not
+flinch from the attempt. The repeated re-enactment
+of the law shows the difficulty of applying
+it and the stubbornness of the struggle which it
+brought about. The fines and forfeitures which
+were levied for infractions of its provisions formed
+a large source of royal revenue, but so ineffectual
+were the original penalties that the runaway
+labourer was at last ordered to be branded with
+a hot iron on the forehead, while the harbouring
+of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. Nor
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-257"></a>2-257]</span>
+
+was it merely the existing class of free labourers
+which was attacked by this reactionary movement.
+The increase of their numbers by a commutation
+of labour services for money payments was
+suddenly checked, and the ingenuity of the
+lawyers who were employed as stewards of each
+manor was exercised in striving to restore to the
+landowners that customary labour whose loss was
+now severely felt. Manumissions and exemptions
+which had passed without question were cancelled
+on grounds of informality, and labour services
+from which they held themselves freed by redemption
+were again demanded from the villeins.
+The attempt was the more galling that the cause
+had to be pleaded in the manor-court itself, and
+to be decided by the very officer whose interest
+it was to give judgement in favour of his lord.
+We can see the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance
+through the statutes which strove in vain
+to repress it. In the towns, where the system
+of forced labour was applied with even more
+rigour than in the country, strikes and combinations
+became frequent among the lower craftsmen.
+In the country the free labourers found allies in
+the villeins whose freedom from manorial service
+was questioned. These were often men of position
+and substance, and throughout the eastern counties
+the gatherings of "fugitive serfs" were supported by
+an organized resistance and by large contributions
+of money on the part of the wealthier tenantry.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-258"></a>2-258]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Renewal of
+the War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With plague, famine, and social strife in the
+land, it was no time for reaping the fruits even
+of such a victory as Crécy. Luckily for England
+the pestilence had fallen as heavily on her foe as
+on herself. A common suffering and exhaustion
+forced both countries to a truce, and though
+desultory fighting went on along the Breton and
+Aquitanian borders, the peace which was thus
+secured lasted with brief intervals of fighting for
+seven years. It was not till 1355 that the
+failure of a last effort to turn the truce into a final
+peace again drove Edward into war. The campaign
+opened with a brilliant prospect of success.
+Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, held as a
+prince of descent from the house of Valois large
+fiefs in Normandy; and a quarrel springing suddenly
+up between him and John, who had now
+succeeded his father Philip on the throne of
+France, Charles offered to put his fortresses
+into Edward's hands. Master of Cherbourg,
+Avranches, Pontaudemer, Evreux and Meulan,
+Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise, Charles held in his
+hands the keys of France; and Edward grasped
+at the opportunity of delivering a crushing blow.
+Three armies were prepared to act in Normandy,
+Britanny, and Guienne. But the first two, with
+Edward and Henry of Derby, who had been raised
+to the dukedom of Lancaster, at their head, were
+detained by contrary winds, and Charles, despairing
+of their arrival, made peace with John.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-259"></a>2-259]</span>
+
+Edward made his way to Calais to meet the
+tidings of this desertion and to be called back
+to England by news of a recapture of Berwick
+by the Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation
+were revived in 1356. The treachery of
+John, his seizure of the King of Navarre, and
+his execution of the Count of Harcourt who was
+looked upon as the adviser of Charles in his policy
+of intrigue, stirred a general rising throughout
+Normandy. Edward at once despatched troops
+under the Duke of Lancaster to its support.
+But the insurgents were soon forced to fall back.
+Conscious of the danger to which an English
+occupation of Normandy would expose him,
+John hastened with a large army to the west,
+drove Lancaster to Cherbourg, took Evreux, and
+besieged Breteuil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Black
+Prince</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here however his progress was suddenly
+checked by news from the south. The Black
+Prince, as the hero of Crécy was called, had
+landed in Guienne during the preceding year and
+won a disgraceful success. Unable to pay his
+troops, he staved off their demands by a campaign
+of sheer pillage. While plague and war
+and the anarchy which sprang up under the weak
+government of John were bringing ruin on the
+northern and central provinces of France, the
+south remained prosperous and at peace. The
+young prince led his army of freebooters up the
+Garonne into "what was before one of the fat
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-260"></a>2-260]</span>
+
+countries of the world, the people good and
+simple, who did not know what war was; indeed
+no war had been waged against them till
+the Prince came. The English and Gascons
+found the country full and gay, the rooms
+adorned with carpets and draperies, the caskets
+and chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was
+safe from these robbers. They, and especially
+the Gascons, who are very greedy, carried off
+everything." Glutted by the sack of Carcassonne
+and Narbonne the plunderers fell back to Bordeaux,
+"their horses so laden with spoil that they could
+hardly move." Worthier work awaited the Black
+Prince in the following year. In the plan of
+campaign for 1356 it had been arranged that he
+should march upon the Loire, and there unite
+with a force under the Duke of Lancaster which
+was to land in Britanny and push rapidly into
+the heart of France. Delays however hindered
+the Prince from starting from Bordeaux till July,
+and when his march brought him to the Loire the
+plan of campaign had already broken down. The
+outbreak in Normandy had tempted the English
+Council to divert the force under Lancaster from
+Britanny to that province; and the Duke was
+now at Cherbourg, hard pressed by the French
+army under John. But if its original purpose
+was foiled, the march of the Black Prince on
+the Loire served still more effectively the English
+cause. His advance pointed straight upon Paris,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-261"></a>2-261]</span>
+
+and again as in the Crécy campaign John was
+forced to leave all for the protection of the capital.
+Hasty marches brought the king to the Loire
+while Prince Edward still lay at Vierzon on the
+Cher. Unconscious of John's designs, he wasted
+some days in the capture of Romorantin while
+the French troops were crossing the Loire along
+its course from Orleans to Tours and John with
+the advance was hurrying through Loches upon
+Poitiers in pursuit, as he supposed, of the retreating
+Englishmen. But the movement of the
+French army, near as it was, was unknown in the
+English camp; and when the news of it forced
+the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy
+was already far ahead of him. Edward reached
+the fields north of Poitiers to find his line of
+retreat cut off and a French army of sixty
+thousand men interposed between his forces and
+Bordeaux.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the Prince had shown little ability in his
+management of the campaign, he showed tactical
+skill in the fight which was now forced on him.
+On the nineteenth of September he took a strong
+position in the fields of Maupertuis, where his
+front was covered by thick hedges and approachable
+only by a deep and narrow lane which ran
+between vineyards. The vineyards and hedges
+he lined with bowmen, and drew up his small
+body of men-at-arms at the point where the lane
+opened upon the higher plain on which he was
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-262"></a>2-262]</span>
+
+himself encamped. Edward's force numbered
+only eight thousand men, and the danger was
+great enough to force him to offer in exchange
+for a free retreat the surrender of his prisoners
+and of the places he had taken, with an oath not
+to fight against France for seven years to come.
+His offers however were rejected, and the battle
+opened with a charge of three hundred French
+knights up the narrow lane. But the lane was
+soon choked with men and horses, while the front
+ranks of the advancing army fell back before a
+galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In
+this moment of confusion a body of English horsemen,
+posted unseen by their opponents on a hill
+to the right, charged suddenly on the French
+flank, and the Prince watching the disorder which
+was caused by the repulse and surprise fell boldly
+on their front. The steady shot of the English
+archers completed the panic produced by this
+sudden attack. The first French line was driven
+in, and on its rout the second, a force of sixteen
+thousand men, at once broke in wild terror and
+fled from the field. John still held his ground
+with the knights of the reserve, whom he had
+unwisely ordered to dismount from their horses,
+till a charge of the Black Prince with two thousand
+lances threw this last body into confusion. The
+French king was taken, desperately fighting; and
+when his army poured back at noon in utter rout
+to the gates of Poitiers eight thousand of their
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-263"></a>2-263]</span>
+
+number had fallen on the field, three thousand in
+the flight, and two thousand men-at-arms, with a
+crowd of nobles, were taken prisoners. The royal
+captive entered London in triumph, mounted on a
+big white charger, while the Prince rode by his
+side on a little black hackney to the palace of the
+Savoy, which was chosen as John's dwelling, and
+a truce for two years seemed to give healing-time
+to France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward and
+the Scots</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the Scots Edward the Third had less
+good fortune. Recalled from Calais by their
+seizure of Berwick, the king induced Balliol to
+resign into his hands his shadowy sovereignty,
+and in the spring of 1356 marched upon Edinburgh
+with an overpowering army, harrying and
+burning as he marched. But the Scots refused
+an engagement, a fleet sent with provisions was
+beaten off by a storm, and the famine-stricken
+army was forced to fall rapidly back on the
+border in a disastrous retreat. The trial convinced
+Edward that the conquest of Scotland was
+impossible, and by a rapid change of policy which
+marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship
+of the country he had wasted so long. David
+Bruce was released on promise of ransom, a truce
+concluded for ten years, and the prohibition of
+trade between the two kingdoms put an end to.
+But the fulness of this reconciliation screened
+a dexterous intrigue. David was childless, and
+Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-264"></a>2-264]</span>
+
+young king experienced in finding means of providing
+the sum demanded for his ransom to bring
+him over to a proposal which would have united
+the two countries for ever. The scheme however
+was carefully concealed; and it was not till
+1363 that David proposed to his Parliament to
+set aside on his death the claims of the Steward
+of Scotland to his crown, and to choose Edward's
+third son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, as his successor.
+Though the proposal was scornfully
+rejected, negotiations were still carried on between
+the two kings for the realization of this
+project, and were probably only put an end to by
+the calamities of Edward's later years.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v2-map-2.jpg"><img src="images/v2-map-2t.jpg" alt="France at the Treaty of Bretigny"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Peace of
+Brétigny</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In France misery and misgovernment seemed
+to be doing Edward's work more effectively than
+arms. The miserable country found no rest in
+itself. Its routed soldiery turned into free companies
+of bandits, while the lords captured at
+Crécy or Poitiers procured the sums needed for
+their ransom by extortion from the peasantry.
+The reforms demanded by the States-General
+which met in this agony of France were frustrated
+by the treachery of the Regent, John's
+eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till Paris,
+impatient of his weakness and misrule, rose in
+arms against the Crown. The peasants too,
+driven mad by oppression and famine, rose in
+wild insurrection, butchering their lords and firing
+their castles over the whole face of France.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-265"></a>2-265]</span>
+
+Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising
+was called, were at last crushed by treachery and
+the sword: and, exhausted as it was, France still
+backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace
+by which John in 1359 proposed to buy his release.
+By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and Poitou
+in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and
+Calais in the west were ceded to the English king.
+On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured ravaging
+over the wasted land. Famine however proved
+its best defence. "I could not believe," said
+Petrarch of this time, "that this was the same
+France which I had seen so rich and flourishing.
+Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a
+fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated,
+houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood
+of Paris showed everywhere marks of desolation
+and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the
+roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast
+solitude." The utter desolation forced Edward to
+carry with him an immense train of provisions,
+and thousands of baggage waggons with mills,
+ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed a long
+train which streamed for six miles behind his
+army. After a fruitless attempt upon Reims
+he forced the Duke of Burgundy to conclude a
+treaty with him by pushing forward to Tonnerre,
+and then descending the Seine appeared with his
+army before Paris. But the wasted country forbade
+a siege, and Edward after summoning the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-266"></a>2-266]</span>
+
+town in vain was forced to fall back for subsistence
+on the Loire. It was during this march that
+the Duke of Normandy's envoys overtook him
+with proposals of peace. The misery of the land
+had at last bent Charles to submission, and in May
+a treaty was concluded at Brétigny, a small place
+to the eastward of Chartres. By this treaty the
+English king waived his claims on the crown of
+France and on the Duchy of Normandy. On
+the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which
+included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge,
+the Limousin and the Angoumois, Périgord and
+the counties of Bigorre and Rouergue, was not
+only restored but freed from its obligations as a
+French fief and granted in full sovereignty with
+Ponthieu, Edward's heritage from the second wife
+of Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and
+his new conquest of Calais.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Misery of
+England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Peace of Brétigny set its seal upon Edward's
+glory. But within England itself the misery of the
+people was deepening every hour. Men believed
+the world to be ending, and the judgement day to
+be near. A few months after the Peace came a
+fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the
+Duke of Lancaster. The repressive measures of
+Parliament and the landowners only widened the
+social chasm which parted employer from employed.
+We can see the growth of a fierce spirit
+of resistance both to the reactionary efforts which
+were being made to bring back labour services
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-267"></a>2-267]</span>
+
+and to the enactments which again bound labour
+to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to
+repress the strikes and combinations which became
+frequent in the towns and the more formidable
+gatherings of villeins and "fugitive
+serfs" in the country at large. A statute of
+later date throws light on the nature of the resistance
+of the last. It tells us that "villeins
+and holders of land in villeinage withdrew their
+customs and services from their lords, having
+attached themselves to other persons who maintained
+and abetted them, and who under colour
+of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors
+and villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit
+of all manner of services either of their body or
+of their lands, and would suffer no distress or
+other course of justice to be taken against them;
+the villeins aiding their maintainers by threatening
+the officers of their lords with peril to life and
+limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies
+to support each other." It would seem not only as
+if the villein was striving to resist the reactionary
+tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour
+service but that in the general overturning of
+social institutions the copyholder was struggling
+to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to
+be recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held
+on lease.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John Ball</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A more terrible outcome of the general suffering
+was seen in a new revolt against the whole
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-268"></a>2-268]</span>
+
+system of social inequality which had till then
+passed unquestioned as the divine order of the
+world. The Peace was hardly signed when the
+cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the
+words of "a mad priest of Kent" as the courtly
+Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to come
+found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict
+and imprisonment in the stout yeomen who
+gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.
+"Mad" as the landowners held him to be, it was
+in the preaching of John Ball that England first
+listened to a declaration of the natural equality
+and rights of man. "Good people," cried the
+preacher, "things will never be well in England
+so long as goods be not in common, and so long
+as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what
+right are they whom we call lords greater folk
+than we? On what grounds have they deserved
+it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all
+came of the same father and mother, of Adam
+and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are
+better than we, if it be not that they make us
+gain for them by our toil what they spend in
+their pride? They are clothed in velvet and
+warm in their furs and their ermines, while we
+are covered with rags. They have wine and
+spices and fair bread; and we oat-cake and straw,
+and water to drink. They have leisure and fine
+houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and
+the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-269"></a>2-269]</span>
+
+our toil that these men hold their state." It was
+the tyranny of property that then as ever roused
+the defiance of socialism. A spirit fatal to the
+whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the
+popular rime which condensed the levelling doctrine
+of John Ball:
+</p>
+
+<table summary="poetry" class="lg">
+
+<tr><td align="left">"When Adam delved and Eve span,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Who was then the gentleman?"</td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William
+Langland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More impressive, because of the very restraint
+and moderation of its tone, is the poem in which
+William Langland began at the same moment to
+embody with a terrible fidelity all the darker and
+sterner aspects of the time, its social revolt, its
+moral and religious awakening, the misery of the
+poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich.
+Nothing brings more vividly home to us the social
+chasm which in the fourteenth century severed
+the rich from the poor than the contrast between
+his "Complaint of Piers the Ploughman" and the
+"Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and
+ease and laughter through which the courtly
+Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in a pleasant
+dream is a far-off world of wrong and of
+ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor. Born
+probably in Shropshire, where he had been put to
+school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long
+Will," as Langland was nicknamed from his tall
+stature, found his way at an early age to London,
+and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing
+"placebos" and "diriges" in the stately funerals
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-270"></a>2-270]</span>
+
+of his day. Men took the moody clerk for a
+madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant
+pride that made him loth, as he tells us, to bow
+to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in
+silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange
+a "God save you" with the law sergeants
+as he passed their new house in the Temple. His
+world is the world of the poor; he dwells on the
+poor man's life, on his hunger and toil, his rough
+revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity
+of a man who has no outlook beyond it. The
+narrowness, the misery, the monotony of the life
+he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is
+only here and there that a love of nature or a
+grim earnestness of wrath quickens his rime into
+poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human
+sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the
+gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of the world
+about him, of his picturesque sense of even its
+coarsest contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his
+courtly wit. The cumbrous allegory, the tedious
+platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which
+form the staple of Langland's work, are only
+broken here and there by phrases of a shrewd
+common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of
+a broad Hogarthian humour. What chains one
+to the poem is its deep undertone of sadness: the
+world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who
+stalks silently along the Strand has no faith in his
+power to put it right.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-271"></a>2-271]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Piers
+Ploughman</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from
+the sin and suffering of the great city to a May-morning
+in the Malvern Hills. "I was weary forwandered
+and went me to rest under a broad
+bank by a burn side, and as I lay and leaned and
+looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it
+sweyved (sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer
+gathers the typical figures of the world he saw
+into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers
+into a wide field his army of traders and chafferers,
+of hermits and solitaries, of minstrels, "japers
+and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen
+that "in setting and in sowing swonken (toil)
+full hard," pilgrims "with their wenches after,"
+weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman,
+lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops,
+friars, and pardoners "parting the silver" with
+the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to
+Canterbury but to Truth; their guide to Truth
+neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the Ploughman,
+whom they find ploughing in his field. He
+it is who bids the knight no more wrest gifts from
+his tenant nor misdo with the poor. "Though he
+be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven
+that he be worthier set and with more bliss than
+thou.... For in charnel at church churles be
+evil to know, or a knight from a knave there."
+The gospel of equality is backed by the gospel of
+labour. The aim of the Ploughman is to work,
+and to make the world work with him.  He
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-272"></a>2-272]</span>
+
+warns the labourer as he warns the knight.
+Hunger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest
+to toil, and Hunger waits to work her will on the
+idler and the waster. On the eve of the great
+struggle between wealth and labour, Langland
+stands alone in his fairness to both, in his shrewd
+political and religious common sense. In the
+face of the popular hatred which was to gather
+round John of Gaunt, he paints the Duke in a
+famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she
+might be, at any rate keeps the noble rats from
+utterly devouring the mice of the people. Though
+the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a
+righteous life to be better than a host of indulgences,
+and God sends His pardon to Piers when
+priests dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious
+of his loneliness and without hope. It is
+only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady
+Mede," brought to trial, and the world repenting
+at the preaching of Reason. In the waking life
+reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is
+looked upon--he tells us bitterly--as a madman.
+There is a terrible despair in the close of his later
+poem, where the triumph of Christ is only
+followed by the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition
+slumbers amidst the revel of Death and
+Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and
+Sloth, rouses himself with a last effort, and seizing
+his pilgrim staff, wanders over the world to
+find Piers Ploughman.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-273"></a>2-273]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Præmunire</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The strife indeed which Langland would have
+averted raged only the fiercer as the dark years
+went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were
+powerless for their immediate ends, either in reducing
+the actual rate of wages or in restricting
+the mass of floating labour to definite areas of
+employment, they proved effective in sowing
+hatred between employer and employed, between
+rich and poor. But this social rift was not the
+only rift which was opening amidst the distress and
+misery of the time. The close of William Langland's
+poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution;
+and the way for such a revolution was
+being paved by the growing bitterness of strife
+between England and the Papacy. In spite of
+the sharp protests from king and parliament the
+need for money at Avignon was too great to
+allow any relaxation in the Papal claims. Almost
+on the eve of Crécy Edward took the decisive
+step of forbidding the entry into England of any
+Papal bulls or documents interfering with the
+rights of presentation belonging to private patrons.
+But the tenacity of Rome was far from loosening
+its grasp on this source of revenue for all Edward's
+protests. Crécy however gave a new boldness to
+the action of the State, and a Statute of Provisors
+was passed by the Parliament in 1351 which
+again asserted the rights of the English Church
+and enacted that all who infringed them by the
+introduction of Papal "provisors" should suffer
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-274"></a>2-274]</span>
+
+imprisonment. But resistance to provisors only brought
+fresh vexations. The patrons who withstood
+a Papal nominee in the name of the law
+were summoned to defend themselves in the
+Papal Court. From that moment the supremacy
+of the Papal law over the law of the land became
+a great question in which the lesser question of
+provisors merged. The pretension of the Court
+of Avignon was met in 1353 by a statute which
+forbade any questioning of judgements rendered
+in the King's Courts or any prosecution of a suit
+in foreign courts under pain of outlawry, perpetual
+imprisonment, or banishment from the land.
+It was this act of Præmunire--as it came in after
+renewals to be called--which furnished so terrible
+a weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with
+Rome. But the Papacy paid little heed to these
+warnings, and its obstinacy in still receiving suits
+and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the
+pride of a conquering people. England was still
+fresh from her glory at Brétigny when Edward
+appealed to the Parliament of 1365. Complaints,
+he said, were constantly being made by his
+subjects to the Pope as to matters which were
+cognizable in the King's Courts. The practice of
+provisors was thus maintained in the teeth of the
+laws, and "the laws, usages, ancient customs, and
+franchises of his kingdom were thereby much
+hindered, the King's crown degraded, and his
+person defamed." The king's appeal was hotly
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-275"></a>2-275]</span>
+
+met. "Biting words," which it was thought wise
+to suppress, were used in the debate which followed,
+and the statutes against provisors and appeals
+were solemnly confirmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wyclif</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What gave point to this challenge was the
+assent of the prelates to the proceedings of the
+Parliament; and the pride of Urban V. at once
+met it by a counter-defiance. He demanded with
+threats the payment of the annual sum of a
+thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement
+of the suzerainty of the See of
+Rome. The insult roused the temper of the
+realm. The king laid the demand before Parliament,
+and both houses replied that "neither King
+John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom,
+nor his people under subjection save with
+their accord or assent." John's submission had
+been made "without their assent and against his
+coronation oath" and they pledged themselves,
+should the Pope attempt to enforce his claim, to
+resist him with all their power. Even Urban
+shrank from imperilling the Papacy by any
+further demands, and the claim to a Papal lordship
+over England was never again heard of.
+But the struggle had brought to the front a man
+who was destined to give a far wider scope and
+significance to this resistance to Rome than any
+as yet dreamed of. Nothing is more remarkable
+than the contrast between the obscurity of John
+Wyclif's earlier life and the fulness and vividness
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-276"></a>2-276]</span>
+
+of our knowledge of him during the twenty years
+which preceded its close. Born in the earlier
+part of the fourteenth century, he had already
+passed middle age when he was appointed to the
+mastership of Balliol College in the University of
+Oxford and recognized as first among the schoolmen
+of his day. Of all the scholastic doctors
+those of England had been throughout the keenest
+and most daring in philosophical speculation. A
+reckless audacity and love of novelty was the
+common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham,
+as against the sober and more disciplined learning
+of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas
+Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris
+during the English wars was transferring her intellectual
+supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford
+Wyclif stood without a rival. From his predecessor,
+Bradwardine, whose work as a scholastic
+teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises
+he published during this period, he inherited the
+tendency to a predestinarian Augustinianism
+which formed the groundwork of his later theological
+revolt. His debt to Ockham revealed itself
+in his earliest efforts at Church reform. Undismayed
+by the thunder and excommunications
+of the Church, Ockham had supported the Emperor
+Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle, and he
+had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire
+from attacking the foundations of the Papal
+supremacy or from asserting the rights of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-277"></a>2-277]</span>
+
+civil power. The spare, emaciated frame of
+Wyclif, weakened by study and asceticism, hardly
+promised a reformer who would carry on the
+stormy work of Ockham; but within this frail
+form lay a temper quick and restless, an immense
+energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable
+pride. The personal charm which ever
+accompanies real greatness only deepened the
+influence he derived from the spotless purity of
+his life. As yet indeed even Wyclif himself can
+hardly have suspected the immense range of his
+intellectual power. It was only the struggle that
+lay before him which revealed in the dry and
+subtle schoolman the founder of our later English
+prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of
+persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious
+partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the
+unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and
+most indefatigable of controversialists, the first
+Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone,
+to question and deny the creed of the Christendom
+around him, to break through the tradition of the
+past, and with his last breath to assert the freedom
+of religious thought against the dogmas of the
+Papacy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">"De
+Dominio
+Divino."</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the moment of the quarrel with Pope
+Urban however Wyclif was far from having
+advanced to such a position as this. As the
+most prominent of English scholars it was natural
+that he should come forward in defence of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-278"></a>2-278]</span>
+
+independence and freedom of the English Church;
+and he published a formal refutation of the claims
+advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will with
+church property in the form of a report of the
+Parliamentary debates which we have described.
+As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of
+Rome but with its practices; and it was on the
+principles of Ockham that he defended the Parliament's
+refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed
+by Urban. But his treatise on "The Kingdom of
+God," "De Dominio Divino," which can hardly
+have been written later than 1368, shows the
+breadth of the ground he was even now prepared
+to take up. In this, the most famous of his
+works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct
+ideal of society. All authority, to use his own
+expression, is "founded in grace." Dominion in
+the highest sense is in God alone; it is God who
+as the suzerain of the universe deals out His rule
+in fief to rulers in their various stations on tenure
+of their obedience to Himself. It was easy to
+object that in such a case "dominion" could never
+exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such a tenure
+and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the
+theory is a purely ideal one. In actual practice
+he distinguishes between dominion and power,
+power which the wicked may have by God's permission,
+and to which the Christian must submit
+from motives of obedience to God. In his own
+scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-279"></a>2-279]</span>
+
+here on earth "God must obey the devil."
+But whether in the ideal or practical view of the
+matter all power and dominion was of God. It
+was granted by Him not to one person, His Vicar
+on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The
+king was as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The
+royal power was as sacred as the ecclesiastical, and
+as complete over temporal things, even over the
+temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church
+over spiritual things. So far as the question of
+Church and State therefore was concerned the
+distinction between the ideal and practical view of
+"dominion" was of little account. Wyclif's application
+of the theory to the individual conscience
+was of far higher and wider importance. Obedient
+as each Christian might be to king or priest, he
+himself as a possessor of "dominion" held immediately
+of God. The throne of God Himself
+was the tribunal of personal appeal. What the
+Reformers of the sixteenth century attempted to
+do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif
+attempted to do by his theory of Dominion, a
+theory which in establishing a direct relation
+between man and God swept away the whole basis
+of a mediating priesthood, the very foundation on
+which the mediaeval church was built.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">England and
+Aquitaine</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was
+little seen. But the social and religious excitement
+which we have described was quickened by
+the renewal of the war, and the general suffering
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-280"></a>2-280]</span>
+
+and discontent gathered bitterness when the success
+which had flushed England with a new and
+warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters
+in which men forgot the glories of Crécy
+and Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of
+Brétigny was really fatal to Edward's cause in the
+south of France. By the cession of Aquitaine to
+him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on
+which his strength rested lost its force. The
+people of the south had clung to their Duke, even
+though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had
+stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern
+France. While preserving however their traditional
+fealty to the descendants of Eleanor they
+still clung to the equally traditional suzerainty of
+the kings of France. But the treaty of Brétigny
+not only severed them from the realm of France,
+it subjected them to the realm of England.
+Edward ceased to be their hereditary Duke, he
+became simply an English king ruling Aquitaine
+as an English dominion. If the Southerners loved
+the North-French little, they loved the English
+less, and the treaty which thus changed their
+whole position was followed by a quick revulsion
+of feeling from the Garonne to the Pyrenees. The
+Gascon nobles declared that John had no right to
+transfer their fealty to another and to sever them
+from the realm of France. The city of Rochelle
+prayed the French king not to release it from its
+fealty to him. "We will obey the English with
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-281"></a>2-281]</span>
+
+our lips," said its citizens, "but our hearts shall
+never be moved towards them." Edward strove
+to meet this passion for local independence, this
+hatred of being ruled from London, by sending
+the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing him
+in 1362 with the Duchy of Aquitaine. But the
+new Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the
+English king, and the grievance of the Southerners
+was left untouched. Charles V. who succeeded
+his father John in 1364 silently prepared to reap
+this harvest of discontent. Patient, wary, unscrupulous,
+he was hardly crowned before he put
+an end to the war which had gone on without a
+pause in Britanny by accepting homage from the
+claimant whom France had hitherto opposed.
+Through Bertrand du Guesclin, a fine soldier whom
+his sagacity had discovered, he forced the king of
+Navarre to a peace which closed the fighting in
+Normandy. A more formidable difficulty in the
+way of pacification and order lay in the Free
+Companies, a union of marauders whom the disbanding
+of both armies after the peace had set
+free to harry the wasted land and whom the
+king's military resources were insufficient to cope
+with. It was the stroke by which Charles cleared
+his realm of these scourges which forced on a new
+struggle with the English in the south.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Pedro the
+Cruel</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the judgement of the English court the
+friendship of Castille was of the first importance
+for the security of Aquitaine.  Spain was the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-282"></a>2-282]</span>
+
+strongest naval power of the western world, and
+not only would the ports of Guienne be closed
+but its communication with England would be at
+once cut off by the appearance of a joint French
+and Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was with
+satisfaction therefore that Edward saw the growth
+of a bitter hostility between Charles and the
+Castilian king, Pedro the Cruel, through the
+murder of his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, the
+French king's sister-in-law. Henry of Trastamara,
+a bastard son of Pedro's father Alfonso the
+Eleventh, had long been a refugee at the French
+court, and soon after the treaty of Brétigny
+Charles in his desire to revenge this murder on
+Pedro gave Henry aid in an attempt on the
+Castilian throne. It was impossible for England
+to look on with indifference while a dependant of
+the French king became master of Castille; and
+in 1362 a treaty offensive and defensive was concluded
+between Pedro and Edward the Third.
+The time was not come for open war; but the
+subtle policy of Charles saw in this strife across
+the Pyrenees an opportunity both of detaching
+Castille from the English cause and of ridding
+himself of the Free Companies. With characteristic
+caution he dexterously held himself in the
+background while he made use of the Pope, who
+had been threatened by the Free Companies in his
+palace at Avignon and was as anxious to get rid
+of them as himself. Pedro's cruelty, misgovernment,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-283"></a>2-283]</span>
+
+and alliance with the Moslem of Cordova
+served as grounds for a crusade which was proclaimed
+by Pope Urban; and Du Guesclin, who
+was placed at the head of the expedition, found
+in the Papal treasury and in the hope of booty
+from an unravaged land means of gathering the
+marauders round his standard. As soon as these
+Crusaders crossed the Ebro Pedro was deserted by
+his subjects, and in 1366 Henry of Trastamara
+saw himself crowned without a struggle at Burgos
+as king of Castille. Pedro with his two daughters
+fled for shelter to Bordeaux and claimed the aid
+promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine
+shrank from fighting for such a cause, but in spite
+of their protests and the reluctance of the English
+council to embark in so distant a struggle Edward
+held that he had no choice save to replace his
+ally, for to leave Henry seated on the throne was
+to leave Aquitaine to be crushed between France
+and Castille.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Charles the
+Fifth</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The after course of the war proved that in his
+anticipations of the fatal result of a combination
+of the two powers Edward was right, but his
+policy jarred not only against the universal
+craving for rest, but against the moral sense of
+the world. The Black Prince however proceeded
+to carry out his father's design in the teeth of the
+general opposition. His call to arms robbed Henry
+of the aid of those English Companies who had
+marched till now with the rest of the crusaders,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-284"></a>2-284]</span>
+
+but who returned at once to the standard of the
+Prince; the passes of Navarre were opened with
+gold, and in the beginning of 1367 the English
+army crossed the Pyrenees. Advancing to the
+Ebro the Prince offered battle at Navarete with
+an army already reduced by famine and disease
+in its terrible winter march, and Henry with
+double his numbers at once attacked him. But in
+spite of the obstinate courage of the Castilian
+troops the discipline and skill of the English
+soldiers once more turned the wavering day into
+a victory. Du Guesclin was taken, Henry fled
+across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was again seated
+on his throne. The pay however which he had
+promised was delayed; and the Prince, whose
+army had been thinned by disease to a fifth of its
+numbers and whose strength never recovered from
+the hardships of this campaign, fell back sick and
+beggared to Aquitaine. He had hardly returned
+when his work was undone. In 1368 Henry reentered
+Castille; its towns threw open their gates;
+a general rising chased Pedro from the throne,
+and a final battle in the spring of 1369 saw his
+utter overthrow. His murder by Henry's hand
+left the bastard undisputed master of Castille.
+Meanwhile the Black Prince, sick and disheartened,
+was hampered at Bordeaux by the expenses
+of the campaign which Pedro had left unpaid.
+To defray his debt he was driven in 1368 to lay a
+hearth-tax on Aquitaine, and the tax served as a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-285"></a>2-285]</span>
+
+pretext for an outbreak of the long-hoarded discontent.
+Charles was now ready for open action.
+He had won over the most powerful among the
+Gascon nobles, and their influence secured the
+rejection of the tax in a Parliament of the province
+which met at Bordeaux. The Prince, pressed
+by debt, persisted against the counsel of his wisest
+advisers in exacting it; and the lords of Aquitaine
+at once appealed to the king of France. Such an
+appeal was a breach of the treaty of Brétigny in
+which the French king had renounced his sovereignty
+over the south; but Charles had craftily
+delayed year after year the formal execution of
+the renunciations stipulated in the treaty, and he
+was still able to treat it as not binding on him.
+The success of Henry of Trastamara decided him
+to take immediate action, and in 1369 he summoned
+the Black Prince as Duke of Aquitaine to
+meet the appeal of the Gascon lords in his court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Renewal of
+the War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince was maddened by the summons.
+"I will come," he replied, "but with helmet on
+head, and with sixty thousand men at my back."
+War however had hardly been declared when the
+ability with which Charles had laid his plans was
+seen in his seizure of Ponthieu and in a rising of
+the whole country south of the Garonne. Du
+Gueselin returned in 1370 from Spain to throw
+life into the French attack. Two armies entered
+Guienne from the east; and a hundred castles
+with La Réole and Limoges threw open their gates
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-286"></a>2-286]</span>
+
+to Du Guesclin. But the march of an English
+army from Calais upon Paris recalled him from
+the south to guard the capital at a moment when
+the English leader advanced to recover Limoges,
+and the Black Prince borne in a litter to its walls
+stormed the town and sullied by a merciless massacre
+of its inhabitants the fame of his earlier
+exploits. Sickness however recalled him home in
+the spring of 1371; and the war, protracted by
+the caution of Charles who forbade his armies to
+engage, did little but exhaust the energy and
+treasure of England. As yet indeed the French
+attack had made small impression on the south,
+where the English troops stoutly held their ground
+against Du Guesclin's inroads. But the protracted
+war drained Edward's resources, while the diplomacy
+of Charles was busy in rousing fresh dangers
+from Scotland and Castille. It was in vain that
+Edward looked for allies to the Flemish towns.
+The male line of the Counts of Flanders ended in
+Count Louis le Mâle; and the marriage of his
+daughter Margaret with Philip, Duke of Burgundy,
+a younger brother of the French king, secured
+Charles from attack along his northern border.
+In Scotland the death of David Bruce put an end
+to Edward's schemes for a reunion of the two
+kingdoms; and his successor, Robert the Steward,
+renewed in 1371 the alliance with France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Loss of
+Aquitaine</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Castille was a yet more serious danger; and an
+effort which Edward made to neutralize its attack
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-287"></a>2-287]</span>
+
+only forced Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole
+weight into the struggle. The two daughters of
+Pedro had remained since their father's flight at
+Bordeaux. The elder of these was now wedded
+to John of Gaunt, Edward's fourth son, whom he
+had created Duke of Lancaster on his previous
+marriage with Blanche, a daughter of Henry of
+Lancaster and the heiress of that house, while the
+younger was wedded to Edward's fifth son, the
+Earl of Cambridge. Edward's aim was that of
+raising again the party of King Pedro and giving
+Henry of Trastamara work to do at home which
+would hinder his interposition in the war of
+Guienne. It was with this view that John of
+Gaunt on his marriage took the title of king of
+Castille. But no adherent of Pedro's cause stirred in
+Spain, and Henry replied to the challenge by sending
+a Spanish fleet to the Channel. A decisive victory
+which this fleet won over an English convoy off
+Rochelle proved a fatal blow to the English cause.
+It wrested from Edward the mastery of the seas,
+and cut off all communication between England
+and Guienne. Charles was at once roused to new
+exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois
+yielded to his general Du Guesclin; and Rochelle
+was surrendered by its citizens in 1372. The next
+year saw a desperate attempt to restore the fortune
+of the English arms. A great army under John
+of Gaunt penetrated into the heart of France.
+But it found no foe to engage. Charles had forbidden
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-288"></a>2-288]</span>
+
+any fighting. "If a storm rages over the
+land," said the king coolly, "it disperses of itself;
+and so will it be with the English." Winter in fact
+overtook the Duke of Lancaster in the mountains
+of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of his host
+reached Bordeaux. The failure of this attack was
+the signal for a general defection, and ere the
+summer of 1374 had closed the two towns of
+Bordeaux and Bayonne were all that remained of
+the English possessions in Southern France. Even
+these were only saved by the exhaustion of the
+conquerors. The treasury of Charles was as
+utterly drained as the treasury of Edward; and
+the kings were forced to a truce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Social
+Strife</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only fourteen years had gone by since the
+Treaty of Brétigny raised England to a height of
+glory such as it had never known before. But
+the years had been years of a shame and suffering
+which stung the people to madness. Never had
+England fallen so low. Her conquests were lost,
+her shores insulted, her commerce swept from the
+seas. Within she was drained by the taxation
+and bloodshed of the war. Its popularity had
+wholly died away. When the Commons were
+asked in 1354 whether they would assent to a
+treaty of perpetual peace if they might have it,
+"the said Commons responded all, and all together,
+'Yes, yes!'" The population was thinned by the
+ravages of pestilence, for till 1369, which saw its
+last visitation, the Black Death returned again and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-289"></a>2-289]</span>
+
+again. The social strife too gathered bitterness
+with every effort at repression. It was in vain
+that Parliament after Parliament increased the
+severity of its laws. The demands of the Parliament
+of 1376 show how inoperative the previous
+Statutes of Labourers had proved. They prayed
+that constables be directed to arrest all who infringed
+the Statute, that no labourer should be
+allowed to take refuge in a town and become an
+artizan if there were need of his service in the
+county from which he came, and that the king
+would protect lords and employers against the
+threats of death uttered by serfs who refused to
+serve. The reply of the Royal Council shows that
+statesmen at any rate were beginning to feel that
+repression might be pushed too far. The king
+refused to interfere by any further and harsher
+provisions between employers and employed, and
+left cases of breach of law to be dealt with in his
+ordinary courts of justice. On the one side he
+forbade the threatening gatherings which were
+already common in the country, but on the other
+he forbade the illegal exactions of the employers.
+With such a reply however the proprietary
+class were hardly likely to be content.
+Two years later the Parliament of Gloucester called
+for a Fugitive-slave Law, which would have enabled
+lords to seize their serfs in whatever county
+or town they found refuge, and in 1379 they
+prayed that judges might be sent five times a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-290"></a>2-290]</span>
+
+year into every shire to enforce the Statute of
+Labourers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edward
+and the
+Parliament</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the strife between employers and employed
+was not the only rift which was opening in the
+social structure. Suffering and defeat had stripped
+off the veil which hid from the nation the shallow
+and selfish temper of Edward the Third. His
+profligacy was now bringing him to a premature
+old age. He was sinking into the tool of his
+ministers and his mistresses. The glitter and profusion
+of his court, his splendid tournaments, his
+feasts, his Table Round, his new order of chivalry,
+the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose
+frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at
+Westminster, the vast keep which crowned the
+hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour
+round a king who tricked his Parliament and
+swindled his creditors. Edward paid no debts.
+He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence
+by a cool act of bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish
+burghers only wrested payment from him by holding
+his royal person as their security. His own
+subjects fared no better than foreigners. The
+prerogative of "purveyance" by which the king
+in his progresses through the country had the
+right of first purchase of all that he needed at fair
+market price became a galling oppression in the
+hands of a bankrupt king who was always moving
+from place to place. "When men hear of
+your coming," Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-291"></a>2-291]</span>
+
+"everybody at once for sheer fear sets about hiding
+or eating or getting rid of their geese and
+chickens or other possessions that they may not
+utterly lose them through your arrival. The
+purveyors and servants of your court seize on men
+and horses in the midst of their field work. They
+seize on the very bullocks that are at plough or at
+sowing, and force them to work for two or three
+days at a time without a penny of payment. It
+is no wonder that men make dole and murmur at
+your approach, for, as the truth is in God, I myself,
+whenever I hear a rumour of it, be I at home
+or in chapter or in church or at study, nay if I
+am saying mass, even I in my own person tremble
+in every limb." But these irregular exactions
+were little beside the steady pressure of taxation.
+Even in the years of peace fifteenths and tenths,
+subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were
+demanded and obtained from Parliament; and
+with the outbreak of war the royal demands became
+heavier and more frequent. As failure
+followed failure the expenses of each campaign increased
+an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle
+cost nearly a million; the march of John of Gaunt
+through France utterly drained the royal treasury.
+Nor were these legal supplies all that the king drew
+from the nation. He had repudiated his pledge
+to abstain from arbitrary taxation of imports and
+exports. He sold monopolies to the merchants in
+exchange for increased customs.  He wrested
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-292"></a>2-292]</span>
+
+supplies from the clergy by arrangements with
+the bishops or the Pope. There were signs that
+Edward was longing to rid himself of the control
+of Parliament altogether. The power of the
+Houses seemed indeed as high as ever; great
+statutes were passed. Those of Provisors and
+Præmunire settled the relations of England to the
+Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined
+that crime and its penalties. That of the Staples
+in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade
+and the privileges of the merchant gilds which
+conducted it. But side by side with these exertions
+of influence we note a series of steady encroachments
+by the Crown on the power of the
+Houses. If their petitions were granted, they
+were often altered in the royal ordinance which
+professed to embody them. A plan of demanding
+supplies for three years at once rendered the
+annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. Its
+very existence was threatened by the convocation
+in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with but
+a single knight from every shire and a single
+burgess from a small number of the greater towns,
+which acted as Parliament and granted subsidies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The
+Baronage
+and the
+Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What aided Edward above all in eluding or
+defying the constitutional restrictions on arbitrary
+taxation, as well as in these more insidious attempts
+to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of
+the check which the Baronage and the Church had
+till now supplied.  The same causes which had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-293"></a>2-293]</span>
+
+long been reducing the number of the greater
+lords who formed the upper house went steadily
+on. Under Edward the Second little more than
+seventy were commonly summoned to Parliament;
+little more than forty were summoned under
+Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were
+now bound to the Crown, partly by their employment
+on its service, partly by their interest in the
+continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage
+too were members of the royal family. Edward
+had carried out on a far wider scale than before
+the policy which had been more or less adhered to
+from the days of Henry the Third, that of gathering
+up in the hands of the royal house all the
+greater heritages of the land. The Black Prince
+was married to Joan of Kent, the heiress of Edward
+the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock.
+His marriage with the heiress of the Earl
+of Ulster brought to the king's second son, Lionel,
+Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions
+of the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the
+house of Bohun passed by like matches to his youngest
+son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson,
+Henry of Lancaster. But the greatest English
+heritage fell to Edward's third living son, John of
+Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent
+during his father's Flemish campaign. Originally
+created Earl of Richmond, the death of his father-in-law,
+Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest
+daughter, raised John in his wife's right to the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-294"></a>2-294]</span>
+
+Dukedom of Lancaster and the Earldoms of Derby,
+Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage
+were thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more
+and more into an hostility with the Church which
+in time disabled the clergy from acting as a check
+on it. What rent the ruling classes in twain was
+the growing pressure of the war. The nobles and
+knighthood of the country, already half ruined by
+the rise in the labour market and the attitude of
+the peasantry, were pressed harder than ever by
+the repeated subsidies which were called for by
+the continuance of the struggle. In the hour of
+their distress they cast their eyes greedily--as in
+the Norman and Angevin days--on the riches of
+the Church. Never had her wealth been greater.
+Out of a population of some three millions the
+ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty
+thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated about
+the country. They were said to own in landed
+property alone more than a third of the soil,
+while their "spiritualities" in dues and offerings
+amounted to twice the king's revenue. Exaggerated
+as such statements were, the wealth of the
+Church was really great; but even more galling
+to the nobles was its influence in the royal councils.
+The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by
+its victories at Crécy and Poitiers, looked with
+envy and wrath at the throng of bishops around
+the council-board, and attributed to their love of
+peace the errors and sluggishness which had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-295"></a>2-295]</span>
+
+caused, as they held, the disasters of the war.
+To rob the Church of wealth and of power became
+the aim of a great baronial party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Weakness of
+the Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The efforts of the baronage indeed would have
+been fruitless had the spiritual power of the
+Church remained as of old. But the clergy were
+rent by their own dissensions. The higher prelates
+were busy with the cares of political office,
+and severed from the lower priesthood by the
+scandalous inequality between the revenues of the
+wealthier ecclesiastics and the "poor parson" of
+the country. A bitter hatred divided the secular
+clergy from the regular; and this strife went
+fiercely on in the Universities. Fitz-Ralf, the
+Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the
+decline which was already being felt in the number
+of academical students, and the University checked
+by statute their practice of admitting mere children
+into their order. The clergy too at large
+shared in the discredit and unpopularity of the
+Papacy. Though they suffered more than any
+other class from the exactions of Avignon, they
+were bound more and more to the Papal cause.
+The very statutes which would have protected
+them were practically set aside by the treacherous
+diplomacy of the Crown. At home and abroad
+the Roman See was too useful for the king to
+come to any actual breach with it. However
+much Edward might echo the bold words of his
+Parliament, he shrank from an open contest which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-296"></a>2-296]</span>
+
+would have added the Papacy to his many foes,
+and which would at the same time have robbed
+him of his most effective means of wresting aids
+from the English clergy by private arrangement
+with the Roman court. Rome indeed was brought
+to waive its alleged right of appointing foreigners
+to English livings. But a compromise was arranged
+between the Pope and the Crown in which
+both united in the spoliation and enslavement of
+the Church. The voice of chapters, of monks, of
+ecclesiastical patrons, went henceforth for nothing
+in the election of bishops or abbots or the nomination
+to livings in the gift of churchmen. The
+Crown recommended those whom it chose to the
+Pope, and the Pope nominated them to see or cure
+of souls. The treasuries of both King and Pope
+profited by the arrangement; but we can hardly
+wonder that after a betrayal such as this the
+clergy placed little trust in statutes or royal protection,
+and bowed humbly before the claims of
+Rome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Its Worldliness</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what weakened the clergy most was their
+severance from the general sympathies of the
+nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of
+their temper. Immense as their wealth was, they
+bore as little as they could of the common burthens
+of the realm. They were still resolute to assert
+their exemption from the common justice of the
+land, though the mild punishments of the bishops'
+courts carried as little dismay as ever into the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-297"></a>2-297]</span>
+
+mass of disorderly clerks. But privileged as they
+thus held themselves against all interference from
+the lay world without them, they carried on a
+ceaseless interference with the affairs of this lay
+world through their control over wills, contracts
+and divorces. No figure was better known or
+more hated than the summoner who enforced the
+jurisdiction and levied the dues of their courts.
+By their directly religious offices they penetrated
+into the very heart of the social life about them.
+But powerful as they were, their moral authority
+was fast passing away. The wealthier churchmen
+with their curled hair and hanging sleeves aped
+the costume of the knightly society from which
+they were drawn and to which they still really
+belonged. We see the general impression of their
+worldliness in Chaucer's pictures of the hunting
+monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto
+on her brooch. The older religious orders in fact
+had sunk into mere landowners, while the enthusiasm
+of the friars had in great part died away
+and left a crowd of impudent mendicants behind
+it. Wyclif could soon with general applause
+denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare
+that "the man who gives alms to a begging friar
+is <i>ipso facto</i> excommunicate."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Advance
+of the
+Commons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this weakness of the Baronage and the
+Church, and the consequent withdrawal of both as
+represented in the temporal and spiritual Estates
+of the Upper House from the active part which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-298"></a>2-298]</span>
+
+they had taken till now in checking the Crown
+that brought the Lower House to the front. The
+Knight of the Shire was now finally joined with
+the Burgess of the Town to form the Third Estate
+of the realm: and this union of the trader and the
+country gentleman gave a vigour and weight to
+the action of the Commons which their House
+could never have acquired had it remained as elsewhere
+a mere gathering of burgesses. But it was
+only slowly and under the pressure of one necessity
+after another that the Commons took a growing
+part in public affairs. Their primary business was
+with taxation, and here they stood firm against
+the evasions by which the king still managed to
+baffle their exclusive right of granting supplies by
+voluntary agreements with the merchants of the
+Staple. Their steady pressure at last obtained in
+1362 an enactment that no subsidy should henceforth
+be set upon wool without assent of Parliament,
+while Purveyance was restricted by a provision
+that payments should be made for all things
+taken for the king's use in ready money. A
+hardly less important advance was made by the
+change of Ordinances into Statutes. Till this
+time, even when a petition of the Houses was
+granted, the royal Council had reserved to itself
+the right of modifying its form in the Ordinance
+which professed to embody it. It was under
+colour of this right that so many of the provisions
+made in Parliament had hitherto been evaded or
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-299"></a>2-299]</span>
+
+set aside. But the Commons now met this abuse
+by a demand that on the royal assent being
+given their petitions should be turned without
+change into Statutes of the Realm and derive force
+of law from their entry on the Rolls of Parliament.
+The same practical sense was seen in their dealings
+with Edward's attempt to introduce occasional
+smaller councils with parliamentary powers. Such
+an assembly in 1353 granted a subsidy on wool.
+The Parliament which met in the following year
+might have challenged its proceedings as null and
+void, but the Commons more wisely contented
+themselves with a demand that the ordinances
+passed in the preceding assembly should receive
+the sanction of the Three Estates. A precedent
+for evil was thus turned into a precedent for
+good, and though irregular gatherings of a like
+sort were for a while occasionally held they were
+soon seen to be fruitless and discontinued. But
+the Commons long shrank from meddling with
+purely administrative matters. When Edward in
+his anxiety to shift from himself the responsibility
+of the war referred to them in 1354 for advice on
+one of the numerous propositions of peace, they
+referred him to the lords of his Council. "Most
+dreaded lord," they replied, "as to this war and
+the equipment needful for it we are so ignorant
+and simple that we know not how nor have the
+power to devise. Wherefore we pray your Grace
+to excuse us in this matter, and that it please you
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-300"></a>2-300]</span>
+
+with the advice of the great and wise persons of
+your Council to ordain what seems best for you
+for the honour and profit of yourself and of your
+kingdom. And whatsoever shall be thus ordained
+by assent and agreement on the part of you and
+your Lords we readily assent to and will hold it
+firmly established."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Baronage
+attacks the
+Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But humble as was their tone the growing
+power of the Commons showed itself in significant
+changes. In 1363 the Chancellor opened Parliament
+with a speech in English, no doubt as a
+tongue intelligible to the members of the Lower
+House. From a petition in 1376 that knights of
+the shire may be chosen by common election of
+the better folk of the shire and not merely nominated
+by the sheriff without due election, as well
+as from an earlier demand that the sheriffs themselves
+should be disqualified from serving in Parliament
+during their term of office, we see that the
+Crown had already begun not only to feel the
+pressure of the Commons but to meet it by foisting
+royal nominees on the constituencies. Such
+an attempt at packing the House would hardly
+have been resorted to had it not already proved
+too strong for direct control. A further proof of
+its influence was seen in a prayer of the Parliament
+that lawyers practising in the King's Courts might
+no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The
+petition marks the rise of a consciousness that the
+House was now no mere gathering of local representatives,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-301"></a>2-301]</span>
+
+but a national assembly, and that a seat
+in it could no longer be confined to dwellers within
+the bounds of this county or that. But it
+showed also a pressure for seats, a passing away
+of the old dread of being returned as a representative
+and a new ambition to gain a place among
+the members of the Commons. Whether they
+would or no indeed the Commons were driven
+forward to a more direct interference with public
+affairs. From the memorable statute of 1322
+their right to take equal part in all matters
+brought before Parliament had been incontestable,
+and their waiver of much of this right faded away
+before the stress of time. Their assent was needed
+to the great ecclesiastical statutes which regulated
+the relation of the See of Rome to the realm.
+They naturally took a chief part in the enactment
+and re-enactment of the Statute of Labourers.
+The Statute of the Staple, with a host of smaller
+commercial and economical measures, was of their
+origination. But it was not till an open breach
+took place between the baronage and the prelates
+that their full weight was felt. In the Parliament
+of 1371, on the resumption of the war, a noble
+taunted the Church as an owl protected by the
+feathers which other birds had contributed, and
+which they had a right to resume when a hawk's
+approach threatened them. The worldly goods of
+the Church, the metaphor hinted, had been bestowed
+on it for the common weal, and could be
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-302"></a>2-302]</span>
+
+taken from it on the coming of a common danger.
+The threat was followed by a prayer that the
+chief offices of state, which had till now been held
+by the leading bishops, might be placed in lay
+hands. The prayer was at once granted: William
+of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, resigned the
+Chancellorship, another prelate the Treasury, to
+lay dependants of the great nobles; and the panic
+of the clergy was seen in large grants which were
+voted by both Convocations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John of
+Gaunt</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the moment of their triumph the assailants
+of the Church found a leader in John of Gaunt.
+The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual
+power of the Crown. Edward himself was sinking
+into dotage. Of his sons the Black Prince, who
+had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish
+campaign, was fast drawing to the grave; he had
+lost a second son by death in childhood; the third,
+Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368. It was his
+fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the
+royal power mainly fell. By his marriage with
+the heiress of the house of Lancaster the Duke had
+acquired lands and wealth, but he had no taste for
+the policy of the Lancastrian house or for acting
+as leader of the barons in any constitutional resistance
+to the Crown. His pride, already quickened
+by the second match with Constance to which he
+owed his shadowy kingship of Castille, drew him
+to the throne; and the fortune which placed the
+royal power practically in his hands bound him
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-303"></a>2-303]</span>
+
+only the more firmly to its cause. Men held that
+his ambition looked to the Crown itself, for the
+approaching death of Edward and the Prince of
+Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of the Black
+Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl,
+the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, between
+John and the throne. But the Duke's success fell
+short of his pride. In the campaign of 1373 he
+traversed France without finding a foe and brought
+back nothing save a ruined army to English shores.
+The peremptory tone in which money was demanded
+for the cost of this fruitless march while
+the petitions of the Parliament were set aside till
+it was granted roused the temper of the Commons.
+They requested--it is the first instance of such a
+practice--a conference with the lords, and while
+granting fresh subsidies prayed that the grant
+should be spent only on the war. The resentment
+of the government at this advance towards a control
+over the actual management of public affairs was
+seen in the calling of no Parliament through the
+next two years. But the years were disastrous
+both at home and abroad. The war went steadily
+against the English arms. The long negotiations
+with the Pope which went on at Bruges through
+1375, and in which Wyclif took part as one of the
+royal commissioners, ended in a compromise by
+which Rome yielded nothing. The strife over the
+Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, and
+a return of the plague heightened the public distress.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-304"></a>2-304]</span>
+
+Edward was now wholly swayed by Alice
+Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the
+royal mistress. But if we gather its tenor from
+the complaints of the succeeding Parliament his
+administration was as weak as it was corrupt.
+The new lay ministers lent themselves to gigantic
+frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought
+up the royal debts and embezzled the public
+revenue. With Richard Lyons, a merchant through
+whom the king negotiated with the gild of the
+Staple, he reaped enormous profits by raising the
+price of imports and by lending to the Crown at
+usurious rates of interest. When the empty
+treasury forced them to call a Parliament the
+ministers tampered with the elections through the
+sheriffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Good
+Parliament</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the temper of the Parliament which met in
+1376, and which gained from after times the name
+of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions
+had utterly failed. Even their promise
+to pillage the Church had failed to win for the
+Duke and his party the good will of the lesser
+gentry or the wealthier burgesses who together
+formed the Commons. Projects of wide constitutional
+and social change, of the humiliation and
+impoverishment of an estate of the realm, were
+profoundly distasteful to men already struggling
+with a social revolution on their own estates and
+in their own workshops. But it was not merely
+its opposition to the projects of Lancaster and his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-305"></a>2-305]</span>
+
+party among the baronage which won for this
+assembly the name of the Good Parliament. Its
+action marked a new period in our Parliamentary
+history, as it marked a new stage in the character
+of the national opposition to the misrule of the
+Crown. Hitherto the task of resistance had
+devolved on the baronage, and had been carried
+out through risings of its feudal tenantry. But
+the misgovernment was now that of the baronage
+or of a main part of the baronage itself in actual
+conjunction with the Crown. Only in the power
+of the Commons lay any adequate means of peaceful
+redress. The old reluctance of the Lower
+House to meddle with matters of State was roughly
+swept away therefore by the pressure of the time.
+The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's
+succession by the removal of John of Gaunt, the
+prelates with William of Wykeham at their head,
+resolute again to take their place in the royal
+councils and to check the projects of ecclesiastical
+spoliation put forward by their opponents, alike
+found in it a body to oppose to the Duke's administration.
+Backed by powers such as these,
+the action of the Commons showed none of their
+old timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of
+a hundred and forty petitions of grievances preluded
+a bold attack on the royal Council. "Trusting in
+God, and standing with his followers before the
+nobles, whereof the chief was John Duke of
+Lancaster, whose doings were ever contrary," their
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-306"></a>2-306]</span>
+
+speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the mis-management
+of the war, the oppressive taxation,
+and demanded an account of the expenditure.
+"What do these base and ignoble knights attempt?"
+cried John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be
+kings or princes of the land?" But the movement
+was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was
+silenced by the charges brought against the
+ministers. After a strict enquiry Latimer and
+Lyons were alike thrown into prison, Alice Perrers
+was banished, and several of the royal servants
+were driven from the Court. At this moment the
+death of the Black Prince shook the power of the
+Parliament. But it only heightened its resolve
+to secure the succession. His son, Richard of
+Bordeaux, as he was called from the place of his
+birth, was now a child of but ten years old; and
+it was known that doubts were whispered on the
+legitimacy of his birth and claim. An early
+marriage of his mother Joan of Kent, a granddaughter
+of Edward the First, with the Earl of
+Salisbury had been annulled; but the Lancastrian
+party used this first match to throw doubts on the
+validity of her subsequent union with the Black
+Prince and on the right of Richard to the
+throne. The dread of Lancaster's ambition is the
+first indication of the approach of what was from
+this time to grow into the great difficulty of the
+realm, the question of the succession to the Crown.
+From the death of Edward the Third to the death
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-307"></a>2-307]</span>
+
+of Charles the First no English sovereign felt himself
+secure from rival claimants of his throne. As
+yet however the dread was a baseless one; the
+people were heartily with the Prince and his child.
+The Duke's proposal that the succession should be
+settled in case of Richard's death was rejected;
+and the boy himself was brought into Parliament
+and acknowledged as heir of the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wyclif
+and John
+of Gaunt</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To secure their work the Commons ended by
+obtaining the addition of nine lords with William
+of Wykeham and two other prelates among them
+to the royal Council. But the Parliament was no
+sooner dismissed than the Duke at once resumed
+his power. His anger at the blow which had been
+dealt at his projects was no doubt quickened by
+resentment at the sudden advance of the Lower
+House. From the Commons who shrank even
+from giving counsel on matters of state to the
+Commons who dealt with such matters as their
+special business, who investigated royal accounts,
+who impeached royal ministers, who dictated
+changes in the royal advisers, was an immense
+step. But it was a step which the Duke believed
+could be retraced. His haughty will flung aside
+all restraints of law. He dismissed the new lords
+and prelates from the Council. He called back
+Alice Perrers and the disgraced ministers. He
+declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and
+did not suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes.
+He imprisoned Peter de la Mare, and confiscated
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-308"></a>2-308]</span>
+
+the possessions of William of Wykeham. His
+attack on this prelate was an attack on the clergy
+at large, and the attack became significant when
+the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations
+of Church property which formed the
+favourite theme of John Wyclif. To Wyclif such
+a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which
+held down the Church. His administrative ability,
+his political energy, his wealth and the colleges at
+Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him
+to raise before his death, were all equally hateful.
+It was this wealth, this intermeddling with worldly
+business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon
+as the curse that robbed prelates and churchmen
+of that spiritual authority which could alone meet
+the vice and suffering of the time. Whatever baser
+motives might spur Lancaster and his party, their
+projects of spoliation must have seemed to Wyclif
+projects of enfranchisement for the Church. Poor
+and powerless in worldly matters, he held that she
+would have the wealth and might of heaven at her
+command. Wyclif's theory of Church and State
+had led him long since to contend that the property
+of the clergy might be seized and employed like
+other property for national purposes. Such a
+theory might have been left, as other daring
+theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the
+disputation of the schools. But the clergy were
+bitterly galled when the first among English
+teachers threw himself hotly on the side of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-309"></a>2-309]</span>
+
+party which threatened them with spoliation, and
+argued in favour of their voluntary abandonment
+of all Church property and of a return to their
+original poverty. They were roused to action
+when Wyclif came forward as the theological bulwark
+of the Lancastrian party at a moment when
+the clergy were freshly outraged by the overthrow
+of the bishops and the plunder of Wykeham.
+They forced the king to cancel the sentence of
+banishment from the precincts of the Court which
+had been directed against the Bishop of Winchester
+by refusing any grant of supply in Convocation
+till William of Wykeham took his seat in it. But
+in the prosecution of Wyclif they resolved to return
+blow for blow. In February 1377 he was
+summoned before Bishop Courtenay of London to
+answer for his heretical propositions concerning
+the wealth of the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge
+as really given to himself, and stood by Wyclif's
+side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But
+no trial took place. Fierce words passed between
+the nobles and the prelate: the Duke himself was
+said to have threatened to drag Courtenay out of
+the church by the hair of his head; at last the
+London populace, to whom John of Gaunt was
+hateful, burst in to their Bishop's rescue, and
+Wyclif's life was saved with difficulty by the aid
+of the soldiery. But his boldness only grew with
+the danger. A Papal bull which was procured by
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-310"></a>2-310]</span>
+
+the bishops, directing the University to condemn
+and arrest him, extorted from him a bold defiance.
+In a defence circulated widely through the kingdom
+and laid before Parliament, Wyclif broadly asserted
+that no man could be excommunicated by the Pope
+"unless he were first excommunicated by himself."
+He denied the right of the Church to exact or
+defend temporal privileges by spiritual censures,
+declared that a Church might justly be deprived
+by the king or lay lords of its property for defect
+of duty, and defended the subjection of ecclesiastics
+to civil tribunals. It marks the temper of the time
+and the growing severance between the Church
+and the nation that, bold as the defiance was, it
+won the support of the people as of the Crown.
+When Wyclif appeared at the close of the year in
+Lambeth Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons
+a message from the Court forbade the primate
+to proceed and the Londoners broke in and
+dissolved the session.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Death of
+Edward the
+Third</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile the Duke's unscrupulous tampering
+with elections had packed the Parliament of 1377
+with his adherents. The work of the Good Parliament
+was undone, and the Commons petitioned for
+the restoration of all who had been impeached by
+their predecessors. The needs of the treasury
+were met by a novel form of taxation. To the
+earlier land-tax, to the tax on personality which
+dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties
+which had grown into importance in the last two
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-311"></a>2-311]</span>
+
+reigns, was now added a tax which reached every
+person in the realm, a poll-tax of a groat a head.
+In this tax were sown the seeds of future trouble,
+but when the Parliament broke up in March the
+Duke's power seemed completely secured. Hardly
+three months later it was wholly undone. In June
+Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age,
+robbed on his death-bed even of his rings by the
+mistress to whom he clung, and the accession of
+his grandson, Richard the Second, changed the
+whole face of affairs. The Duke withdrew from
+Court, and sought a reconciliation with the party
+opposed to him. The men of the Good Parliament
+surrounded the new king, and a Parliament which
+assembled in October took vigorously up its work.
+Peter de la Mare was released from prison and
+replaced in the chair of the House of Commons.
+The action of the Lower House indeed was as
+trenchant and comprehensive as that of the Good
+Parliament itself. In petition after petition the
+Commons demanded the confirmation of older
+rights and the removal of modern abuses. They
+complained of administrative wrongs such as the
+practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the
+oppressions of officers of the exchequer and of the
+forest, of the ill state of prisons, of the customs of
+"maintenance" and "livery" by which lords extended
+their protection to shoals of disorderly
+persons and overawed the courts by means of them.
+Amid ecclesiastical abuses they noted the state of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-312"></a>2-312]</span>
+
+the Church courts, and the neglect of the laws
+of Provisors. They demanded that the annual
+assembly of Parliament, which had now become
+customary, should be defined by law, and that
+bills once sanctioned by the Crown should be
+forthwith turned into statutes without further
+amendment or change on the part of the royal
+Council. With even greater boldness they laid
+hands on the administration itself. They not
+only demanded that the evil counsellors of the
+last reign should be removed, and that the treasurer
+of the subsidy on wool should account for
+its expenditure to the lords, but that the royal
+Council should be named in Parliament, and chosen
+from members of either estate of the realm. Though
+a similar request for the nomination of the officers
+of the royal household was refused, their main
+demand was granted. It was agreed that the great
+officers of state, the chancellor, treasurer, and barons
+of exchequer should be named by the lords in
+Parliament, and removed from their offices during
+the king's "tender years" only on the advice of
+the lords. The pressure of the war, which rendered
+the existing taxes insufficient, gave the House a
+fresh hold on the Crown. While granting a new
+subsidy in the form of a land and property tax, the
+Commons restricted its proceeds to the war, and
+assigned two of their members, William Walworth
+and John Philpot, as a standing committee to
+regulate its expenditure.  The successor of this
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-313"></a>2-313]</span>
+
+Parliament in the following year demanded and
+obtained an account of the way in which the subsidy
+had been spent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Discontent
+of the
+people</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The minority of the king, who was but eleven
+years old at his accession, the weakness of the royal
+council amidst the strife of the baronial factions,
+above all the disasters of the war without and the
+growing anarchy within the realm itself, alone made
+possible this startling assumption of the executive
+power by the Houses. The shame of defeat abroad
+was being added to the misery and discomfort at
+home. The French war ran its disastrous course.
+One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a
+second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart
+of France ended, like its predecessors, in disappointment
+and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between
+employers and employed was kindling into civil
+war. The Parliament, drawn as it was wholly
+from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely
+for the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for
+the mastery of the Crown. The Good Parliament
+had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement
+of the Statute of Labourers as any of its
+predecessors. In spite of statutes, however, the
+market remained in the labourers' hands. The
+comfort of the worker rose with his wages. Men
+who had "no land to live on but their hands disdained
+to live on penny ale or bacon, and called
+for fresh flesh or fish, fried or bake, and that hot
+and hotter for chilling of their maw." But there
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-314"></a>2-314]</span>
+
+were dark shades in this general prosperity of the
+labour class. There were seasons of the year
+during which employment for the floating mass of
+labour was hard to find. In the long interval
+between harvest-tide and harvest-tide work and
+food were alike scarce in every homestead of the
+time. Some lines of William Langland give us
+the picture of a farm of the day. "I have no
+penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor
+pigs, but two green cheeses, a few curds and cream,
+and an oaten cake, and two loaves of beans and
+bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon
+nor no cooked meat collops for to make, but I have
+parsley and leeks and many cabbage plants, and
+eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw
+afield my dung while the drought lasteth, and by
+this livelihood we must all live till Lammas-tide
+[August], and by that I hope to have harvest in
+my croft." But it was not till Lammas-tide that
+high wages and the new corn bade "Hunger go to
+sleep," and during the long spring and summer the
+free labourer and the "waster that will not work
+but wander about, that will eat no bread but the
+finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest
+ale," was a source of social and political danger.
+"He grieveth him against God and grudgeth
+against Reason, and then curseth he the King and
+all his council after such law to allow labourers to
+grieve." Such a smouldering mass of discontent
+as this needed but a spark to burst into flame; and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-315"></a>2-315]</span>
+
+the spark was found in the imposition of fresh
+taxation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The
+Poll-Tax</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power
+he was still the leading noble in the realm, and it
+is possible that dread of the encroachments of the
+last Parliament on the executive power drew after
+a time even the new advisers of the Crown closer to
+him. Whatever was the cause, he again came to
+the front. But the supplies voted in the past
+year were wasted in his hands. A fresh expedition
+against France under the Duke himself ended in
+failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home
+his brutal household was outraging public order
+by the murder of a knight who had incurred John's
+anger in the precincts of Westminster. So great
+was the resentment of the Londoners at this act
+that it became needful to summon Parliament elsewhere
+than to the capital; and in 1378 the Houses
+met at Gloucester. The Duke succeeded in bringing
+the Lords to refuse those conferences with the
+Commons which had given unity to the action of
+the late Parliament, but he was foiled in an attack
+on the clerical privilege of sanctuary and in the
+threats which his party still directed against
+Church property, while the Commons forced the
+royal Council to lay before them the accounts of
+the last subsidy and to appoint a commission to
+examine into the revenue of the Crown. Unhappily
+the financial policy of the preceding year was persisted
+in. The check before St. Malo had been
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-316"></a>2-316]</span>
+
+somewhat redeemed by treaties with Charles of
+Evreux and the Duke of Britanny which secured
+to England the right of holding Cherbourg and
+Brest; but the cost of these treaties only swelled
+the expenses of the war. The fresh supplies voted
+at Gloucester proved insufficient for their purpose,
+and a Parliament in the spring of 1379 renewed
+the Poll-tax in a graduated form. But the proceeds
+of the tax proved miserably inadequate, and
+when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a return
+was again made to the old system of subsidies.
+But these failed in their turn; and at the close of
+the year the Parliament again fell back on a severer
+Poll-tax. One of the attractions of the new mode
+of taxation seems to have been that the clergy,
+who adopted it for themselves, paid in this way a
+larger share of the burthens of the state; but the
+chief ground for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its
+bringing within the net of the tax-gatherer a class
+which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the
+free labourer, the village smith, the village tiler.
+But few courses could have been more dangerous.
+The Poll-tax not only brought the pressure of the
+war home to every household; it goaded into action
+precisely the class which was already seething with
+discontent. The strife between labour and capital
+was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in
+town. The landlords were claiming new services,
+or forcing men who looked on themselves as free
+to prove they were no villeins by law. The free
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-317"></a>2-317]</span>
+
+labourer was struggling against the attempt to
+exact work from him at low wages. The wandering
+workman was being seized and branded as a
+vagrant. The abbey towns were struggling for
+freedom against the abbeys. The craftsmen within
+boroughs were carrying on the same strife against
+employer and craft-gild. And all this mass of
+discontent was being heightened and organized by
+agencies with which the Government could not
+cope. The poorer villeins and the free labourers
+had long since banded together in secret conspiracies
+which the wealthier villeins supported
+with money. The return of soldiers from the war
+threw over the land a host of broken men, skilled
+in arms, and ready to take part in any rising.
+The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from
+village to village and street to street, shared the
+passions of the class from which they sprang.
+Priests like Ball openly preached the doctrines of
+communism. And to these had been recently
+added a fresh agency, which could hardly fail to
+stir a new excitement. With the practical ability
+which marked his character, Wyclif set on foot
+about this time a body of poor preachers to supply,
+as he held, the place of those wealthier clergy who
+had lost their hold on the land. The coarse
+sermons, bare feet, and russet dress of these
+"Simple Priests" moved the laughter of rector and
+canon, but they proved a rapid and effective means
+of diffusing Wyclif's protests against the wealth
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-318"></a>2-318]</span>
+
+and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can hardly
+doubt that in the general turmoil their denunciation
+of ecclesiastical wealth passed often into more
+general denunciations of the proprietary classes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John Ball</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the spring went by quaint rimes passed
+through the country, and served as a summons to
+revolt. "John Ball," ran one, "greeteth you all,
+and doth for to understand he hath rung your
+bell. Now right and might, will and skill, God
+speed every dele." "Help truth," ran another,
+"and truth shall help you! Now reigneth pride
+in price, and covetise is counted wise, and lechery
+withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame.
+Envy reigneth with treason, and sloth is take in
+great season. God do bote, for now is tyme!"
+We recognize Ball's hand in the yet more stirring
+missives of "Jack the Miller" and "Jack the
+Carter." "Jack Miller asketh help to turn his
+mill aright. He hath grounden small, small: the
+King's Son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look
+thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the
+post stand with steadfastness. With right and
+with might, with skill and with will; let might
+help right, and skill go before will, and right
+before might, so goeth our mill aright." "Jack
+Carter," ran the companion missive, "prays you
+all that ye make a good end of that ye have
+begun, and do well, and aye better and better:
+for at the even men heareth the day." "Falseness
+and guile," sang Jack Trewman, "have reigned
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-319"></a>2-319]</span>
+
+too long, and truth hath been set under a lock,
+and falseness and guile reigneth in every stock.
+No man may come truth to, but if he sing 'si
+dedero.' True love is away that was so good,
+and clerks for wealth work them woe. God do
+bote, for now is time." In the rude jingle of these
+lines began for England the literature of political
+controversy: they are the first predecessors of
+the pamphlets of Milton and of Burke. Rough as
+they are, they express clearly enough the mingled
+passions which met in the revolt of the peasants:
+their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple
+justice; their scorn of the immorality of the nobles
+and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the
+perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Peasant
+Rising</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the eastern and midland counties the
+restlessness spread to all England south of the
+Thames. But the grounds of discontent varied
+with every district. The actual outbreak began
+on the 5th of June at Dartford, where a tiler
+killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in
+vengeance for a brutal outrage on his daughter.
+The county at once rose in arms. Canterbury,
+where "the whole town was of their mind," threw
+open its gates to the insurgents who plundered
+the Archbishop's palace and dragged John Ball
+from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen
+gathered round Walter Tyler of Essex and
+John Hales of Malling to march upon London.
+Their grievance was mainly a political one.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-320"></a>2-320]</span>
+
+Villeinage was unknown in Kent. As the
+peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every
+lawyer who fell into their hands was put to death;
+"not till all these were killed would the land
+enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen
+shouted as they fired the houses of the stewards
+and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the
+flames. But this action can hardly have been due
+to anything more than sympathy with the rest of
+the realm, the sympathy which induced the same
+men when pilgrims from the north brought news
+that John of Gaunt was setting free his bondmen
+to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord
+and King of England. Nor was their grievance a
+religious one. Lollardry can have made little way
+among men whose grudge against the Archbishop
+of Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of
+pilgrimages. Their discontent was simply political;
+they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax
+and better government; their aim was to slay
+the nobles and wealthier clergy, to take the king
+into their own hands, and pass laws which should
+seem good to the Commons of the realm. The
+whole population joined the Kentishmen as they
+marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed
+with fear. The young king--he was but a boy of
+sixteen--addressed them from a boat on the river;
+but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of
+Archbishop Sudbury to allow him to land kindled
+the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason" the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-321"></a>2-321]</span>
+
+great mass rushed on London. On the
+13th of June its gates were flung open by the
+poorer artizans within the city, and the stately
+palace of John of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new
+inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses of
+the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But
+the insurgents, as they proudly boasted, were
+"seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or
+robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off a
+silver vessel from the sack of the Savoy was flung
+with his spoil into the flames. Another body of
+insurgents encamped at the same time to the east
+of the city. In Essex and the eastern counties
+the popular discontent was more social than
+political. The demands of the peasants were that
+bondage should be abolished, that tolls and imposts
+on trade should be done away with, that "no acre
+of land which is held in bondage or villeinage be
+held at higher rate than fourpence a year," in
+other words for a money commutation of all
+villein services. Their rising had been even
+earlier than that of the Kentishmen. Before
+Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the poll-tax
+gathered crowds of peasants together, armed with
+clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal commissioners
+who were sent to repress the tumult
+were driven from the field, and the Essex men
+marched upon London on one side of the river as
+the Kentishmen marched on the other. The
+evening of the thirteenth, the day on which Tyler
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-322"></a>2-322]</span>
+
+entered the city, saw them encamped without its
+walls at Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury
+and the northern heights were occupied by the
+men of Hertfordshire and the villeins of St.
+Albans, where a strife between abbot and town
+had been going on since the days of Edward the
+Second.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard the
+Second</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The royal Council with the young king had
+taken refuge in the Tower, and their aim seems to
+have been to divide the forces of the insurgents.
+On the morning of the fourteenth therefore Richard
+rode from the Tower to Mile-end to meet the Essex
+men. "I am your King and Lord, good people,"
+the boy began with a fearlessness which marked
+his bearing throughout the crisis, "what will
+you?" "We will that you free us for ever,"
+shouted the peasants, "us and our lands; and
+that we be never named nor held for serfs!" "I
+grant it," replied Richard; and he bade them go
+home, pledging himself at once to issue charters of
+freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy welcomed
+the promise. Throughout the day more than
+thirty clerks were busied writing letters of pardon
+and emancipation, and with these the mass of the
+Essex men and the men of Hertfordshire withdrew
+quietly to their homes. But while the king was
+successful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen
+on the councillors he left behind him. Richard
+had hardly quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen
+who had spent the night within the city
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-323"></a>2-323]</span>
+
+appeared at its gates. The general terror was
+shown ludicrously enough when they burst in and
+taking the panic-stricken knights of the royal
+household in rough horse-play by the beard
+promised to be their equals and good comrades in
+the days to come. But the horse-play changed
+into dreadful earnest when they found that
+Richard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery
+of Archbishop Sudbury and other ministers in the
+chapel changed their fury into a cry for blood.
+The Primate was dragged from his sanctuary and
+beheaded. The same vengeance was wreaked on
+the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner for the
+levy of the hated poll-tax, the merchant Richard
+Lyons who had been impeached by the Good
+Parliament. Richard meanwhile had ridden
+round the northern wall of the city to the Wardrobe
+near Blackfriars, and from this new refuge he
+opened his negotiations with the Kentish insurgents.
+Many of these dispersed at the news of
+the king's pledge to the men of Essex, but a body
+of thirty thousand still surrounded Wat Tyler
+when Richard on the morning of the fifteenth
+encountered that leader by a mere chance at
+Smithfield. Hot words passed between his train
+and the peasant chieftain who advanced to confer
+with the king, and a threat from Tyler brought
+on a brief struggle in which the Mayor of London,
+William Walworth, struck him with his dagger to
+the ground.  "Kill! kill!" shouted the crowd:
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-324"></a>2-324]</span>
+
+"they have slain our captain!" But Richard
+faced the Kentishmen with the same cool courage
+with which he faced the men of Essex. "What
+need ye, my masters?" cried the boy-king as he
+rode boldly up to the front of the bowmen. "I
+am your Captain and your King; follow me!"
+The hopes of the peasants centred in the young
+sovereign; one aim of their rising had been to
+free him from the evil counsellors who, as they
+believed, abused his youth; and at his word they
+followed him with a touching loyalty and trust
+till he entered the Tower. His mother welcomed
+him within its walls with tears of joy. "Rejoice
+and praise God," Richard answered, "for I have
+recovered to-day my heritage which was lost and
+the realm of England!" But he was compelled
+to give the same pledge of freedom to the
+Kentishmen as at Mile-end, and it was only after
+receiving his letters of pardon and emancipation
+that the yeomen dispersed to their homes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The general
+revolt</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The revolt indeed was far from being at an end.
+As the news of the rising ran through the country
+the discontent almost everywhere broke into flame.
+There were outbreaks in every shire south of the
+Thames as far westward as Devonshire. In the
+north tumults broke out at Beverley and
+Scarborough, and Yorkshire and Lancashire made
+ready to rise. The eastern counties were in one
+wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen
+burned the charters of the University and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-325"></a>2-325]</span>
+
+attacked the colleges. A body of peasants occupied
+St. Albans. In Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called
+John the Litster or Dyer, took the title of King
+of the Commons, and marching through the
+country at the head of a mass of peasants compelled
+the nobles whom he captured to act as his
+meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees
+during his repast. The story of St. Edmundsbury
+shows us what was going on in Suffolk. Ever
+since the accession of Edward the Third the
+townsmen and the villeins of their lands around
+had been at war with the abbot and his monks.
+The old and more oppressive servitude had long
+passed away, but the later abbots had set
+themselves against the policy of concession and
+conciliation which had brought about this advance
+towards freedom. The gates of the town were
+still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in
+enforcing his claim to the wardship of all orphans
+born within his domain. From claims such as
+these the town could never feel itself safe so long
+as mysterious charters from Pope or King, interpreted
+cunningly by the wit of the new lawyer
+class, lay stored in the abbey archives. But the
+archives contained other and hardly less formidable
+documents than these. Untroubled by the waste
+of war, the religious houses profited more than any
+other landowners by the general growth of wealth.
+They had become great proprietors, money-lenders
+to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-326"></a>2-326]</span>
+
+they had banished from their land. There were few
+townsmen of St. Edmund's who had not some bonds
+laid up in the abbey registry. In 1327 one band
+of debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment
+of five hundred marks and fifty casks of wine.
+Another company of the wealthier burgesses were
+joint debtors on a bond for ten thousand pounds.
+The new spirit of commercial activity joined with
+the troubles of the time to throw the whole community
+into the abbot's hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Saint
+Edmundsbury</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We can hardly wonder that riots, lawsuits, and
+royal commissions marked the relation of the town
+and abbey under the first two Edwards. Under
+the third came an open conflict. In 1327 the
+townsmen burst into the great house, drove the
+monks into the choir, and dragged them thence to
+the town prison. The abbey itself was sacked;
+chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar frontals,
+the books of the library, the very vats and dishes
+of the kitchen, all disappeared. The monks
+estimated their losses at ten thousand pounds.
+But the townsmen aimed at higher booty than
+this. The monks were brought back from prison
+to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of their
+registry, papal bulls and royal charters, deeds and
+bonds and mortgages, were laid before them.
+Amidst the wild threats of the mob they were
+forced to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of
+a gild to the town as well as of free release to their
+debtors.  Then they were left masters of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-327"></a>2-327]</span>
+
+ruined house. But all control over town or land
+was gone. Through spring and summer no rent
+or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of
+the abbey did not dare to show their faces in the
+streets. News came at last that the abbot was in
+London, appealing for redress to the court, and the
+whole county was at once on fire. A crowd of
+rustics, maddened at the thought of revived claims
+of serfage, of interminable suits of law, poured into
+the streets of the town. From thirty-two of the
+neighbouring villages the priests marched at the
+head of their flocks as on a new crusade. The
+wild mass of men, women, and children, twenty
+thousand in all, as men guessed, rushed again on
+the abbey, and for four November days the work
+of destruction went on unhindered. When gate,
+stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry had
+gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to
+the granges and barns of the abbey farms. Their
+plunder shows what vast agricultural proprietors
+the monks had become. A thousand horses, a
+hundred and twenty plough-oxen, two hundred
+cows, three hundred bullocks, three hundred hogs,
+ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges
+and barns burned to the ground. It was judged
+afterwards that sixty thousand pounds would
+hardly cover the loss.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weak as was the government of Mortimer and
+Isabella, the appeal of the abbot against this outrage
+was promptly heeded. A royal force quelled
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-328"></a>2-328]</span>
+
+the riot, thirty carts full of prisoners were
+despatched to Norwich; twenty-four of the chief
+townsmen with thirty-two of the village priests
+were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack
+on the abbey, and twenty were summarily hanged.
+Nearly two hundred persons remained under
+sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years
+their case dragged on in the King's Courts. At
+last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage.
+Irritated by repeated breaches of promise on the
+abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as
+he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and
+bound him, and carried him off to London. There
+he was hurried from street to street lest his hiding-place
+should be detected till opportunity offered
+for shipping him off to Brabant. The Primate and
+the Pope levelled their excommunications against
+the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at
+last discovered and brought home it was probably
+with some pledge of the arrangement which
+followed in 1332. The enormous damages
+assessed by the royal justices were remitted, the
+outlawry of the townsmen was reversed, the
+prisoners were released. On the other hand the
+deeds which had been stolen were again replaced
+in the archives of the abbey, and the charters
+which had been extorted from the monks were
+formally cancelled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">St. Edmundsbury
+in 1381</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained
+crushed by their failure, and throughout the reign
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-329"></a>2-329]</span>
+
+of Edward the Third the oppression against which
+they had risen went on without a check. It was
+no longer the rough blow of sheer force; it was
+the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the
+law. At Richard's accession Prior John of Cambridge
+in the vacancy of the abbot was in charge
+of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all
+the arts of his day. In sweetness of voice, in
+knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists pronounced
+him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet
+more illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure
+to us, the Breton Belgabred. John was "industrious
+and subtle," and subtlety and industry found
+their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses
+and farmers around him. "Faithfully he strove,"
+says the monastic chronicler, "with the villeins of
+Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen
+he owned specially as his "adversaries," but it was
+the rustics who were to show what a hate he had
+won. On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat
+Tyler's fall, the howl of a great multitude round
+his manor-house at Mildenhall broke roughly on
+the chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly,
+but he was betrayed by his own servants, judged
+in rude mockery of the law by villein and
+bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay
+naked in the open field while the mob poured
+unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's head
+on a lance before them through the streets, the
+frenzied throng at last reached the gallows where
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-330"></a>2-330]</span>
+
+the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John
+Cavendish, was already impaled; and pressing the
+cold lips together in mockery of their friendship
+set them side by side. Another head soon joined
+them. The abbey gates were burst open, and the
+cloister filled with a maddened crowd, howling for
+a new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of
+the barony. Few knew him as he stood among the
+group of trembling monks, but he courted death
+with a contemptuous courage. "I am the man
+you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a
+minute, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! Monk!
+Traitor!" he was swept to the gallows, and his
+head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd
+rolled back again to the abbey gate, and
+summoned the monks before them. They told
+them that now for a long time they had oppressed
+their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore
+they willed that in the sight of the Commons they
+should forthwith surrender their bonds and
+charters. The monks brought the parchments to
+the market-place; many which were demanded
+they swore they could not find. A compromise
+was at last patched up; and it was agreed that
+the charters should be surrendered till the future
+abbot should confirm the liberties of the town.
+Then, unable to do more, the crowd ebbed away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Close of the
+rising</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A scene less violent, but even more picturesque,
+went on the same day at St. Albans. William
+Grindecobbe, the leader of its townsmen, returned
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-331"></a>2-331]</span>
+
+with one of the charters of emancipation which
+Richard had granted after his interview at Mile-end
+to the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, and
+breaking into the abbey precincts at the head of
+the burghers, forced the abbot to deliver up the
+charters which bound the town in bondage to his
+house. But a more striking proof of servitude
+than any charters could give remained in the millstones
+which after a long suit at law had been adjudged
+to the abbey and placed within its cloister
+as a triumphant witness that no townsman might
+grind corn within the domain of the abbey save at
+the abbot's mill. Bursting into the cloister, the
+burghers now tore the mill-stones from the floor,
+and broke them into small pieces, "like blessed
+bread in church," which each might carry off to
+show something of the day when their freedom
+was won again. But it was hardly won when it
+was lost anew. The quiet withdrawal and dispersion
+of the peasant armies with their charters of
+emancipation gave courage to the nobles. Their
+panic passed away. The warlike Bishop of Norwich
+fell lance in hand on Litster's camp, and
+scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock.
+Richard with an army of forty thousand men
+marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and
+spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions.
+At Waltham he was met by the display of his own
+recent charters and a protest from the Essex men
+that "they were so far as freedom went the peers
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-332"></a>2-332]</span>
+
+of their lords." But they were to learn the worth
+of a king's word. "Villeins you were," answered
+Richard, "and villeins you are. In bondage you
+shall abide, and that not your old bondage, but a
+worse!" The stubborn resistance which he met
+showed that the temper of the people was not
+easily broken. The villagers of Billericay threw
+themselves into the woods and fought two hard
+fights before they were reduced to submission. It
+was only by threats of death that verdicts of guilty
+could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders
+of the revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe
+was offered his life if he would persuade his
+followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they
+had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely
+to his fellow-townsmen and bade them take no
+thought for his trouble. "If I die," he said, "I
+shall die for the cause of the freedom we have won,
+counting myself happy to end my life by such a
+martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have
+done had I been killed yesterday." But repression
+went pitilessly on, and through the summer and
+the autumn seven thousand men are said to have
+perished on the gallows or the field.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-333"></a>2-333]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk4-Ch4"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4552756"></a>CHAPTER IV</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4552762"></a>RICHARD THE SECOND</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4552768"></a>1381-1400</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Results of
+the Peasant
+Revolt</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terrible as were the measures of repression which
+followed the Peasant Revolt, and violent as was
+the passion of reaction which raged among the
+proprietary classes at its close, the end of the rising
+was in fact secured. The words of Grindecobbe
+ere his death were a prophecy which time fulfilled.
+Cancel charters of manumission as the council
+might, serfage was henceforth a doomed and perishing
+thing. The dread of another outbreak hung
+round the employer. The attempts to bring back
+obsolete services quietly died away. The old process
+of enfranchisement went quietly on. During
+the century and a half which followed the Peasant
+Revolt villeinage died out so rapidly that it became
+a rare and antiquated thing. The class of small
+freeholders sprang fast out of the wreck of it into
+numbers and importance. In twenty years more
+they were in fact recognized as the basis of our
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-334"></a>2-334]</span>
+
+electoral system in every English county. The
+Labour Statutes proved as ineffective as of old in
+enchaining labour or reducing its price. A hundred
+years after the Black Death the wages of an English
+labourer was sufficient to purchase twice the amount
+of the necessaries of life which could have been
+obtained for the wages paid under Edward the
+Third. The incidental descriptions of the life of
+the working classes which we find in Piers Ploughman
+show that this increase of social comfort had
+been going on even during the troubled period
+which preceded the outbreak of the peasants, and
+it went on faster after the revolt was over. But
+inevitable as such a progress was, every step of it
+was taken in the teeth of the wealthier classes.
+Their temper indeed at the close of the rising was
+that of men frenzied by panic and the taste of
+blood. They scouted all notion of concession.
+The stubborn will of the conquered was met by as
+stubborn a will in their conquerors. The royal
+Council showed its sense of the danger of a mere
+policy of resistance by submitting the question of
+enfranchisement to the Parliament which assembled
+in November 1381 with words which suggested a
+compromise. "If you desire to enfranchise and set
+at liberty the said serfs," ran the royal message,
+"by your common assent, as the King has been
+informed that some of you desire, he will consent
+to your prayer." But no thoughts of compromise
+influenced the landowners in their reply.  The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-335"></a>2-335]</span>
+
+king's grant and letters, the Parliament answered
+with perfect truth, were legally null and void:
+their serfs were their goods, and the king could
+not take their goods from them but by their own
+consent. "And this consent," they ended, "we
+have never given and never will give, were we all
+to die in one day." Their temper indeed expressed
+itself in legislation which was a fit sequel to the
+Statutes of Labourers. They forbade the child of
+any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town.
+They prayed the king to ordain "that no bondman
+nor bondwoman shall place their children at school,
+as has been done, so as to advance their children
+in the world by their going into the church." The
+new colleges which were being founded at the
+Universities at this moment closed their gates upon
+villeins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Religious
+reaction</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The panic which produced this frenzied reaction
+against all projects of social reform produced inevitably
+as frenzied a panic of reaction against all
+plans for religious reform. Wyclif had been supported
+by the Lancastrian party till the very eve
+of the Peasant Revolt. But with the rising his
+whole work seemed suddenly undone. The quarrel
+between the baronage and the Church on which
+his political action had as yet been grounded was
+hushed in the presence of a common danger. His
+"poor preachers" were looked upon as missionaries
+of socialism. The friars charged Wyclif with being
+a "sower of strife, who by his serpentlike instigation
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-336"></a>2-336]</span>
+
+had set the serf against his lord," and though
+he tossed back the charge with disdain he had to
+bear a suspicion which was justified by the conduct
+of some of his followers. John Ball, who had
+figured in the front rank of the revolt, was falsely-named
+as one of his adherents, and was alleged to
+have denounced in his last hour the conspiracy of
+the "Wyclifites." Wyclif's most prominent scholar,
+Nicholas Herford, was said to have openly approved
+the brutal murder of Archbishop Sudbury. Whatever
+belief such charges might gain, it is certain
+that from this moment all plans for the reorganization
+of the Church were confounded in the general
+odium which attached to the projects of the peasant
+leaders, and that any hope of ecclesiastical reform
+at the hands of the baronage and the Parliament
+was at an end. But even if the Peasant Revolt
+had not deprived Wyclif of the support of the
+aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto cooperated,
+their alliance must have been dissolved
+by the new theological position which he had already
+taken up. Some months before the outbreak
+of the insurrection he had by one memorable step
+passed from the position of a reformer of the discipline
+and political relations of the Church to that
+of a protester against its cardinal beliefs. If there
+was one doctrine upon which the supremacy of the
+Mediæval Church rested, it was the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation. It was by his exclusive right
+to the performance of the miracle which was
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-337"></a>2-337]</span>
+
+wrought in the mass that the lowliest priest was
+raised high above princes. With the formal denial
+of the doctrine of Transubstantiation which Wyclif
+issued in the spring of 1381 began that great movement
+of religious revolt which ended more than
+a century after in the establishment of religious
+freedom by severing the mass of the Teutonic
+peoples from the general body of the Catholic
+Church. The act was the bolder that he stood
+utterly alone. The University of Oxford, in which
+his influence had been hitherto all-powerful, at
+once condemned him. John of Gaunt enjoined
+him to be silent. Wyclif was presiding as Doctor
+of Divinity over some disputations in the schools
+of the Augustinian Canons when his academical
+condemnation was publicly read, but though
+startled for the moment he at once challenged
+Chancellor or doctor to disprove the conclusions
+at which he had arrived. The prohibition of the
+Duke of Lancaster he met by an open avowal of
+his teaching, a confession which closes proudly
+with the quiet words, "I believe that in the end
+the truth will conquer."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Rise of
+Lollardry</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the moment his courage dispelled the panic
+around him. The University responded to his
+appeal, and by displacing his opponents from office
+tacitly adopted his cause. But Wyclif no longer
+looked for support to the learned or wealthier
+classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He
+appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-338"></a>2-338]</span>
+
+of such a kind in our history, to England at large.
+With an amazing industry he issued tract after
+tract in the tongue of the people itself. The dry,
+syllogistic Latin, the abstruse and involved argument
+which the great doctor had addressed to his
+academic hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and
+by a transition which marks the wonderful genius
+of the man the schoolman was transformed into
+the pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our
+later English poetry, Wyclif is the father of our
+later English prose. The rough, clear, homely
+English of his tracts, the speech of the ploughman
+and the trader of the day though coloured with
+the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its
+literary use as distinctly a creation of his own as
+the style in which he embodied it, the terse
+vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the
+hard antitheses which roused the dullest mind like
+a whip. Once fairly freed from the trammels of
+unquestioning belief, Wyclif's mind worked fast in
+its career of scepticism. Pardons, indulgences,
+absolutions, pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints,
+worship of their images, worship of the saints
+themselves, were successively denied. A formal
+appeal to the Bible as the one ground of faith,
+coupled with an assertion of the right of every
+instructed man to examine the Bible for himself,
+threatened the very groundwork of the older
+dogmatism with ruin. Nor were these daring
+denials confined to the small circle of scholars who
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-339"></a>2-339]</span>
+
+still clung to him. The "Simple Priests" were
+active in the diffusion of their master's doctrines,
+and how rapid their progress must have been we
+may see from the panic-struck exaggerations of
+their opponents. A few years later they complained
+that the followers of Wyclif abounded
+everywhere and in all classes, among the baronage,
+in the cities, among the peasantry of the countryside,
+even in the monastic cell itself. "Every
+second man one meets is a Lollard."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Lollardry at
+Oxford</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lollard," a word which probably means "idle
+babbler," was the nickname of scorn with which
+the orthodox Churchmen chose to insult their
+assailants. But this rapid increase changed their
+scorn into vigorous action. In 1382 Courtenay,
+who had now become Archbishop, summoned a
+council at Blackfriars and formally submitted
+twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif's
+works. An earthquake in the midst of the proceedings
+terrified every prelate but the resolute
+Primate; the expulsion of ill humours from the
+earth, he said, was of good omen for the expulsion
+of ill humours from the Church; and the condemnation
+was pronounced. Then the Archbishop
+turned fiercely upon Oxford as the fount and centre
+of the new heresies. In an English sermon at St.
+Frideswide's Nicholas Herford had asserted the
+truth of Wyclif's doctrines, and Courtenay ordered
+the Chancellor to silence him and his adherents on
+pain of being himself treated as a heretic. The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-340"></a>2-340]</span>
+
+Chancellor fell back on the liberties of the
+University, and appointed as preacher another
+Wyclifite, Repyngdon, who did not hesitate to
+style the Lollards "holy priests," and to affirm that
+they were protected by John of Gaunt. Party
+spirit meanwhile ran high among the students.
+The bulk of them sided with the Lollard leaders,
+and a Carmelite, Peter Stokes, who had procured
+the Archbishop's letters, cowered panic stricken in
+his chamber while the Chancellor, protected by an
+escort of a hundred townsmen, listened approvingly
+to Repyngdon's defiance. "I dare go no further,"
+wrote the poor Friar to the Archbishop, "for fear
+of death"; but he mustered courage at last to
+descend into the schools where Repyngdon was
+now maintaining that the clerical order was
+"better when it was but nine years old than now
+that it has grown to a thousand years and more."
+The appearance however of scholars in arms again
+drove Stokes to fly in despair to Lambeth, while a
+new heretic in open Congregation maintained
+Wyclif's denial of Transubstantiation. "There is
+no idolatry," cried William James, "save in the
+Sacrament of the Altar." "You speak like a wise
+man," replied the Chancellor, Robert Rygge.
+Courtenay however was not the man to bear
+defiance tamely, and his summons to Lambeth
+wrested a submission from Rygge which was only
+accepted on his pledge to suppress the Lollardism
+of the University. "I dare not publish them, on
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-341"></a>2-341]</span>
+
+fear of death," exclaimed the Chancellor when
+Courtenay handed him his letters of condemnation.
+"Then is your University an open <i>fautor</i> of
+heretics," retorted the Primate, "if it suffers not
+the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within its
+bounds." The royal Council supported the Archbishop's
+injunction, but the publication of the
+decrees at once set Oxford on fire. The scholars
+threatened death against the friars, "crying that
+they wished to destroy the University." The
+masters suspended Henry Crump from teaching as
+a troubler of the public peace for calling the
+Lollards "heretics." The Crown however at last
+stepped in to Courtenay's aid, and a royal writ
+ordered the instant banishment of all favourers of
+Wyclif with the seizure and destruction of all
+Lollard books on pain of forfeiture of the University's
+privileges. The threat produced its effect.
+Herford and Repyngdon appealed in vain to John
+of Gaunt for protection; the Duke himself
+denounced them as heretics against the Sacrament
+of the Altar, and after much evasion they were
+forced to make a formal submission. Within
+Oxford itself the suppression of Lollardism was
+complete, but with the death of religious freedom
+all trace of intellectual life suddenly disappears.
+The century which followed the triumph of
+Courtenay is the most barren in its annals, nor
+was the sleep of the University broken till the
+advent of the New Learning restored to it some of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-342"></a>2-342]</span>
+
+the life and liberty which the Primate had so
+roughly trodden out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wyclif's
+Bible</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of
+Wyclif's position as the last of the great schoolmen
+than the reluctance of so bold a man as Courtenay
+even after his triumph over Oxford to take extreme
+measures against the head of Lollardry. Wyclif,
+though summoned, had made no appearance before
+the "Council of the Earthquake." "Pontius
+Pilate and Herod are made friends to-day," was
+his bitter comment on the new union which proved
+to have sprung up between the prelates and the
+monastic orders who had so long been at variance
+with each other; "since they have made a heretic
+of Christ, it is an easy inference for them to count
+simple Christians heretics." He seems indeed to
+have been sick at the moment, but the announcement
+of the final sentence roused him to life again.
+He petitioned the king and Parliament that he
+might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines he
+had put forth, and turning with characteristic
+energy to the attack of his assailants, he asked
+that all religious vows might be suppressed, that
+tithes might be diverted to the maintenance of the
+poor and the clergy maintained by the free alms
+of their flocks, that the Statutes of Provisors and
+Præmunire might be enforced against the Papacy,
+that Churchmen might be declared incapable of
+secular offices, and imprisonment for excommunication
+cease. Finally in the teeth of the council's
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-343"></a>2-343]</span>
+
+condemnation he demanded that the doctrine of
+the Eucharist which he advocated might be freely
+taught. If he appeared in the following year
+before the convocation at Oxford it was to perplex
+his opponents by a display of scholastic logic
+which permitted him to retire without any retractation
+of his sacramental heresy. For the time
+his opponents seemed satisfied with his expulsion
+from the University, but in his retirement at
+Lutterworth he was forging during these troubled
+years the great weapon which, wielded by other
+hands than his own, was to produce so terrible an
+effect on the triumphant hierarchy. An earlier
+translation of the Scriptures, in part of which he
+was aided by his scholar Herford, was being
+revised and brought to the second form which is
+better known as "Wyclif's Bible" when death
+drew near. The appeal of the prelates to Rome
+was answered at last by a Brief ordering him to
+appear at the Papal Court. His failing strength
+exhausted itself in a sarcastic reply which explained
+that his refusal to comply with the summons
+simply sprang from broken health. "I am always
+glad," ran the ironical answer, "to explain my
+faith to any one, and above all to the Bishop of
+Rome; for I take it for granted that if it be
+orthodox he will confirm it, if it be erroneous he
+will correct it. I assume too that as chief Vicar
+of Christ upon earth the Bishop of Rome is of all
+mortal men most bound to the law of Christ's
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-344"></a>2-344]</span>
+
+Gospel, for among the disciples of Christ a majority
+is not reckoned by simply counting heads in the
+fashion of this world, but according to the imitation
+of Christ on either side. Now Christ during His
+life upon earth was of all men the poorest, casting
+from Him all worldly authority. I deduce from
+these premisses as a simple counsel of my own that
+the Pope should surrender all temporal authority
+to the civil power and advise his clergy to do the
+same." The boldness of his words sprang perhaps
+from a knowledge that his end was near. The
+terrible strain on energies enfeebled by age and
+study had at last brought its inevitable result, and
+a stroke of paralysis while Wyclif was hearing
+mass in his parish church of Lutterworth was
+followed on the next day by his death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Lollard
+movement</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The persecution of Courtenay deprived the
+religious reform of its more learned adherents and
+of the support of the Universities. Wyclif's death
+robbed it of its head at a moment when little had
+been done save a work of destruction. From that
+moment Lollardism ceased to be in any sense an
+organized movement and crumbled into a general
+spirit of revolt. All the religious and social discontent
+of the times floated instinctively to this
+new centre. The socialist dreams of the peasantry,
+the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the
+hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords
+towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming
+zealot were blended together in a common
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-345"></a>2-345]</span>
+
+hostility to the Church and a common resolve to
+substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and
+ecclesiastical system. But it was this want of
+organization, this looseness and fluidity of the new
+movement, that made it penetrate through every
+class of society. Women as well as men became
+the preachers of the new sect. Lollardry had its
+own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were
+passed everywhere from hand to hand; scurrilous
+ballads which revived the old attacks of "Golias"
+in the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury
+of the clergy were sung at every corner. Nobles
+like the Earl of Salisbury and at a later time Sir
+John Oldcastle placed themselves openly at the
+head of the cause and threw open their gates as a
+refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred
+of the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and defended
+a Lollard preacher who ventured to advocate the
+new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul's. One
+of its mayors, John of Northampton, showed the
+influence of the new morality by the Puritan spirit
+in which he dealt with the morals of the city.
+Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of
+the clergy who connived for money at every kind
+of debauchery, he arrested the loose women, cut
+off their hair, and carted them through the streets
+as objects of public scorn. But the moral spirit
+of the new movement, though infinitely its grander
+side, was less dangerous to the Church than its
+open repudiation of the older doctrines and systems
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-346"></a>2-346]</span>
+
+of Christendom. Out of the floating mass of
+opinion which bore the name of Lollardry one faith
+gradually evolved itself, a faith in the sole authority
+of the Bible as a source of religious truth. The
+translation of Wyclif did its work. Scripture,
+complains a canon of Leicester, "became a vulgar
+thing, and more open to lay folk and women that
+knew how to read than it is wont to be to clerks
+themselves." Consequences which Wyclif had
+perhaps shrunk from drawing were boldly drawn
+by his disciples. The Church was declared to
+have become apostate, its priesthood was denounced
+as no priesthood, its sacraments as idolatry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Lollardry
+and the
+Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in vain that the clergy attempted to
+stifle the new movement by their old weapon of
+persecution. The jealousy entertained by the
+baronage and gentry of every pretension of the
+Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make
+persecution effective. At the moment of the
+Peasant Revolt Courtenay procured the enactment
+of a statute which commissioned the sheriffs to
+seize all persons convicted before the bishops of
+preaching heresy. But the statute was repealed
+in the next session, and the Commons added to
+the bitterness of the blow by their protest that
+they considered it "in nowise their interest to be
+more under the jurisdiction of the prelates or
+more bound by them than their ancestors had
+been in times past." Heresy indeed was still a
+felony by the common law, and if as yet we meet
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-347"></a>2-347]</span>
+
+with no instances of the punishment of heretics by
+the fire it was because the threat of such a death
+was commonly followed by the recantation of the
+Lollard. But the restriction of each bishop's
+jurisdiction within the limits of his own diocese
+made it impossible to arrest the wandering
+preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil
+punishment--even if it had been sanctioned by
+public opinion--seems to have long fallen into
+desuetude. Experience proved to the prelates
+that few sheriffs would arrest on the mere warrant
+of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no royal court
+would issue the writ "for the burning of a heretic"
+on a bishop's requisition. But powerless as the
+efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression,
+they were effective in rousing the temper of
+the Lollards into a bitter fanaticism. The heretics
+delighted in outraging the religious sense of their
+day. One Lollard gentleman took home the
+sacramental wafer and lunched on it with wine
+and oysters. Another flung some images of the
+saints into his cellar. The Lollard preachers
+stirred up riots by the virulence of their preaching
+against the friars. But they directed even fiercer
+invectives against the wealth and secularity of the
+great Churchmen. In a formal petition which was
+laid before Parliament in 1395 they mingled
+denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an
+open profession of disbelief in transubstantiation,
+priesthood, pilgrimages, and image-worship, and a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-348"></a>2-348]</span>
+
+demand, which illustrates the strange medley of
+opinions which jostled together in the new movement,
+that war might be declared unchristian and
+that trades such as those of the goldsmith or the
+armourer, which were contrary to apostolical
+poverty, might be banished from the realm. They
+contended (and it is remarkable that a Parliament
+of the next reign adopted the statement) that from
+the superfluous revenues of the Church, if once
+they were applied to purposes of general utility,
+the king might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen
+hundred knights, and six thousand squires, besides
+endowing a hundred hospitals for the relief of the
+poor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Disasters of
+the War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The distress of the landowners, the general
+disorganization of the country, in every part of
+which bands of marauders were openly defying
+the law, the panic of the Church and of society
+at large as the projects of the Lollards shaped
+themselves into more daring and revolutionary
+forms, added a fresh keenness to the national
+discontent at the languid and inefficient prosecution
+of the war. The junction of the French and
+Spanish fleets had made them masters of the seas,
+and what fragments were left of Guienne lay at
+their mercy. The royal Council strove to detach
+the House of Luxemburg from, the French alliance
+by winning for Richard the hand of Anne, a
+daughter of the late Emperor Charles the Fourth
+who had fled at Crécy, and sister of King Wenzel
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-349"></a>2-349]</span>
+
+of Bohemia who was now king of the Romans.
+But the marriage remained without political
+result, save that the Lollard books which were
+sent into their native country by the Bohemian
+servants of the new queen stirred the preaching of
+John Huss and the Hussite wars. Nor was
+English policy more successful in Flanders.
+Under Philip van Arteveldt, the son of the leader
+of 1345, the Flemish towns again sought the
+friendship of England against France, but at the
+close of 1382 the towns were defeated and their
+leader slain in the great French victory of Rosbecque.
+An expedition to Flanders in the
+following year under the warlike Bishop of
+Norwich turned out a mere plunder-raid and ended
+in utter failure. A short truce only gave France
+the leisure to prepare a counter-blow by the
+despatch of a small but well-equipped force under
+John de Vienne to Scotland in 1385. Thirty
+thousand Scots joined in the advance of this force
+over the border: and though northern England
+rose with a desperate effort and an English army
+penetrated as far as Edinburgh in the hope of
+bringing the foe to battle, it was forced to fall
+back without an encounter. Meanwhile France
+dealt a more terrible blow in the reduction of
+Ghent. The one remaining market for English
+commerce was thus closed up, while the forces
+which should have been employed in saving Ghent
+and in the protection of the English shores against
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-350"></a>2-350]</span>
+
+the threat of invasion were squandered by John
+of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone
+the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary
+crown which he claimed in his wife's right. The
+enterprise showed that the Duke had now
+abandoned the hope of directing affairs at home
+and was seeking a new sphere of activity abroad.
+To drive him from the realm had been from the
+close of the Peasant Revolt the steady purpose of
+the councillors who now surrounded the young
+king, of his favourite Robert de Vere and his
+Chancellor Michael de la Pole, who was raised in
+1385 to the Earldom of Suffolk. The Duke's
+friends were expelled from office; John of
+Northampton, the head of his adherents among the
+Commons, was thrown into prison; the Duke
+himself was charged with treason and threatened
+with arrest. In 1386 John of Gaunt abandoned
+the struggle and sailed for Spain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Temper of
+the Court</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard himself took part in these measures
+against the Duke. He was now twenty, handsome
+and golden-haired, with a temper capable of great
+actions and sudden bursts of energy but indolent
+and unequal. The conception of kingship in
+which he had been reared made him regard the
+constitutional advance which had gone on during
+the war as an invasion of the rights of his Crown.
+He looked on the nomination of the royal Council
+and the great officers of state by the two Houses
+or the supervision of the royal expenditure by the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-351"></a>2-351]</span>
+
+Commons as Infringements on the prerogative
+which only the pressure of the war and the weakness
+of a minority had forced the Crown to bow
+to. The judgement of his councillors was one
+with that of the king. Vere was no mere royal
+favourite; he was a great noble and of ancient
+lineage. Michael de la Pole was a man of large
+fortune and an old servant of the Crown; he had
+taken part in the war for thirty years, and had
+been admiral and captain of Calais. But neither
+were men to counsel the young king wisely in his
+effort to obtain independence at once of Parliament
+and of the great nobles. His first aim had been
+to break the pressure of the royal house itself, and
+in his encounter with John of Gaunt he had
+proved successful. But the departure of the Duke
+of Lancaster only called to the front his brother
+and his son. Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of
+Gloucester, had inherited much of the lands and
+the influence of the old house of Bohun. Round
+Henry, Earl of Derby, the son of John of Gaunt
+by Blanche of Lancaster, the old Lancastrian party
+of constitutional opposition was once more forming
+itself. The favour shown to the followers of
+Wyclif at the Court threw on the side of this new
+opposition the bulk of the bishops and Churchmen.
+Richard himself showed no sympathy with the
+Lollards, but the action of her Bohemian servants
+shows the tendencies of his queen. Three
+members of the royal Council were patrons of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-352"></a>2-352]</span>
+
+Lollards, and the Earl of Salisbury, a favourite
+with the king, was their avowed head. The
+Commons displayed no hostility to the Lollards
+nor any zeal for the Church; but the lukewarm
+prosecution of the war, the profuse expenditure of
+the Court, and above all the manifest will of the
+king to free himself from Parliamentary control,
+estranged the Lower House. Richard's haughty
+words told their own tale. When the Parliament
+of 1385 called for an enquiry every year into the
+royal household, the king replied he would enquire
+when he pleased. When it prayed to know the
+names of the officers of state, he answered that he
+would change them at his will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Lords
+Appellant</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The burthen of such answers and of the policy
+they revealed fell on the royal councillors, and the
+departure of John of Gaunt forced the new
+opposition into vigorous action. The Parliament
+of 1386 called for the removal of Suffolk. Richard
+replied that he would not for such a prayer
+dismiss a turnspit of his kitchen. The Duke of
+Gloucester and Bishop Arundel of Ely were sent
+by the Houses as their envoys, and warned the
+king that should a ruler refuse to govern with the
+advice of his lords and by mad counsels work out
+his private purposes it was lawful to depose him.
+The threat secured Suffolk's removal; he was
+impeached for corruption and maladministration,
+and condemned to forfeiture and imprisonment.
+It was only by submitting to the nomination of a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-353"></a>2-353]</span>
+
+Continual Council, with the Duke of Gloucester at
+its head, that Richard could obtain a grant of
+subsidies. But the Houses were no sooner broken
+up than Suffolk was released, and in 1387 the
+young king rode through the country calling on
+the sheriffs to raise men against the barons, and
+bidding them suffer no knight of the shire to be
+returned for the next Parliament "save one whom
+the King and his Council chose." The general ill-will
+foiled both his efforts: and he was forced to
+take refuge in an opinion of five of the judges
+that the Continual Council was unlawful, the
+sentence on Suffolk erroneous, and that the Lords
+and Commons had no power to remove a king's
+servant. Gloucester answered the challenge by
+taking up arms, and a general refusal to fight for
+the king forced Richard once more to yield. A
+terrible vengeance was taken on his supporters in
+the recent schemes. In the Parliament of 1388
+Gloucester, with the four Earls of Derby, Arundel,
+Warwick, and Nottingham, appealed on a charge
+of high treason Suffolk and De Vere, the Archbishop
+of York, the Chief Justice Tresilian, and
+Sir Nicholas Bramber. The first two fled, Suffolk
+to France, De Vere after a skirmish at Radcot
+Bridge to Ireland; but the Archbishop was
+deprived of his see, Bramber beheaded, and
+Tresilian hanged. The five judges were banished,
+and Sir Simon Burley with three other members
+of the royal household sent to the block.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-354"></a>2-354]</span>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard's
+Rule</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the prayer of the "Wonderful Parliament,"
+as some called this assembly, or as others with
+more justice "The Merciless Parliament," it was
+provided that all officers of state should henceforth
+be named in Parliament or by the Continual
+Council. Gloucester remained at the head of the
+latter body, but his power lasted hardly a year.
+In May 1389 Richard found himself strong enough
+to break down the government by a word. Entering
+the Council he suddenly asked his uncle how old
+he was. "Your highness," answered Gloucester,
+"is in your twenty-fourth year!" "Then I am
+old enough to manage my own affairs," said
+Richard coolly; "I have been longer under
+guardianship than any ward in my realm. I
+thank you for your past services, my lords, but I
+need them no more." The resolution was welcomed
+by the whole country; and Richard justified
+the country's hopes by wielding his new power
+with singular wisdom and success. He refused to
+recall De Vere or the five judges. The intercession
+of John of Gaunt on his return from Spain brought
+about a full reconciliation with the Lords Appellant.
+A truce was concluded with France, and its renewal
+year after year enabled the king to lighten the
+burthen of taxation. Richard announced his
+purpose to govern by advice of Parliament; he
+soon restored the Lords Appellant to his Council,
+and committed the chief offices of state to great
+Churchmen like Wykeham and Arundel. A series
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-355"></a>2-355]</span>
+
+of statutes showed the activity of the Houses. A
+Statute of Provisors which re-enacted those of
+Edward the Third was passed in 1390; the Statute
+of Præmunire, which punished the obtaining of
+bulls or other instruments from Rome with forfeiture,
+in 1393. The lords were bridled anew by a
+Statute of Maintenance, which forbade their
+violently supporting other men's causes in courts
+of justice, and giving "livery" to a host of retainers.
+The Statute of Uses in 1391, which rendered
+illegal the devices which had been invented to
+frustrate that of Mortmain, showed the same
+resolve to deal firmly with the Church. A reform
+of the staple and other mercantile enactments
+proved the king's care for trade. Throughout
+the legislation of these eight years we see the same
+tone of coolness and moderation. Eager as he was
+to win the good-will of the Parliament and the
+Church, Richard refused to bow to the panic of
+the landowners or to second the persecution of the
+priesthood. The demands of the Parliament that
+education should be denied to the sons of villeins
+was refused. Lollardry as a social danger was
+held firmly at bay, and in 1387 the king ordered
+Lollard books to be seized and brought before the
+Council. But the royal officers showed little zeal
+in aiding the bishops to seize or punish the heretical
+teachers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">French and
+English</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in the period of peace which was won
+for the country by the wisdom and decision of its
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-356"></a>2-356]</span>
+
+young king that England listened to the voice of
+her first great singer. The work of Chaucer
+marks the final settlement of the English tongue.
+The close of the great movement towards national
+unity which had been going on ever since the
+Conquest was shown in the middle of the fourteenth
+century by the disuse, even amongst the nobler
+classes, of the French tongue. In spite of the
+efforts of the grammar schools and of the strength
+of fashion English won its way throughout the
+reign of Edward the Third to its final triumph in
+that of his grandson. It was ordered to be used
+in courts of law in 1362 "because the French
+tongue is much unknown," and in the following
+year it was employed by the Chancellor in opening
+Parliament. Bishops began to preach in English,
+and the English tracts of Wyclif made it once
+more a literary tongue. We see the general
+advance in two passages from writers of Edward's
+and Richard's reigns. "Children in school," says
+Higden, a writer of the first period, "against the
+usage and manner of all other nations be compelled
+for to leave their own language and for to construe
+their lessons and their things in French, and so
+they have since the Normans first came into
+England. Also gentlemen's children be taught for
+to speak French from the time that they be rocked
+in their cradle, and know how to speak and play
+with a child's toy; and uplandish (or country)
+men will liken themselves to gentlemen, and strive
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-357"></a>2-357]</span>
+
+with, great busyness to speak French for to be more
+told of." "This manner," adds John of Trevisa,
+Higden's translator in Richard's time, "was much
+used before the first murrain (the Black Death of
+1349), and is since somewhat changed. For John
+Cornwal, a master of grammar, changed the lore
+in grammar school and construing of French into
+English; and Richard Pencrych learned this
+manner of teaching of him, as other men did of
+Pencrych. So that now, the year of our Lord
+1385 and of the second King Richard after the
+Conquest nine, in all the grammar schools of
+England children leaveth French, and construeth
+and learneth in English. Also gentlemen have
+now much left for to teach their children French."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Chaucer</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This drift towards a general use of the national
+tongue told powerfully on literature. The influence
+of the French romances everywhere tended to
+make French the one literary language at the
+opening of the fourteenth century, and in England
+this influence had been backed by the French tone
+of the court of Henry the Third and the three
+Edwards. But at the close of the reign of Edward
+the Third the long French romances needed to be
+translated even for knightly hearers. "Let clerks
+indite in Latin," says the author of the "Testament
+of Love," "and let Frenchmen in their French
+also indite their quaint terms, for it is kindly to
+their mouths; and let us show our fantasies in
+such wordes as we learned of our mother's tongue."
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-358"></a>2-358]</span>
+
+But the new national life afforded nobler materials
+than "fantasies" now for English literature. With
+the completion of the work of national unity had
+come the completion of the work of national
+freedom. The vigour of English life showed itself
+in the wide extension of commerce, in the progress
+of the towns, and the upgrowth of a free yeomanry.
+It gave even nobler signs of its activity in the
+spirit of national independence and moral earnestness
+which awoke at the call of Wyclif. New
+forces of thought and feeling which were destined
+to tell on every age of our later history broke
+their way through the crust of feudalism in the
+socialist revolt of the Lollards, and a sudden burst
+of military glory threw its glamour over the age
+of Crécy and Poitiers. It is this new gladness of
+a great people which utters itself in the verse of
+Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was born about 1340,
+the son of a London vintner who lived in Thames
+Street; and it was in London that the bulk of his
+life was spent. His family, though not noble,
+seems to have been of some importance, for from
+the opening of his career we find Chaucer in close
+connexion with the Court. At sixteen he was
+made page to the wife of Lionel of Clarence; at
+nineteen he first bore arms in the campaign of
+1359. But he was luckless enough to be made
+prisoner; and from the time of his release after
+the treaty of Brétigny he took no further share in
+the military enterprises of his time. He seems
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-359"></a>2-359]</span>
+
+again to have returned to service about the Court,
+and it was now that his first poems made their
+appearance, the "Compleynte to Pity" in 1368,
+and in 1369 the "Death of Blanch the Duchesse,"
+the wife of John of Gaunt who from this time at
+least may be looked upon as his patron. It may
+have been to John's influence that he owed his
+employment in seven diplomatic missions which
+were probably connected with the financial straits
+of the Crown. Three of these, in 1372, 1374, and
+1378, carried him to Italy. He visited Genoa and
+the brilliant court of the Visconti at Milan; at
+Florence, where the memory of Dante, the "great
+master" whom he commemorates so reverently in
+his verse, was still living, he may have met
+Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of Oxenford,
+he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from
+the lips of Petrarca.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">His Early
+Poems</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was these visits to Italy which gave us the
+Chaucer whom we know. From that hour his
+work stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic
+literature from the heart of which it sprang. The
+long French romances were the product of an age
+of wealth and ease, of indolent curiosity, of a
+fanciful and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the
+great passions which gave life to the Middle Ages,
+that of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into
+the conceits of Mariolatry, that of war into the
+extravagances of Chivalry. Love indeed remained;
+it was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur;
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-360"></a>2-360]</span>
+
+but it was a love of refinement, of romantic follies,
+of scholastic discussions, of sensuous enjoyment--a
+plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to
+reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of
+the minstrel moved through a perpetual May-time;
+the grass was ever green; the music of the lark
+and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket.
+There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious,
+moral, or reflective in man's life: life was too
+amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental,
+too full of interest and gaiety and chat. It was an
+age of talk: "mirth is none," says Chaucer's host,
+"to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and
+the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most
+agreeable talker of his day. His romances, his
+rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose,
+are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail,
+but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their
+very length, the minuteness of their description of
+outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it
+passes to the subtler inner world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was with this literature that Chaucer had till
+now been familiar, and it was this which he
+followed in his earlier work. But from the time
+of his visits to Milan and Genoa his sympathies
+drew him not to the dying verse of France but
+to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry in
+Italy. Dante's eagle looks at him from the sun.
+"Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him
+one "whose rethorique sweete enlumyned al Itail
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-361"></a>2-361]</span>
+
+of poetrie." The "Troilus" which he produced
+about 1382 is an enlarged English version of
+Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; the Knight's Tale, whose
+first draft is of the same period, bears slight traces
+of his Teseide. It was indeed the "Decameron"
+which suggested the very form of the "Canterbury
+Tales," the earliest of which, such as those of the
+Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress,
+the Franklin, and the Squire, may probably be
+referred like the Parliament of Foules and the
+House of Fame to this time of Chaucer's life. But
+even while changing, as it were, the front of
+English poetry Chaucer preserves his own distinct
+personality. If he quizzes in the rime of Sir
+Thopaz the wearisome idleness of the French
+romance he retains all that was worth retaining of
+the French temper, its rapidity and agility of
+movement, its lightness and brilliancy of touch,
+its airy mockery, its gaiety and good humour, its
+critical coolness and self-control. The French wit
+quickens in him more than in any English writer
+the sturdy sense and shrewdness of our national
+disposition, corrects its extravagance, and relieves
+its somewhat ponderous morality. If on the other
+hand he echoes the joyous carelessness of the
+Italian tale, he tempers it with the English
+seriousness. As he follows Boccaccio all his
+changes are on the side of purity; and when the
+Troilus of the Florentine ends with the old sneer
+at the changeableness of woman Chaucer bids us
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-362"></a>2-362]</span>
+
+"look Godward," and dwells on the unchangeableness
+of Heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Canterbury
+Tales</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The genius of Chaucer however was neither
+French nor Italian, whatever element it might
+borrow from either literature, but English to the
+core; and from the year 1384 all trace of foreign
+influence dies away. Chaucer had now reached
+the climax of his poetic power. He was a busy,
+practical worker, Comptroller of the Customs in
+1374, of the Petty Customs in 1382, a member of
+the Commons in the Parliament of 1386. The
+fall of the Duke of Lancaster from power may
+have deprived him of employment for a time, but
+from 1389 to 1391 he was Clerk of the Royal
+Works, busy with repairs and building at Westminster,
+Windsor, and the Tower. His air indeed
+was that of a student rather than of a man of the
+world. A single portrait has preserved for us his
+forked beard, his dark-coloured dress, the knife
+and pen-case at his girdle, and we may supplement
+this portrait by a few vivid touches of his own.
+The sly, elvish face, the quick walk, the plump
+figure and portly waist were those of a genial and
+humorous man; but men jested at his silence, his
+abstraction, his love of study. "Thou lookest as
+thou wouldest find an hare," laughs the host, "and
+ever on the ground I see thee stare." He heard
+little of his neighbours' talk when office work in
+Thames Street was over. "Thou goest home to
+thy own house anon, and also dumb as any stone
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-363"></a>2-363]</span>
+
+thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy
+look, and livest thus as an heremite, although,"
+he adds slyly, "thy abstinence is lite," or little.
+But of this seeming abstraction from the world
+about him there is not a trace in Chaucer's verse.
+We see there how keen his observation was, how
+vivid and intense his sympathy with nature and
+the men among whom he moved. "Farewell, my
+book," he cried as spring came after winter and
+the lark's song roused him at dawn to spend hours
+gazing alone on the daisy whose beauty he sang.
+But field and stream and flower and bird, much as
+he loved them, were less to him than man. No
+poetry was over more human than Chaucer's, none
+ever came more frankly and genially home to men
+than his "Canterbury Tales."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the continuation and revision of this
+work which mainly occupied him during the years
+from 1384 to 1391. Its best stories, those of the
+Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the
+Merchant, the Friar, the Nun, the Priest, and the
+Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as well as
+the Prologue. The framework which Chaucer
+chose--that of a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury--not
+only enabled him to string these tales
+together, but lent itself admirably to the peculiar
+characteristics of his poetic temper, his dramatic
+versatility and the universality of his sympathy.
+His tales cover the whole field of mediæval poetry;
+the legend of the priest, the knightly romance,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-364"></a>2-364]</span>
+
+the wonder-tale of the traveller, the broad humour
+of the fabliau, allegory and apologue, all are there.
+He finds a yet wider scope for his genius in the
+persons who tell these stories, the thirty pilgrims
+who start in the May morning from the Tabard in
+Southwark--thirty distinct figures, representatives
+of every class of English society from the noble to
+the ploughman. We see the "verray perfight
+gentil knight" in cassock and coat of mail, with
+his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as the
+May morning, and behind them the brown-faced
+yeoman in his coat and hood of green with a
+mighty bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics
+light up for us the mediaeval church--the brawny
+hunt-loving monk, whose bridle jingles as loud and
+clear as the chapel-bell--the wanton friar, first
+among the beggars and harpers of the country-side--the
+poor parson, threadbare, learned, and devout,
+("Christ's lore and his apostles twelve he taught,
+and first he followed it himself")--the summoner
+with his fiery face--the pardoner with his wallet
+"bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"--the
+lively prioress with her courtly French lisp,
+her soft little red mouth, and "Amor vincit omnia"
+graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the
+portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with
+the profits of the pestilence--the busy serjeant-of-law,
+"that ever seemed busier than he was"--the
+hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his love of
+books and short sharp sentences that disguise a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-365"></a>2-365]</span>
+
+latent tenderness which breaks out at last in the
+story of Griseldis. Around them crowd types of
+English industry: the merchant; the franklin in
+whose house "it snowed of meat and drink"; the
+sailor fresh from frays in the Channel; the buxom
+wife of Bath; the broad-shouldered miller; the
+haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer, tapestry-maker,
+each in the livery of his craft; and last the
+honest ploughman who would dyke and delve for
+the poor without hire. It is the first time in
+English poetry that we are brought face to face
+not with characters or allegories or reminiscences
+of the past, but with living and breathing men,
+men distinct in temper and sentiment as in face or
+costume or mode of speech; and with this distinctness
+of each maintained throughout the story
+by a thousand shades of expression and action. It
+is the first time, too, that we meet with the dramatic
+power which not only creates each character
+but combines it with its fellows, which not only
+adjusts each tale or jest to the temper of the
+person who utters it but fuses all into a poetic
+unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its
+complexity, which surrounds us in the "Canterbury
+Tales." In some of the stories indeed, which were
+composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the
+tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the
+schoolman; but taken as a whole the poem is the
+work not of a man of letters but of a man of
+action.  Chaucer has received his training from
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-366"></a>2-366]</span>
+
+war, courts, business, travel--a training not of
+books but of life. And it is life that he loves--the
+delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its
+farce, its laughter and its tears, the tenderness of
+its Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of the
+miller and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart,
+this wide tolerance, which enables him to reflect man
+for us as none but Shakspere has ever reflected
+him, and to do this with a pathos, a shrewd sense
+and kindly humour, a freshness and joyousness
+of feeling, that even Shakspere has not surpassed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The French
+Marriage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last ten years of Chaucer's life saw a few
+more tales added to the Pilgrimage and a few
+poems to his work; but his power was lessening,
+and in 1400 he rested from his labours in his last
+home, a house in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel
+at Westminster. His body rests within the Abbey
+church. It was strange that such a voice should
+have awakened no echo in the singers that follow,
+but the first burst of English song died as suddenly
+in Chaucer as the hope and glory of his age. He
+died indeed at the moment of a revolution which
+was the prelude to years of national discord and
+national suffering. Whatever may have been the
+grounds of his action, the rule of Richard the
+Second after his assumption of power had shown
+his capacity for self-restraint. Parted by his own
+will from the counsellors of his youth, calling to
+his service the Lords Appellant, reconciled alike
+with the baronage and the Parliament, the young
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-367"></a>2-367]</span>
+
+king promised to be among the noblest and wisest
+rulers that England had seen. But the violent
+and haughty temper which underlay this self-command
+showed itself from time to time. The
+Earl of Arundel and his brother the bishop stood
+in the front rank of the party which had coerced
+Richard in his early days; their influence was
+great in the new government. But a strife between
+the Earl and John of Gaunt revived the
+king's resentment at the past action of this house;
+and at the funeral of Anne of Bohemia in 1394 a
+fancied slight roused Richard to a burst of passion.
+He struck the Earl so violently that the blow drew
+blood. But the quarrel was patched up, and the
+reconciliation was followed by the elevation of
+Bishop Arundel to the vacant Primacy in 1396.
+In the preceding year Richard had crossed to
+Ireland and in a short autumn campaign reduced
+its native chiefs again to submission. Fears of
+Lollard disturbances soon recalled him, but these
+died at the king's presence, and Richard was able
+to devote himself to the negotiation of a marriage
+which was to be the turning-point of his reign.
+His policy throughout the recent years had been a
+policy of peace. It was war which rendered the
+Crown helpless before the Parliament, and peace
+was needful if the work of constant progress was
+not to be undone. But the short truces, renewed
+from time to time, which he had as yet secured
+were insufficient for this purpose, for so long as
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-368"></a>2-368]</span>
+
+war might break out in the coming year the king
+hands were tied. The impossibility of renouncing
+the claim to the French crown indeed made a
+formal peace impossible, but its ends might be
+secured by a lengthened truce, and it was with a
+view to this that Richard in 1396 wedded Isabella,
+the daughter of Charles the Sixth of France. The
+bride was a mere child, but she brought with her
+a renewal of the truce for five-and-twenty years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Change of
+Richard's
+temper</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The match was hardly concluded when the veil
+under which Richard had shrouded his real temper
+began to be dropped. His craving for absolute
+power, such as he witnessed in the Court of France,
+was probably intensified from this moment by a
+mental disturbance which gathered strength as the
+months went on. As if to preclude any revival of
+the war Richard had surrendered Cherbourg to
+the king of Navarre and now gave back Brest to
+the Duke of Britanny. He was said to have
+pledged himself at his wedding to restore Calais
+to the king of France. But once freed from all
+danger of such a struggle the whole character of
+his rule seemed to change. His court became as
+crowded and profuse as his grandfather's. Money
+was recklessly borrowed and as recklessly
+squandered. The king's pride became insane,
+and it was fed with dreams of winning the
+Imperial crown through the deposition of Wenzel
+of Bohemia. The councillors with whom he had
+acted since his resumption of authority saw themselves
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-369"></a>2-369]</span>
+
+powerless. John of Gaunt indeed still
+retained influence over the king. It was the
+support of the Duke of Lancaster after his return
+from his Spanish campaign which had enabled
+Richard to hold in check the Duke of Gloucester
+and the party that he led; and the anxiety of the
+young king to retain this support was seen in his
+grant of Aquitaine to his uncle, and in the legitimation
+of the Beauforts, John's children by a mistress,
+Catherine Swinford, whom he married after the
+death of his second wife. The friendship of the
+Duke brought with it the adhesion of one even
+more important, his son Henry, the Earl of Derby.
+As heir through his mother, Blanche of Lancaster,
+to the estates and influence of the Lancastrian
+house, Henry was the natural head of a constitutional
+opposition, and his weight was increased by
+a marriage with the heiress of the house of Bohun.
+He had taken a prominent part in the overthrow
+of Suffolk and De Vere, and on the king's resumption
+of power he had prudently withdrawn from
+the realm on a vow of Crusade, had touched at
+Barbary, visited the Holy Sepulchre, and in 1390
+sailed for Dantzig and taken part in a campaign
+against the heathen Prussians with the Teutonic
+Knights. Since his return he had silently followed
+in his father's track. But the counsels of John of
+Gaunt were hardly wiser than of old; Arundel
+had already denounced his influence as a hurtful
+one; and in the events which were now to hurry
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-370"></a>2-370]</span>
+
+quickly on he seems to have gone hand in hand
+with the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard's
+Tyranny</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A new uneasiness was seen in the Parliament
+of 1397, and the Commons prayed for a redress
+of the profusion of the Court. Richard at once
+seized on the opportunity for a struggle. He
+declared himself grieved that his subjects should
+"take on themselves any ordinance or governance
+of the person of the King or his hostel or of any
+persons of estate whom he might be pleased to
+have in his company." The Commons were at
+once overawed; they owned that the cognizance
+of such matters belonged wholly to the king, and
+gave up to the Duke of Lancaster the name of the
+member, Sir Thomas Haxey, who had brought
+forward this article of their prayer. The lords
+pronounced him a traitor, and his life was only
+saved by the fact that he was a clergyman and by
+the interposition of Archbishop Arundel. The
+Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Gloucester at
+once withdrew from Court. They stood almost
+alone, for of the royal house the Dukes of Lancaster
+and York with their sons the Earls of Derby and
+Rutland were now with the king, and the old
+coadjutor of Gloucester, the Earl of Nottingham,
+was in high favour with him. The Earl of
+Warwick alone joined them, and he was included
+in a charge of conspiracy which was followed by
+the arrest of the three. A fresh Parliament in
+September was packed with royal partizans, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-371"></a>2-371]</span>
+
+Richard moved boldly to his end. The pardons
+of the Lords Appellant were revoked. Archbishop
+Arundel was impeached and banished from the
+realm, he was transferred by the Pope to the See
+of St. Andrews, and the Primacy given to Roger
+Walden. The Earl of Arundel, accused before
+the Peers under John of Gaunt as High Steward,
+was condemned and executed in a single day.
+Warwick, who owned the truth of the charge, was
+condemned to perpetual imprisonment. The Duke
+of Gloucester was saved from a trial by a sudden
+death in his prison at Calais. A new Parliament
+at Shrewsbury in the opening of 1398 completed
+the king's work. In three days it declared null
+the proceedings of the Parliament of 1388, granted
+to the king a subsidy on wool and leather for his
+life, and delegated its authority to a standing
+committee of eighteen members from both Houses
+with power to continue their sittings even after the
+dissolution of the Parliament and to "examine and
+determine all matters and subjects which had been
+moved in the presence of the king with all the
+dependencies thereof."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry of
+Lancaster</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a single year the whole colour of Richard's
+government had changed. He had revenged himself
+on the men who had once held him down, and
+his revenge was hardly taken before he disclosed
+a plan of absolute government. He had used the
+Parliament to strike down the Primate as well as
+the greatest nobles of the realm and to give him
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-372"></a>2-372]</span>
+
+a revenue for life which enabled him to get rid
+of Parliament itself, for the Permanent Committee
+which it named were men devoted, as Richard
+held, to his cause. John of Gaunt was at its
+head, and the rest of its lords were those who
+had backed the king in his blow at Gloucester
+and the Arundels. Two however were excluded.
+In the general distribution of rewards which followed
+Gloucester's overthrow the Earl of Derby
+had been made Duke of Hereford, the Earl of
+Nottingham Duke of Norfolk. But at the close
+of 1397 the two Dukes charged each other with
+treasonable talk as they rode between Brentford
+and London, and the Permanent Committee
+ordered the matter to be settled by a single combat.
+In September 1398 the Dukes entered the
+lists; but Richard forbade the duel, sentenced
+the Duke of Norfolk to banishment for life, and
+Henry of Lancaster to exile for ten years. As
+Henry left London the streets were crowded with
+people weeping for his fate; some followed him
+even to the coast. But his withdrawal removed
+the last check on Richard's despotism. He forced
+from every tenant of the Crown an oath to recognize
+the acts of his Committee as valid, and to
+oppose any attempts to alter or revoke them.
+Forced loans, the sale of charters of pardon to
+Gloucester's adherents, the outlawry of seven
+counties at once on the plea that they had supported
+his enemies and must purchase pardon, a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-373"></a>2-373]</span>
+
+reckless interference with the course of justice,
+roused into new life the old discontent. Even
+this might have been defied had not Richard set
+an able and unscrupulous leader at its head.
+Leave had been given to Henry of Lancaster to
+receive his father's inheritance on the death of
+John of Gaunt, in February 1399. But an ordinance
+of the Continual Committee annulled this
+permission and Richard seized the Lancastrian
+estates. Archbishop Arundel at once saw the
+chance of dealing blow for blow. He hastened
+to Paris and pressed the Duke to return to England,
+telling him how all men there looked for it,
+"especially the Londoners, who loved him a
+hundred times more than they did the king."
+For a while Henry remained buried in thought,
+"leaning on a window overlooking a garden";
+but Arundel's pressure at last prevailed, he made
+his way secretly to Britanny, and with fifteen
+knights set sail from Vannes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Ireland and
+the Pale</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What had really decided him was the opportunity
+offered by Richard's absence from the
+realm. From the opening of his reign the king's
+attention had been constantly drawn to his dependent
+lordship of Ireland. More than two
+hundred years had passed away since the troubles
+which followed the murder of Archbishop Thomas
+forced Henry the Second to leave his work of
+conquest unfinished, and the opportunity for a
+complete reduction of the island which had been
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-374"></a>2-374]</span>
+
+lost then had never returned. When Henry
+quitted Ireland indeed Leinster was wholly in
+English hands, Connaught bowed to a nominal
+acknowledgement of the English overlordship, and
+for a while the work of conquest seemed to go
+steadily on. John de Courcy penetrated into
+Ulster and established himself at Downpatrick;
+and Henry planned the establishment of his
+youngest son, John, as Lord of Ireland. But
+the levity of the young prince, who mocked
+the rude dresses of the native chieftains and
+plucked them in insult by the beard, soon forced
+his father to recall him; and in the continental
+struggle which soon opened on the Angevin kings,
+as in the constitutional struggle within England
+itself which followed it, all serious purpose of
+completing the conquest of Ireland was forgotten.
+Nothing indeed but the feuds and weakness of
+the Irish tribes enabled the adventurers to hold
+the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford,
+Waterford, and Cork, which formed what was
+thenceforth known as "the English Pale." In
+all the history of Ireland no event has proved
+more disastrous than this half-finished conquest.
+Had the Irish driven their invaders into the sea,
+or the English succeeded in the complete reduction
+of the island, the misery of its after ages
+might have been avoided. A struggle such as that
+in which Scotland drove out its conquerors might
+have produced a spirit of patriotism and national
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-375"></a>2-375]</span>
+
+union which would have formed a people out of
+the mass of warring clans. A conquest such as
+that in which the Normans made England their
+own would have spread at any rate the law, the
+order, the civilization of the conquering country
+over the length and breadth of the conquered.
+Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to effect its
+entire deliverance, was strong enough to hold its
+assailants partially at bay. The country was
+broken into two halves whose conflict has never
+ceased. So far from either giving elements of
+civilization or good government to the other,
+conqueror and conquered reaped only degradation
+from the ceaseless conflict. The native tribes lost
+whatever tendency to union or social progress had
+survived the invasion of the Danes. Their barbarism
+was intensified by their hatred of the
+more civilized intruders. But these intruders
+themselves, penned within the narrow limits of
+the Pale, brutalized by a merciless conflict, cut
+off from contact with the refining influences of a
+larger world, sank rapidly to the level of the barbarism
+about them: and the lawlessness, the
+ferocity, the narrowness of feudalism broke out
+unchecked in this horde of adventurers who held
+the land by their sword.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">English and
+Irish</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the first the story of the English Pale
+was a story of degradation and anarchy. It
+needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army
+stormed its strongholds and drove its leading
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-376"></a>2-376]</span>
+
+barons into exile, to preserve even their fealty to
+the English Crown. John divided the Pale into
+counties and ordered the observance of the English
+law; but the departure of his army was the
+signal for a return of the disorder he had trampled
+under foot. Between Englishmen and Irishmen
+went on a ceaseless and pitiless war. Every Irishman
+without the Pale was counted by the English
+settlers an enemy and a robber whose murder
+found no cognizance or punishment at the hands
+of the law. Half the subsistence of the English
+barons was drawn from forays across the border,
+and these forays were avenged by incursions of
+native marauders which carried havoc at times
+to the very walls of Dublin. Within the Pale
+itself the misery was hardly less. The English
+settlers were harried and oppressed by their own
+baronage as much as by the Irish marauders,
+while the feuds of the English lords wasted their
+strength and prevented any effective combination
+either for common conquest or common defence.
+So utter seemed their weakness that Robert Bruce
+saw in it an opportunity for a counter-blow at
+his English assailants, and his victory at Bannockburn
+was followed up by the despatch of a Scotch
+force to Ireland with his brother Edward at its
+head. A general rising of the Irish welcomed this
+deliverer; but the danger drove the barons of the
+Pale to a momentary union, and in 1316 their
+valour was proved on the bloody field of Athenree
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-377"></a>2-377]</span>
+
+by the slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes
+and the almost complete annihilation of the sept
+of the O'Connors. But with victory returned the
+old anarchy and degradation. The barons of the
+Pale sank more and more into Irish chieftains.
+The Fitz-Maurices, who became Earls of Desmond
+and whose vast territory in Minister was erected
+into a County Palatine, adopted the dress and
+manners of the natives around them. The rapid
+growth of this evil was seen in the ruthless provisions
+by which Edward the Third strove to
+check it in his Statute of Kilkenny. The Statute
+forbade the adoption of the Irish language or
+name or dress by any man of English blood: it
+enforced within the Pale the exclusive use of
+English law, and made the use of the native or
+Brehon law, which was gaining ground, an act
+of treason; it made treasonable any marriage of
+the Englishry with persons of Irish race, or
+any adoption of English children by Irish foster-fathers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard in
+Ireland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But stern as they were these provisions proved
+fruitless to check the fusion of the two races,
+while the growing independence of the Lords of
+the Pale threw off all but the semblance of obedience
+to the English government. It was this
+which stirred Richard to a serious effort for the
+conquest and organization of the island. In 1386
+he granted the "entire dominion" of Ireland
+with the title of its Duke to Robert de Vere on
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-378"></a>2-378]</span>
+
+condition of his carrying out its utter reduction.
+But the troubles of the reign soon recalled De
+Vere, and it was not till the truce with France
+had freed his hands that the king again took up
+his projects of conquest. In 1394 he landed with
+an army at Waterford, and received the general
+submission of the native chieftains. But the
+Lords of the Pale held sullenly aloof; and Richard
+had no sooner quitted the island than the Irish in
+turn refused to carry out their promise of quitting
+Leinster, and engaged in a fresh contest with the
+Earl of March, whom the king had proclaimed as
+his heir and left behind him as his lieutenant in
+Ireland. In the summer of 1398 March was
+beaten and slain in battle: and Richard resolved
+to avenge his cousin's death and complete the
+work he had begun by a fresh invasion. He felt
+no apprehension of danger. At home his triumph
+seemed complete. The death of Norfolk, the
+exile of Henry of Lancaster, left the baronage
+without heads for any rising. He ensured, as
+he believed, the loyalty of the great houses by
+the hostages of their blood whom he carried with
+him, at whose head was Henry of Lancaster's son,
+the future Henry the Fifth. The refusal of the
+Percies, the Earl of Northumberland and his son
+Henry Percy or Hotspur, to obey his summons
+might have warned him that danger was brewing
+in the north. Richard however took little heed.
+He banished the Percies, who withdrew into
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-379"></a>2-379]</span>
+
+Scotland; and sailed for Ireland at the end of
+May, leaving his uncle the Duke of York regent
+in his stead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Landing of
+Henry</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The opening of his campaign was indecisive,
+and it was not till fresh reinforcements arrived
+at Dublin that the king could prepare for a march
+into the heart of the island. But while he planned
+the conquest of Ireland the news came that England
+was lost. Little more than a month had
+passed after his departure when Henry of Lancaster
+entered the Humber and landed at Ravenspur.
+He came, he said, to claim his heritage;
+and three of his Yorkshire castles at once threw
+open their gates. The two great houses of the
+north joined him at once. Ralph Neville, the Earl
+of Westmoreland, had married his half-sister; the
+Percies came from their exile over the Scottish
+border. As he pushed quickly to the south all
+resistance broke down. The army which the
+Regent gathered refused to do hurt to the Duke;
+London called him to her gates; and the royal
+Council could only march hastily on Bristol in
+the hope of securing that port for the King's
+return. But the town at once yielded to Henry's
+summons, the Regent submitted to him, and with
+an army which grew at every step the Duke
+marched upon Cheshire, where Richard's adherents
+were gathering in arms to meet the king.
+Contrary winds had for a while kept Richard
+ignorant of his cousin's progress, and even when
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-380"></a>2-380]</span>
+
+the news reached him he was in a web of
+treachery. The Duke of Albemarle, the son of
+the Regent Duke of York, was beside him, and
+at his persuasion the King abandoned his first
+purpose of returning at once, and sent the Earl
+of Salisbury to Conway while he himself waited
+to gather his army and fleet. The six days he
+proposed to gather them in became sixteen, and
+the delay proved fatal to his cause. As no news
+came of Richard the Welshmen who flocked to
+Salisbury's camp dispersed on Henry's advance
+to Chester. Henry was in fact master of the
+realm at the opening of August when Richard at
+last sailed from Waterford and landed at Milford
+Haven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard's
+capture</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every road was blocked, and the news that all
+was lost told on the thirty thousand men he
+brought with him. In a single day but six
+thousand remained, and even these dispersed
+when it was found that the King had ridden off
+disguised as a friar to join the force which he
+believed to be awaiting him in North Wales with
+Salisbury at its head. He reached Caernarvon
+only to find this force already disbanded, and
+throwing himself into the castle despatched his
+kinsmen, the Dukes of Exeter and Surrey, to
+Chester to negotiate with Henry of Lancaster.
+But they were detained there while the Earl of
+Northumberland pushed forward with a picked
+body of men, and securing the castles of the coast
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol2-Page-2-381"></a>2-381]</span>
+
+at last sought an interview with Richard at Conway.
+The King's confidence was still unbroken.
+He threatened to raise a force of Welshmen and
+to put Lancaster to death. Deserted as he was
+indeed, a King was in himself a power, and only
+the treacherous pledges of the Earl induced him
+to set aside his plans for a reconciliation to be
+brought about in Parliament and to move from
+Conway on the promise of a conference with
+Henry at Flint. But he had no sooner reached
+the town than he found himself surrounded by Lancaster's
+forces. "I am betrayed," he cried, as the
+view of his enemies burst on him from the hill;
+"there are pennons and banners in the valley."
+But it was too late for retreat. Richard was
+seized and brought before his cousin. "I am
+come before my time," said Lancaster, "but I will
+show you the reason. Your people, my lord,
+complain that for the space of twenty years you
+have ruled them harshly: however, if it please
+God, I will help you to rule them better." "Fair
+cousin," replied the King, "since it pleases you,
+it pleases me well." Then, breaking in private
+into passionate regrets that he had ever spared
+his cousin's life, he suffered himself to be carried
+a prisoner along the road to London.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="teidiv">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="index-div-id4555750"></a>
+END OF VOL. II.
+</div>
+
+</div>
+   </div>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="pg" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME II (OF 8)***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume II (of
+8), by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume II (of 8)
+       The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 10, 2005  [eBook #17038]
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME II (OF 8)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME II
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+THE CHARTER, 1216-1307
+THE PARLIAMENT, 1307-1400
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November_ 1877;
+_Reprinted December_ 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.
+_Eversley Edition,_ 1895.
+London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1895
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    Volume II
+
+        Book III--The Charter--1216-1307
+
+            Chapter II--Henry the Third--1216-1232
+
+            Chapter III--The Barons' War--1232-1272
+
+            Chapter IV--Edward the First--1272-1307
+
+        Book IV--The Parliament--1307-1461
+
+            Authorities for Book IV
+
+            Chapter I--Edward II--1307-1327
+
+            Chapter II--Edward the Third--1327-1347
+
+            Chapter III--The Peasant Revolt--1347-1381
+
+            Chapter IV--Richard the Second--1381-1400
+
+
+LIST OF MAPS
+
+    Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1.jpg)
+
+    France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2.jpg)
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME II
+
+
+BOOK III
+THE CHARTER
+1216-1307
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+HENRY THE THIRD
+1216-1232
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: William Marshal]
+
+The death of John changed the whole face of English affairs. His son, Henry
+of Winchester, was but nine years old, and the pity which was stirred by
+the child's helplessness was aided by a sense of injustice in burthening
+him with the iniquity of his father. At his death John had driven from his
+side even the most loyal of his barons; but William Marshal had clung to
+him to the last, and with him was Gualo, the Legate of Innocent's
+successor, Honorius the Third. The position of Gualo as representative of
+the Papal overlord of the realm was of the highest importance, and his
+action showed the real attitude of Rome towards English freedom. The
+boy-king was hardly crowned at Gloucester when Legate and Earl issued in
+his name the very Charter against which his father had died fighting. Only
+the clauses which regulated taxation and the summoning of parliament were
+as yet declared to be suspended. The choice of William Marshal as "governor
+of King and kingdom" gave weight to this step; and its effect was seen when
+the contest was renewed in 1217. Lewis was at first successful in the
+eastern counties, but the political reaction was aided by jealousies which
+broke out between the English and French nobles in his force, and the first
+drew gradually away from him. So general was the defection that at the
+opening of summer William Marshal felt himself strong enough for a blow at
+his foes. Lewis himself was investing Dover, and a joint army of French and
+English barons under the Count of Perche and Robert Fitz-Walter was
+besieging Lincoln, when gathering troops rapidly from the royal castles the
+regent marched to the relief of the latter town. Cooped up in its narrow
+streets and attacked at once by the Earl and the garrison, the barons fled
+in utter rout; the Count of Perche fell on the field, Robert Fitz-Walter
+was taken prisoner. Lewis at once retreated on London and called for aid
+from France. But a more terrible defeat crushed his remaining hopes. A
+small English fleet which set sail from Dover under Hubert de Burgh fell
+boldly on the reinforcements which were crossing under escort of Eustace
+the Monk, a well-known freebooter of the Channel. Some incidents of the
+fight light up for us the naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the
+English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into the crowded transports,
+others hurled quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more active
+vessels crashed with their armed prows into the sides of the French ships.
+The skill of the mariners of the Cinque Ports turned the day against the
+larger forces of their opponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly
+destroyed. The royal army at once closed upon London, but resistance was
+really at an end. By a treaty concluded at Lambeth in September Lewis
+promised to withdraw from England on payment of a sum which he claimed as
+debt; his adherents were restored to their possessions, the liberties of
+London and other towns confirmed, and the prisoners on either side set at
+liberty. A fresh issue of the Charter, though in its modified form,
+proclaimed yet more clearly the temper and policy of the Earl Marshal.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Hubert de Burgh]
+
+His death at the opening of 1219, after a year spent in giving order to the
+realm, brought no change in the system he had adopted. The control of
+affairs passed into the hands of a new legate, Pandulf, of Stephen Langton
+who had just returned forgiven from Rome, and of the Justiciar, Hubert de
+Burgh. It was a time of transition, and the temper of the Justiciar was
+eminently transitional. Bred in the school of Henry the Second, Hubert had
+little sympathy with national freedom, and though resolute to maintain the
+Charter he can have had small love for it; his conception of good
+government, like that of his master, lay in a wise personal administration,
+in the preservation of order and law. But he combined with this a
+thoroughly English desire for national independence, a hatred of
+foreigners, and a reluctance to waste English blood and treasure in
+Continental struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task was one of no
+common difficulty. He was hampered by the constant interference of Rome. A
+Papal legate resided at the English court, and claimed a share in the
+administration of the realm as the representative of its overlord and as
+guardian of the young sovereign. A foreign party too had still a footing in
+the kingdom, for William Marshal had been unable to rid himself of men like
+Peter des Roches or Faukes de Breaute, who had fought on the royal side in
+the struggle against Lewis. Hubert had to deal too with the anarchy which
+that struggle left behind it. From the time of the Conquest the centre of
+England had been covered with the domains of great houses, whose longings
+were for feudal independence and whose spirit of revolt had been held in
+check partly by the stern rule of the kings and partly by the rise of a
+baronage sprung from the Court and settled for the most part in the North.
+The oppression of John united both the earlier and these newer houses in
+the struggle for the Charter. But the character of each remained unchanged,
+and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party break out in their old
+lawlessness and defiance of the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Order restored]
+
+For a time the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed to revive. But the
+Justiciar was resolute to crush it, and he was backed by the strenuous
+efforts of Stephen Langton. A new and solemn coronation of the young king
+in 1220 was followed by a demand for the restoration of the royal castles
+which had been seized by the barons and foreigners. The Earl of Chester,
+the head of the feudal baronage, though he rose in armed rebellion, quailed
+before the march of Hubert and the Primate's threats of excommunication. A
+more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de Breaute, the
+sheriff of six counties, with six royal castles in his hands, and allied
+both with the rebel barons and Llewelyn of Wales. But in 1224 his castle of
+Bedford was besieged for two months; and on its surrender the stern justice
+of Hubert hung the twenty-four knights and their retainers who formed the
+garrison before its walls. The blow was effectual; the royal castles were
+surrendered by the barons, and the land was once more at peace. Freed from
+foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from the presence of the
+foreign legate. Langton wrested a promise from Rome that so long as he
+lived no future legate should be sent to England, and with Pandulf's
+resignation in 1221 the direct interference of the Papacy in the government
+of the realm came to an end. But even these services of the Primate were
+small compared with his services to English freedom. Throughout his life
+the Charter was the first object of his care. The omission of the articles
+which restricted the royal power over taxation in the Charter which was
+published at Henry's accession in 1216 was doubtless due to the
+Archbishop's absence and disgrace at Rome. The suppression of disorder
+seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal
+ministers; for when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in
+Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the King's councillors,
+protested that it had been extorted by force and was without legal
+validity. "If you loved the King, William," the Primate burst out in anger,
+"you would not throw a stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the
+realm." The young king was cowed by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised
+observance of the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of such
+a temper among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage
+demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of
+a subsidy, and Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of
+constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the
+Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: State of the Church]
+
+These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the realm
+year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually bringing
+the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of liberty
+was at this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement which
+stirred English society to its depths. Never had the priesthood wielded
+such boundless power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third
+and his immediate successors. But its religious hold on the people was
+loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy was fading away
+before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use
+of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation
+of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy
+the struggle that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second
+disclosed a spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of
+Florence denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very
+foundations of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence
+had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to
+the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no signs as yet of religious
+revolt, and though the political action of Rome had been in the main on the
+side of freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its interference with
+national concerns which broke out in the struggle against John. "The Pope
+has no part in secular matters," had been the reply of London to the
+interdict of Innocent. And within the English Church itself there was much
+to call for reform. Its attitude in the strife for the Charter as well as
+the after work of the Primate had made it more popular than ever; but its
+spiritual energy was less than its political. The disuse of preaching, the
+decline of the monastic orders into rich landowners, the non-residence and
+ignorance of the parish priests, lowered the religious influence of the
+clergy. The abuses of the time foiled even the energy of such men as Bishop
+Grosseteste of Lincoln. His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt
+taverns, to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot and
+debauchery of the life of the baronage. But such prohibitions witness to
+the prevalence of the evils they denounce. Bishops and deans were still
+withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as ministers, judges, or
+ambassadors. Benefices were heaped in hundreds at a time on royal
+favourites like John Mansel. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes and
+then served them by half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased from
+Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks from all episcopal
+discipline. And behind all this was a group of secular statesmen and
+scholars, the successors of such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed no
+open warfare with the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its abuses and
+its faults.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Friars]
+
+To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the aim of
+two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of the
+thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at the
+sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the
+Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he cried, "must be met by zeal,
+lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by
+preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the
+mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life
+of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the
+time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take
+Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all, he flings his very clothes
+at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God. His
+passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his
+brother, he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His
+last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!" Strangely as the two men
+differed from each other, their aim was the same--to convert the heathen,
+to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to
+carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by an utter reversal
+of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the
+salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister
+for the preacher, the monk for the "brother" or friar. To force the new
+"brethren" into entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their
+vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging Friars" were
+to subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the
+very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by
+others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance
+swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders,
+the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered
+in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging preachers, clad
+in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered
+barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and
+Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Friars and the Towns]
+
+To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious
+revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most
+ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his
+fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction
+they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's ritual or the
+scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its
+minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed
+the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story
+brought religion into the fair and the market place. In England, where the
+Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in
+1224, both were received with the same delight. As the older orders had
+chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at
+Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance
+of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between
+Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods turned aside to a
+grange of the monks of Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures,
+as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs,
+the jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the
+monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to
+welcome them and witness their tricks. The disappointment was too much for
+the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate
+to find their night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome of the townsmen
+made up everywhere for the ill-will and opposition of both clergy and
+monks. The work of the Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid
+progress of population within the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary
+regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible
+scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was
+to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and the
+Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters
+of each town. Their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses; it was
+amongst the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their homes. At
+London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford they made their
+way to the swampy ground between its walls and the streams of Thames. Huts
+of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough
+fence and ditch that bounded the Friary. The order of Francis made a hard
+fight against the taste for sumptuous buildings and for greater personal
+comfort which characterized the time. "I did not enter into religion to
+build walls," protested an English provincial when the brethren pressed for
+a larger house; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which the
+burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to the ground. "You
+need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his scornful
+reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar
+found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at matins. At night he
+dreamed that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester
+and Oxford with, shouts of "Kill, kill!" "I am a friar," shrieked the
+terror-stricken brother. "You lie," was the instant answer, "for you go
+shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there. In
+an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of window.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Revival of Theology]
+
+It was with less success that the order struggled against the passion of
+the time for knowledge. Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was
+by their founders, would have denied them the possession of books or
+materials for study. "I am your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis
+cried passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter. When the news of a
+great doctor's reception was brought to him at Paris, his countenance fell.
+"I am afraid, my son," he replied, "that such doctors will be the
+destruction of my vineyard. They are the true doctors who with the meekness
+of wisdom show forth good works for the edification of their neighbours."
+One kind of knowledge indeed their work almost forced on them. The
+popularity of their preaching soon led them to the deeper study of
+theology; within a short time after their establishment in England we find
+as many as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Leicester,
+Bristol, and other places, and a regular succession of teachers provided at
+each University. The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of
+their new church while philosophy was taught in the cloister. The first
+provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house and
+persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there. His influence after his promotion
+to the see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure theological study
+among the Friars, as well as their establishment in the University; and in
+this work he was ably seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco,
+under whom the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation throughout
+Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Koln borrowed from it their professors: it
+was through its influence indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly
+inferior to that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism. But the
+result of this powerful impulse was soon seen to be fatal to the wider
+intellectual activity which had till now characterized the Universities.
+Theology in its scholastic form resumed its supremacy in the schools. Its
+only efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine and law. The
+last, as he was by far the greatest, instance of the freer and wider
+culture which had been the glory of the last century, was Roger Bacon, and
+no name better illustrates the rapidity and completeness with which it
+passed away.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Roger Bacon]
+
+Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents who were driven into exile
+and reduced to poverty by the civil wars. From Oxford, where he studied
+under Edmund of Abingdon to whom he owed his introduction to the works of
+Aristotle, he passed to the University of Paris, and spent his whole
+heritage there in costly studies and experiments. "From my youth up," he
+writes, "I have laboured at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the
+friendship of all men among the Latins who had any reputation for
+knowledge. I have caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry,
+arithmetic, the construction of tables and instruments, and many needful
+things besides." The difficulties in the way of such studies as he had
+resolved to pursue were immense. He was without instruments or means of
+experiment. "Without mathematical instruments no science can be mastered,"
+he complains afterwards, "and these instruments are not to be found among
+the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred pounds.
+Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which the
+motions of the heavens are certified from the beginning to the end of the
+world without daily labour, but these tables are worth a king's ransom and
+could not be made without a vast expense. I have often attempted the
+composition of such tables, but could not finish them through failure of
+means and the folly of those whom I had to employ." Books were difficult
+and sometimes even impossible to procure. "The scientific works of
+Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients cannot be
+had without great cost; their principal works have not been translated into
+Latin, and copies of others are not to be found in ordinary libraries or
+elsewhere. The admirable books of Cicero de Republica are not to be found
+anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I have made anxious enquiry for them
+in different parts of the world, and by various messengers. I could never
+find the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for them during
+twenty years and more. And so it is with many more most useful books
+connected with the science of morals." It is only words like these of his
+own that bring home to us the keen thirst for knowledge, the patience, the
+energy of Roger Bacon. He returned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching
+record of his devotion to those whom he taught remains in the story of John
+of London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the general
+level of his pupils. "When he came to me as a poor boy," says Bacon in
+recommending him to the Pope, "I caused him to be nurtured and instructed
+for the love of God, especially since for aptitude and innocence I have
+never found so towardly a youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be
+taught in languages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratuitously
+instructed him with my own lips since the time that I received your
+mandate. There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root of
+philosophy, though he has not produced the branches, flowers, and fruit
+because of his youth, and because he has had no experience in teaching. But
+he has the means of surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and
+goes on as he has begun."
+
+The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was justified
+by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teaching in Oxford. It is
+probably of himself that he speaks when he tells us that "the science of
+optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere among the
+Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science on which he had laboured
+for ten years. But his teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. From
+the moment when the Friars settled in the Universities scholasticism
+absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world. The temper of the
+age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The older enthusiasm
+for knowledge was dying down; the study of law was the one source of
+promotion, whether in Church or state; philosophy was discredited,
+literature in its purer forms became almost extinct. After forty years of
+incessant study, Bacon found himself in his own words "unheard, forgotten,
+buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was
+gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially laboured in the
+attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on
+these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to mention the cost of
+books, experiments, instruments, tables, the acquisition of languages, and
+the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the
+friendship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants." Ruined
+and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend
+Grosseteste and renounced the world. He became a friar of the order of St.
+Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to
+the work which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the
+masses of the poor. He had written little. So far was he from attempting to
+write that his new superiors prohibited him from publishing anything under
+pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and water. But we can
+see the craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation which
+marks the man of genius, in the joy with which he seized a strange
+opportunity that suddenly opened before him. "Some few chapters on
+different subjects, written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got
+abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains under the notice of
+Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once invited Bacon to write. But
+difficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other expenses
+for such a work as he projected would cost at least, L60, and the Pope sent
+not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like
+himself. No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends
+raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of
+repayment from Clement. Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse and
+scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular
+form to gain the Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed
+another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. By the
+close of 1267 the work was done. The "greater work," itself in modern form
+a closely-printed folio, with its successive summaries and appendices in
+the "lesser" and the "third" works (which make a good octavo more), were
+produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen months.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Opus Majus]
+
+No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus"
+is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words
+of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of
+philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a
+greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had
+been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly
+unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast
+advantages which it offered." The developement of his scheme is on the
+largest scale; he gathers together the whole knowledge of his time on every
+branch of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he
+suggests improvements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his
+after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in
+insisting on the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of
+languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than his
+scientific investigations. From grammar he passes to mathematics, from
+mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the name of mathematics
+indeed was included all the physical science of the time. "The neglect of
+it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately, "hath
+nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he who knows
+not mathematics cannot know any other sciences; and what is more, he cannot
+discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography,
+chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into something of scientific
+form, and like rapid sketches are given of the question of climate,
+hydrography, geography, and astrology. The subject of optics, his own
+especial study, is treated with greater fulness; he enters into the
+question of the anatomy of the eye besides discussing problems which lie
+more strictly within the province of optical science. In a word, the
+"Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is "at once the
+Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of
+the after-works of Roger Bacon--and treatise after treatise has of late
+been disentombed from our libraries--are but developements in detail of the
+magnificent conception he laid before Clement. Such a work was its own
+great reward.
+
+From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and found small
+recognition. No word of acknowledgement seems to have reached its author
+from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only
+gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old
+man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll
+away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first
+in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scholasticism]
+
+The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength of the drift towards
+the practical studies, and above all towards theology in its scholastic
+guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous
+foe of mediaeval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his logical
+method in the discussion and definition of theological dogma into its
+unexpected ally. It was this very method that led to "that unprofitable
+subtlety and curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the
+scholastic philosophy. But "certain it is"--to continue the same great
+thinker's comment on the Friars--"that if these schoolmen to their great
+thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading
+and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights to the great
+advancement of all learning and knowledge." What, amidst all their errors,
+they undoubtedly did was to insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration
+and a more exact use of words, to introduce a clear and methodical
+treatment of all subjects into discussion, and above all to substitute an
+appeal to reason for unquestioning obedience to authority. It was by this
+critical tendency, by the new clearness and precision which scholasticism
+gave to enquiry, that in spite of the trivial questions with which it often
+concerned itself it trained the human mind through the next two centuries
+to a temper which fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge
+that brought about the Renascence. And it is to the same spirit of fearless
+enquiry as well as to the strong popular sympathies which their very
+constitution necessitated that we must attribute the influence which the
+Friars undoubtedly exerted in the coming struggle between the people and
+the Crown. Their position is clearly and strongly marked throughout the
+whole contest. The University of Oxford, which soon fell under the
+direction of their teaching, stood first in its resistance to Papal
+exactions and its claim of English liberty. The classes in the towns, on
+whom the influence of the Friars told most directly, were steady supporters
+of freedom throughout the Barons' Wars.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Political Influence]
+
+Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was of immense value, for
+it set on a religious basis and gave an intellectual form to the
+constitutional theory of the relations between king and people which was
+slowly emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assuming the
+responsibility of a Christian king to God for the good government of his
+realm, in surrounding the pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious
+sanctions, the mediaeval Church entered its protest against any personal
+despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract
+between king and people; and their trenchant logic made short work of the
+royal claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience. "He who
+would be in truth a king," ran a poem which embodies their teaching at this
+time in pungent verse--"he is a 'free king' indeed if he rightly rule
+himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of
+his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction. It is one
+thing to rule according to a king's duty, another to destroy a kingdom by
+resisting the law." "Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be
+known what the generality, to whom their laws are best known, think on the
+matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make
+daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their
+own affairs which are at stake they will take the more care and will act
+with an eye to their own peace." "It concerns the community to see what
+sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm." The
+constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole
+nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to have a voice in
+the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so
+clearly stated before. But the importance of the Friar's work lay in this,
+that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the popular
+preacher. The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was
+carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother,
+begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the
+cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or
+market-place. His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to
+coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the
+homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them
+side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his
+tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened to the
+rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry the Third]
+
+Never had there been more need of such a political education of the whole
+people than at the moment we have reached. For the triumph of the Charter,
+the constitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly
+on the helplessness of the king. As boy or youth, Henry the Third had bowed
+to the control of William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he was
+now grown to manhood, and his character was from this hour to tell on the
+events of his reign. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father
+the young king was absolutely free. There was a geniality, a vivacity, a
+refinement in his temper which won a personal affection for him even in his
+worst days from some who bitterly censured his rule. The Abbey-church of
+Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor,
+remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of men
+of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. But
+of the political capacity which was the characteristic of his house he had
+little or none. Profuse, changeable, false from sheer meanness of spirit,
+impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless
+in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an empty and
+prodigal magnificence, his one notion of government was a dream of
+arbitrary power. But frivolous as the king's mood was, he clung with a weak
+man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy; and this was the policy not
+of Hubert or Langton but of John. He cherished the hope of recovering his
+heritage across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown;
+and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises which force had
+wrested from the king and which force could wrest back again. France was
+telling more and more on English opinion; and the claim which the French
+kings were advancing to a divine and absolute power gave a sanction in
+Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority which was still maintained
+by his favourite advisers in the royal council. Above all he clung to the
+alliance with the Papacy. Henry was personally devout; and his devotion
+only bound him the more firmly to his father's system of friendship with
+Rome. Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to the Papal See. Rome
+had saved him from ruin as a child; its legate had set the crown on his
+head; its threats and excommunications had foiled Lewis and built up again
+a royal party. Above all it was Rome which could alone free him from his
+oath to the Charter, and which could alone defend him if like his father he
+had to front the baronage in arms.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and Rome]
+
+His temper was now to influence the whole system of government. In 1227
+Henry declared himself of age; and though Hubert still remained Justiciar
+every year saw him more powerless in his struggle with the tendencies of
+the king. The death of Stephen Langton in 1228 was a yet heavier blow to
+English freedom. In persuading Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had
+averted a conflict between the national desire for self-government and the
+Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more
+serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by
+the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened
+which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the
+other at the Reformation. In the mediaeval theory of the Papacy, as
+Innocent and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of
+which the Popes were the head, took the feudal form of the secular realms
+which lay within its pale. The Pope was its sovereign, the Bishops were his
+barons, and the clergy were his under vassals. As the king demanded aids
+and subsidies in case of need from his liegemen, so in the theory of Rome
+might the head of the Church demand aid in need from the priesthood. And at
+this moment the need of the Popes was sore. Rome had plunged into her
+desperate conflict with the Emperor, Frederick the Second, and was looking
+everywhere for the means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On England
+she believed herself to have more than a spiritual claim for support. She
+regarded the kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its overlord.
+It was only by the promise of a heavy subsidy that Henry in 1229 could buy
+the Papal confirmation of Langton's successor. But the baronage was of
+other mind than Henry as to this claim of overlordship, and the demand of
+an aid to Rome from the laity was at once rejected by them. Her spiritual
+claim over the allegiance of the clergy however remained to fall back upon,
+and the clergy were in the Pope's hand. Gregory the Ninth had already
+claimed for the Papal See a right of nomination to some prebends in each
+cathedral church; he now demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the
+priesthood, and a threat of excommunication silenced their murmurs.
+Exaction followed exaction as the needs of the Papal treasury grew greater.
+The very rights of lay patrons were set aside, and under the name of
+"reserves" presentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal
+market, while Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings of the
+Church.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Hubert de Burgh]
+
+The general indignation at last found vent in a wide conspiracy. In 1231
+letters from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be
+ruined by the Romans" were scattered over the kingdom by armed men; tithes
+gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were seized and given to the
+poor; the Papal collectors were beaten and their bulls trodden under foot.
+The remonstrances of Rome only made clearer the national character of the
+movement; but as enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen
+to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done;
+royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their acts; and
+the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance of
+Hubert de Burgh. No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the mind
+of the king. But he was already in full collision with the Justiciar on
+other grounds. Henry was eager to vindicate his right to the great heritage
+his father had lost: the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they
+loved England but because they hated France, spurred him to war; and in
+1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons. But while Hubert held
+power no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. The Norman
+call was rejected through his influence, and when a great armament gathered
+at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport
+and supplies. The young king drew his sword and rushed madly on the
+Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.
+But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred for the year. In
+1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poitou, but the failure
+of the campaign was again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was
+said to have prevented a decisive engagement. It was at this moment that
+the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry's wrath against his
+minister. In the summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar,
+and dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven
+him to take sanctuary. A smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly
+refused. "I will die any death," he said, "before I put iron on the man who
+freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." The
+remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the king to replace Hubert in
+sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner
+into the Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless in the
+realm. His fall left England without a check to the rule of Henry himself.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE BARON'S WAR
+1232-1272
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Aliens]
+
+Once master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick to declare his plan of
+government. The two great checks on a merely personal rule lay as yet in
+the authority of the great ministers of State and in the national character
+of the administrative body which had been built up by Henry the Second.
+Both of these checks Henry at once set himself to remove. He would be his
+own minister. The Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the king
+and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law-courts. The Chancellor had
+grown into a great officer of State, and in 1226 this office had been
+conferred on the Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent of the
+Great Council. But Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him and naming
+to this as to other offices at his pleasure. His policy was to entrust all
+high posts of government to mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained
+administrators, but wholly dependent on the royal will. He found equally
+dependent agents of administration by surrounding himself with foreigners.
+The return of Peter des Roches to the royal councils was the first sign of
+the new system; and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were summoned
+over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative
+posts about the Court. The king's marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence
+was followed by the arrival in England of the new queen's uncles. The
+"Savoy," as his house in the Strand was named, still recalls Peter of Savoy
+who arrived five years later to take for a while the chief place at Henry's
+council-board; another brother, Boniface, was consecrated on Archbishop
+Edmund's death to the highest post in the realm save the Crown itself, the
+Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The young Primate, like his brother, brought
+with him foreign fashions strange enough to English folk. His armed
+retainers pillaged the markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the
+ground the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who opposed his
+visitation. London was roused by the outrage; on the king's refusal to do
+justice a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's house at Lambeth
+with cries of vengeance, and the "handsome archbishop," as his followers
+styled him, was glad to escape over sea. This brood of Provencals was
+followed in 1243 by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's queen,
+Isabella of Angouleme. Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of
+Valence received at a later time the earldom of Pembroke. Even the king's
+jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed these great
+nobles to find a fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords brought
+in their train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and three English
+earls who were in royal wardship were wedded by the king to foreigners. The
+whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men who were
+ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English government or
+English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy; the very retainers of the royal
+household turned robbers and pillaged foreign merchants in the precincts of
+the Court; corruption invaded the judicature; at the close of this period
+of misrule Henry de Bath, a justiciary, was proved to have openly taken
+bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry and the Baronage]
+
+That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on unchecked in defiance
+of the provisions of the Charter was owing to the disunion and sluggishness
+of the English baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard,
+the Earl Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth as their leader to
+demand the expulsion of the strangers from the royal Council. Though
+deserted by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent
+against him and forced the king to treat for peace. But at this critical
+moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland; he
+fell in a petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. The
+interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon, forced the king to
+dismiss Peter from court; but there was no real change of system, and the
+remonstrances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of
+Lincoln, remained fruitless. In the long interval of misrule the financial
+straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest
+Laws were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant,
+loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free
+quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this kind however were utterly
+insufficient to defray the cost of the king's prodigality. A sixth of the
+royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of
+the Crown amounted to four times its annual income. Henry was forced to
+appeal for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted in
+1237 on promise of control in its expenditure and on condition that the
+king confirmed the Charter. But Charter and promise were alike disregarded;
+and in 1242 the resentment of the barons expressed itself in a determined
+protest and a refusal of further subsidies. In spite of their refusal
+however Henry gathered money enough for a costly expedition for the
+recovery of Poitou. The attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg
+the king's force fled in disgraceful rout before the French as far as
+Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a disease which
+scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the conquerors. The treasury was
+utterly drained, and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh appeal with
+his own mouth to the baronage. But the barons had now rallied to a plan of
+action, and we can hardly fail to attribute their union to the man who
+appears at their head. This was the Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon of Montfort]
+
+Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose name had become
+memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in
+Southern Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his
+mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.
+But as Simon's tendencies were for the most part French John had kept the
+revenues of the earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim of his
+elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of Henry the Third to accept a
+divided allegiance. The refusal marks the rapid growth of that sentiment of
+nationality which the loss of Normandy had brought home. Amaury chose to
+remain French, and by a family arrangement with the king's sanction the
+honour of Leicester passed in 1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice
+made Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood still moved the jealousy of
+the barons, and this jealousy was quickened by a secret match in 1238 with
+Eleanor, the king's sister and widow of the second William Marshal. The
+match formed probably part of a policy which Henry pursued throughout his
+reign of bringing the great earldoms into closer connexion with the Crown.
+That of Chester had fallen to the king through the extinction of the family
+of its earls; Cornwall was held by his brother, Richard; Salisbury by his
+cousin. Simon's marriage linked the Earldom of Leicester to the royal
+house. But it at once brought Simon into conflict with the nobles and the
+Church. The baronage, justly indignant that such a step should have been
+taken without their consent, for the queen still remained childless and
+Eleanor's children by one whom they looked on as a stranger promised to be
+heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt which failed only through the
+desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall, who was satisfied with
+Earl Simon's withdrawal from the Royal Council. The censures of the Church
+on Eleanor's breach of a vow of chaste widowhood which she had made at her
+first husband's death were averted with hardly less difficulty by a journey
+to Rome. It was after a year of trouble that Simon returned to England to
+reap as it seemed the fruits of his high alliance. He was now formally made
+Earl of Leicester and re-entered the Royal Council. But it is probable that
+he still found there the old jealousy which had forced from him a pledge of
+retirement after his marriage; and that his enemies now succeeded in
+winning over the king. In a few months, at any rate, he found the
+changeable king alienated from him, he was driven by a burst of royal
+passion from the realm, and was forced to spend seven months in France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's early action]
+
+Henry's anger passed as quickly as it had risen, and in the spring of 1240
+the Earl was again received with honour at court. It was from this moment
+however that his position changed. As yet it had been that of a foreigner,
+confounded in the eyes of the nation at large with the Poitevins and
+Provencals who swarmed about the court. But in the years of retirement
+which followed Simon's return to England his whole attitude was reversed.
+There was as yet no quarrel with the king: he followed him in a campaign
+across the Channel, and shared in his defeat at Saintes. But he was a
+friend of Grosseteste and a patron of the Friars, and became at last known
+as a steady opponent of the misrule about him. When prelates and barons
+chose twelve representatives to confer with Henry in 1244 Simon stood with
+Earl Richard of Cornwall at the head of them. A definite plan of reform
+disclosed his hand. The confirmation of the Charter was to be followed by
+the election of Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer, in the Great Council. Nor
+was this restoration of a responsible ministry enough; a perpetual Council
+was to attend the king and devise further reforms. The plan broke against
+Henry's resistance and a Papal prohibition; but from this time the Earl
+took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. The struggle of
+the following years was chiefly with the exactions of the Papacy, and Simon
+was one of the first to sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246
+addressed to the court of Rome. He was present at the Lent Parliament of
+1248, and we can hardly doubt that he shared in its bold rebuke of the
+king's misrule and its renewed demand for the appointment of the higher
+officers of state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the danger of
+leaving at home such a centre of all efforts after reform that brought
+Henry to send him in the autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for
+the Crown the last of its provinces over sea.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon in Gascony]
+
+Threatened by France and by Navarre without as well as by revolt within,
+the loss of Gascony seemed close at hand; but in a few months the stern
+rule of the new Seneschal had quelled every open foe within or without its
+bounds. To bring the province to order proved a longer and a harder task.
+Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the Rhine: "they rode the country
+by night," wrote the Earl, "like thieves, in parties of twenty or thirty or
+forty," and gathered in leagues against the Seneschal, who set himself to
+exact their dues to the Crown and to shield merchant and husbandman from
+their violence. For four years Earl Simon steadily warred down these robber
+bands, storming castles where there was need, and bridling the wilder
+country with a chain of forts. Hard as the task was, his real difficulty
+lay at home. Henry sent neither money nor men; and the Earl had to raise
+both from his own resources, while the men whom he was fighting found
+friends in Henry's council-chamber. Again and again Simon was recalled to
+answer charges of tyranny and extortion made by the Gascon nobles and
+pressed by his enemies at home on the king. Henry's feeble and impulsive
+temper left him open to pressure like this; and though each absence of the
+Earl from the province was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder which
+only his presence repressed, the deputies of its nobles were still admitted
+to the council-table and commissions sent over to report on the Seneschal's
+administration. The strife came to a head in 1252, when the commissioners
+reported that stern as Simon's rule had been the case was one in which
+sternness was needful. The English barons supported Simon, and in the face
+of their verdict Henry was powerless. But the king was now wholly with his
+enemies; and his anger broke out in a violent altercation. The Earl offered
+to resign his post if the money he had spent was repaid him, and appealed
+to Henry's word. Henry hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a
+false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; "and but that thou bearest
+the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a
+word!" A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the Earl once more
+returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw
+to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its
+nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King
+Lewis from the land. But the offer was refused; and Henry, who had himself
+undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253
+to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's temper]
+
+The Earl's character had now thoroughly developed. He inherited the strict
+and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance on
+religious services whether by night or day. In his correspondence with Adam
+Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in a perusal of
+the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted
+for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful
+and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his
+sense of honour keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of
+contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in
+his after career. His best friends marked honestly this fault, and it shows
+the greatness of the man that he listened to their remonstrances. "Better
+is a patient man," writes honest Friar Adam, "than a strong man, and he who
+can rule his own temper than he who storms a city." But the one
+characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his
+"constancy," the firm immoveable resolve which trampled even death under
+foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward the First chose as
+his device, "Keep troth," was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see
+in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties
+both at home and abroad he "thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of
+so great an exploit" as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but
+once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the
+failure of all support or funds from England, and the king's desertion of
+his cause, till the work was done. There was the same steadiness of will
+and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Robert Grosseteste show how
+early Simon had learned to sympathize with the Bishop in his resistance to
+Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offered him his own support and
+that of his associates. But Robert passed away, and as the tide of
+misgovernment mounted higher and higher the Earl silently trained himself
+for the day of trial. The fruit of his self-discipline was seen when the
+crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the
+enthusiastic love of the people clung to the grave, stern soldier who
+"stood like a pillar," unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by
+the oath he had sworn.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Matthew Paris]
+
+While Simon had been warring with Gascon rebels affairs in England had been
+going from bad to worse. The scourge of Papal taxation fell heavier on the
+clergy. After vain appeals to Rome and to the king, Archbishop Edmund
+retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-gatherer after
+tax-gatherer with powers of excommunication, suspension from orders, and
+presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priesthood. The
+wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. Oxford gave the
+signal by hunting a Papal legate out of the city amid cries of "usurer" and
+"simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the
+barons bade a Papal collector begone out of England. "If you tarry here
+three days longer," he added, "you and your company shall be cut to
+pieces." For a time Henry himself was swept away by the tide of national
+indignation. Letters from the king, the nobles, and the prelates, protested
+against the Papal exactions, and orders were given that no money should be
+exported from the realm. But the threat of interdict soon drove Henry back
+on a policy of spoliation in which he went hand in hand with Rome. The
+temper which this oppression begot among even the most sober churchmen has
+been preserved for us by an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst
+of patriotic feeling. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is
+the last, of our monastic historians. The school of St. Alban's survived
+indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle into mere annalists
+whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts and whose work is as
+colourless as it is jejune. In Matthew the breadth and precision of the
+narrative, the copiousness of his information on topics whether national or
+European, the general fairness and justice of his comments, are only
+surpassed by the patriotic fire and enthusiasm of the whole. He had
+succeeded Roger of Wendover as chronicler at St. Alban's; and the Greater
+Chronicle with an abridgement of it which long passed under the name of
+Matthew of Westminster, a "History of the English," and the "Lives of the
+Earlier Abbots," are only a few among the voluminous works which attest his
+prodigious industry. He was an artist as well as an historian, and many of
+the manuscripts which are preserved are illustrated by his own hand. A
+large circle of correspondents--bishops like Grosseteste, ministers like
+Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swereford--furnished him with
+minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical proceedings. Pilgrims from
+the East and Papal agents brought news of foreign events to his scriptorium
+at St. Alban's. He had access to and quotes largely from state documents,
+charters, and exchequer rolls. The frequency of royal visits to the abbey
+brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself
+contributed to the great chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a
+faithfulness the memory of his weakness and misgovernment. On one solemn
+feast-day the king recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the middle
+step between the floor and the throne begged him to write the story of the
+day's proceedings. While on a visit to St. Alban's he invited him to his
+table and chamber, and enumerated by name two hundred and fifty of the
+English baronies for his information. But all this royal patronage has left
+little mark on his work. "The case," as Matthew says, "of historical
+writers is hard, for if they tell the truth they provoke men, and if they
+write what is false they offend God." With all the fulness of the school of
+court historians, such as Benedict and Hoveden, to which in form he
+belonged, Matthew Paris combines an independence and patriotism which is
+strange to their pages. He denounces with the same unsparing energy the
+oppression of the Papacy and of the king. His point of view is neither that
+of a courtier nor of a churchman but of an Englishman, and the new national
+tone of his chronicle is but the echo of a national sentiment which at last
+bound nobles and yeomen and churchmen together into a people resolute to
+wrest freedom from the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wales]
+
+The nation was outraged like the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the
+Charter failed to bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248,
+in 1249, and again in 1255 the great Council fruitlessly renewed its demand
+for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce
+good government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the
+great officers of the Crown were appointed in the Council of the Baronage.
+But Henry refused their offer with scorn and sold his plate to the citizens
+of London to find payment for his household. A spirit of mutinous defiance
+broke out on the failure of all legal remedy. When the Earl of Norfolk
+refused him aid Henry answered with a threat. "I will send reapers and reap
+your fields for you," he said. "And I will send you back the heads of your
+reapers," replied the Earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and the
+refusal of supplies, the Crown was in fact penniless; and yet never was
+money more wanted, for a trouble which had long pressed upon the English
+kings had now grown to a height that called for decisive action. Even his
+troubles at home could not blind Henry to the need of dealing with the
+difficulty of Wales. Of the three Welsh states into which all that remained
+unconquered of Britain had been broken by the victories of Deorham and
+Chester, two had long ceased to exist. The country between the Clyde and
+the Dee had been gradually absorbed by the conquests of Northumbria and the
+growth of the Scot monarchy. West Wales, between the British Channel and
+the estuary of the Severn, had yielded to the sword of Ecgberht. But a
+fiercer resistance prolonged the independence of the great central portion
+which alone in modern language preserves the name of Wales. Comprising in
+itself the largest and most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was aided
+in its struggle against Mercia by the weakness of its assailant, the
+youngest and feeblest of the English states, as well as by an internal
+warfare which distracted the energies of the invaders. But Mercia had no
+sooner risen to supremacy among the English kingdoms than it took the work
+of conquest vigorously in hand. Offa tore from Wales the border-land
+between the Severn and the Wye; the raids of his successors carried fire
+and sword into the heart of the country; and an acknowledgement of the
+Mercian overlordship was wrested from the Welsh princes. On the fall of
+Mercia this overlordship passed to the West-Saxon kings, and the Laws of
+Howel Dda own the payment of a yearly tribute by "the prince of Aberffraw"
+to "the King of London." The weakness of England during her long struggle
+with the Danes revived the hopes of British independence; it was the
+co-operation of the Welsh on which the northmen reckoned in their attack on
+the house of Ecgberht. But with the fall of the Danelaw the British princes
+were again brought to submission, and when in the midst of the Confessor's
+reign the Welsh seized on a quarrel between the houses of Leofric and
+Godwine to cross the border and carry their attacks into England itself,
+the victories of Harold reasserted the English supremacy. Disembarking on
+the coast his light-armed troops he penetrated to the heart of the
+mountains, and the successors of the Welsh prince Gruffydd, whose head was
+the trophy of the campaign, swore to observe the old fealty and render the
+old tribute to the English Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wales and the Normans]
+
+A far more desperate struggle began when the wave of Norman conquest broke
+on the Welsh frontier. A chain of great earldoms, settled by William along
+the border-land, at once bridled the old marauding forays. From his county
+palatine of Chester Hugh the Wolf harried Flintshire into a desert, Robert
+of Belesme in his earldom of Shrewsbury "slew the Welsh," says a
+chronicler, "like sheep, conquered them, enslaved them and flayed them with
+nails of iron." The earldom of Gloucester curbed Britain along the lower
+Severn. Backed by these greater baronies a horde of lesser adventurers
+obtained the royal "licence to make conquest on the Welsh." Monmouth and
+Abergavenny were seized and guarded by Norman castellans; Bernard of
+Neufmarche won the lordship of Brecknock; Roger of Montgomery raised the
+town and fortress in Powysland which still preserves his name. A great
+rising of the whole people in the days of the second William won back some
+of this Norman spoil. The new castle of Montgomery was burned, Brecknock
+and Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and the Welsh poured ravaging
+over the English border. Twice the Red King carried his arms fruitlessly
+among the mountains against enemies who took refuge in their fastnesses
+till famine and hardship drove his broken host into retreat. The wiser
+policy of Henry the First fell back on his father's system of gradual
+conquest. A new tide of invasion flowed along the southern coast, where the
+land was level and open and accessible from the sea. The attack was aided
+by strife in the country itself. Robert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Gloucester,
+was summoned to his aid by a Welsh chieftain; and his defeat of Rhys ap
+Tewdor, the last prince under whom Southern Wales was united, produced an
+anarchy which enabled Robert to land safely on the coast of Glamorgan, to
+conquer the country round, and to divide it among his soldiers. A force of
+Flemings and Englishmen followed the Earl of Clare as he landed near
+Milford Haven and pushing back the British inhabitants settled a "Little
+England" in the present Pembrokeshire. A few daring adventurers accompanied
+the Norman Lord of Kemeys into Cardigan, where land might be had for the
+winning by any one who would "wage war on the Welsh."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Welsh Revival]
+
+It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of the British race
+seemed at hand, that a new outburst of energy rolled back the tide of
+invasion and changed the fitful resistance of the separate Welsh provinces
+into a national effort to regain independence. To all outer seeming Wales
+had become utterly barbarous. Stripped of every vestige of the older Roman
+civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement
+from the general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons had sunk
+into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk of
+the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, retaining no
+higher political organization than that of the clan, their strength was
+broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united only in battle or in raid
+against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild people there still
+lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years
+before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest
+Englishmen. At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was
+suddenly broken by a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth century
+burst forth, not from one bard or another, but from the nation at large.
+The Welsh temper indeed was steeped in poetry. "In every house," says the
+shrewd Gerald de Barri, "strangers who arrived in the morning were
+entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens and the music of the
+harp." A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of
+western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable
+means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a
+developement of the old Celtic language heard by Caesar as the Romance
+tongues are developements of Caesar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than
+any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure
+and to settled literary form. No other mediaeval literature shows at its
+outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh.
+But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling
+freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into
+a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the symbol of the
+strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the romantic
+tales which reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Welsh Poetry]
+
+The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact,
+tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal. When
+Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The "descent
+into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediaeval horror
+with the mediaeval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends
+his years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse
+with fair women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy,
+a new earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is
+broken by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the
+hero's armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright
+with glancing colour. "The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured
+silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious
+emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold than the flower of the
+broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her
+hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the
+spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of
+the falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the
+breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses."
+Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the
+gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper,
+so quick to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its
+emotions, its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a
+passionate melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impossible, by
+an instinct of what is noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird
+charm of nature. The wildest extravagance of the tale-teller is relieved
+by some graceful play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, some
+magical touch of beauty. As Kulwch's greyhounds bound from side to side of
+their master's steed, they "sport round him like two sea-swallows." His
+spear is "swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of
+reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest." A
+subtle, observant love of nature and natural beauty takes fresh colour
+from the passionate human sentiment with which it is imbued. "I love the
+birds" sings Gwalchmai "and their sweet voices in the lulling songs of the
+wood"; he watches at night beside the fords "among the untrodden grass" to
+hear the nightingale and watch the play of the sea-mew. Even patriotism
+takes the same picturesque form. The Welsh poet hates the flat and
+sluggish land of the Saxon; as he dwells on his own he tells of "its
+sea-coast and its mountains, its towns on the forest border, its fair
+landscape, its dales, its waters, and its valleys, its white sea-mews,
+its beauteous women." Here as everywhere the sentiment of nature passes
+swiftly and subtly into the sentiment of a human tenderness: "I love its
+fields clothed with tender trefoil" goes on the song; "I love the marches
+of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm." In the
+Celtic love of woman there is little of the Teutonic depth and
+earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of delicate enjoyment,
+a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light of dawn on a snowy
+mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty. "White is my love as the
+apple-blossom, as the ocean's spray; her face shines like the pearly dew
+on Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is like the light of sunset." The buoyant
+and elastic temper of the French trouveur was spiritualized in the Welsh
+singers by a more refined poetic feeling. "Whoso beheld her was filled
+with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod." A touch
+of pure fancy such as this removes its object out of the sphere of passion
+into one of delight and reverence.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Bards]
+
+It is strange to pass from the world of actual Welsh history into such a
+world as this. But side by side with this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy
+and romance ran a torrent of intenser song. The spirit of the earlier
+bards, their joy in battle, their love of freedom, broke out anew in ode
+after ode, in songs extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, but fused into
+poetry by the intense fire of patriotism which glowed within them. Every
+fight, every hero had its verse. The names of older singers, of Taliesin,
+Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, were revived in bold forgeries to animate the
+national resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in North Wales that the
+spirit of patriotism received its strongest inspiration from this burst of
+song. Again and again Henry the Second was driven to retreat from the
+impregnable fastnesses where the "Lords of Snowdon," the princes of the
+house of Gruffydd ap Conan, claimed supremacy over the whole of Wales. Once
+in the pass of Consilt a cry arose that the king was slain, Henry of Essex
+flung down the royal standard, and the king's desperate efforts could
+hardly save his army from utter rout. The bitter satire of the Welsh
+singers bade him knight his horse, since its speed had alone saved him from
+capture. In a later campaign the invaders were met by storms of rain, and
+forced to abandon their baggage in a headlong flight to Chester. The
+greatest of the Welsh odes, that known to English readers in Gray's
+translation as "The Triumph of Owen," is Gwalchmai's song of victory over
+the repulse of an English fleet from Abermenai.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Llewelyn ap Jorwerth]
+
+The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth seemed destined to realize
+the hopes of his countrymen. The homage which he succeeded in extorting
+from the whole of the Welsh chieftains during a reign which lasted from
+1194 to 1246 placed him openly at the head of his race, and gave a new
+character to its struggle with the English king. In consolidating his
+authority within his own domains, and in the assertion of his lordship over
+the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap Jorwerth aimed steadily at securing
+the means of striking off the yoke of the Saxon. It was in vain that John
+strove to buy his friendship by the hand of his natural daughter Johanna.
+Fresh raids on the Marches forced the king to enter Wales in 1211; but
+though his army reached Snowdon it fell back like its predecessors, starved
+and broken before an enemy it could never reach. A second attack in the
+same year had better success. The chieftains of South Wales were drawn from
+their new allegiance to join the English forces, and Llewelyn, prisoned in
+his fastnesses, was at last driven to submit. But the ink of the treaty was
+hardly dry before Wales was again on fire; a common fear of the English
+once more united its chieftains, and the war between John and his barons
+soon removed all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his allegiance to
+an excommunicated king, and allied with the barons under Fitz-Walter--too
+glad to enlist in their cause a prince who could hold in check the nobles
+of the border country where the royalist cause was strongest--Llewelyn
+seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex Powys, the central
+district of Wales where the English influence had always been powerful, to
+clear the royal garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardigan, and to force even
+the Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Llewelyn and the Bards]
+
+England watched these efforts of the subject race with an anger still
+mingled with contempt. "Who knows not," exclaims Matthew Paris as he dwells
+on the new pretensions of the Welsh ruler, "who knows not that the Prince
+of Wales is a petty vassal of the King of England?" But the temper of
+Llewelyn's own people was far other than the temper of the English
+chronicler. The hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph of
+the Lord of Snowdon. His court was crowded with bardic singers. "He pours,"
+sings one of them, "his gold into the lap of the bard as the ripe fruit
+falls from the trees." Gold however was hardly needed to wake their
+enthusiasm. Poet after poet sang of "the Devastator of England," the "Eagle
+of men that loves not to lie nor sleep," "towering above the rest of men
+with his long red lance," his "red helmet of battle crested with a fierce
+wolf." "The sound of his coming is like the roar of the wave as it rushes
+to the shore, that can neither be stayed nor hushed." Lesser bards strung
+together Llewelyn's victories in rough jingle of rime and hounded him on to
+the slaughter. "Be of good courage in the slaughter," sings Elidir, "cling
+to thy work, destroy England, and plunder its multitudes." A fierce thirst
+for blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses of the court singers.
+"Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in heaps," bursts out a triumphant
+bard; "St. Clears, with its bright white lands, it is not Saxons who hold
+it now!" "In Swansea, the key of Lloegria, we made widows of all the
+wives." "The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with
+the leader of wolves and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers
+with keen scent of carcases." "Better," closes the song, "better the grave
+than the life of man who sighs when the horns call him forth, to the
+squares of battle."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Welsh hopes]
+
+But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out of the mere mob of
+chieftains who live by rapine, and boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from
+hand to hand through the hall that "they take and give no quarter."
+"Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious," he was "the great Caesar" who was
+to gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of the Celtic race.
+Mysterious prophecies, the prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from
+lip to lip and were heard even along the Seine and the Rhine, came home
+again to nerve Wales to its last struggle with the stranger. Medrawd and
+Arthur, men whispered, would appear once more on earth to fight over again
+the fatal battle of Camlan in which the hero-king perished. The last
+conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still lived to combat for his
+people. The supposed verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope of a
+restoration of the Cymry. "In their hands shall be all the land from
+Britanny to Man: ... a rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving out
+of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gathered up in the strange work
+of Geoffry of Monmouth, these predictions had long been making a deep
+impression not on Wales only but on its conquerors. It was to meet the
+dreams of a yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king at
+Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the Second. But neither trick
+nor conquest could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory
+of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who joined his
+host, "that your people of rebels can withstand my army?" "My people,"
+replied the chieftain, "may be weakened by your might, and even in great
+part destroyed, but unless the wrath of God be on the side of its foe it
+will not perish utterly. Nor deem I that other race or other tongue will
+answer for this corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last day
+save this people and tongue of Wales." So ran the popular rime, "Their Lord
+they will praise, their speech they shall keep, their land they shall
+lose--except wild Wales."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Provisions of Oxford]
+
+Faith and prophecy seemed justified by the growing strength of the British
+people. The weakness and dissensions which characterized the reign of Henry
+the Third enabled Llewelyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a practical independence
+till the close of his life, when a fresh acknowledgement of the English
+supremacy was wrested from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of
+his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Gruffydd, who followed him in
+1246. The raids of the new chieftain swept the border to the very gates of
+Chester, while his conquest of Glamorgan seemed to bind the whole people
+together in a power strong enough to meet any attack from the stranger. So
+pressing was the danger that it called the king's eldest son, Edward, to
+the field; but his first appearance in arms ended in a crushing defeat. The
+defeat however remained unavenged. Henry's dreams were of mightier
+enterprises than the reduction of the Welsh. The Popes were still fighting
+their weary battle against the House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its
+kingdom of Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy See,
+to any power that would aid them in the struggle. In 1254 it was offered to
+the king's second son, Edmund. With imbecile pride Henry accepted the
+offer, prepared to send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to
+repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the purposes of his war. In
+a Parliament at the opening of 1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the
+clergy. A fresh demand was made in 1258. But the patience of the realm was
+at last exhausted. Earl Simon had returned in 1253 from his government of
+Gascony, and the fruit of his meditations during the four years of his
+quiet stay at home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to France and
+Scotland which showed there was as yet no open quarrel with Henry, was seen
+in a league of the baronage and in their adoption of a new and startling
+policy. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of
+the Charter: its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage and a
+definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge;
+its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own
+stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the Charter and
+his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken. The barons
+had secured the freedom of the realm; the secret of their long patience
+during the reign of Henry lay in the difficulty of securing its right
+administration. It was this difficulty which Earl Simon was prepared to
+solve when action was forced on him by the stir of the realm. A great
+famine added to the sense of danger from Wales and from Scotland and to the
+irritation at the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year
+1258 opened. It was to arrange for a campaign against Wales that Henry
+called a parliament in April. But the baronage appeared in arms with
+Gloucester and Leicester at their head. The king was forced to consent to
+the appointment of a committee of twenty-four to draw up terms for the
+reform of the state. The Twenty-four again met the Parliament at Oxford in
+June, and although half the committee consisted of royal ministers and
+favourites it was impossible to resist the tide of popular feeling. Hugh
+Bigod, one of the firmest adherents of the two Earls, was chosen as
+Justiciar. The claim to elect this great officer was in fact the leading
+point in the baronial policy. But further measures were needed to hold in
+check such arbitrary misgovernment as had prevailed during the last twenty
+years. By the "Provisions of Oxford" it was agreed that the Great Council
+should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned by the king or no; and
+on each occasion "the Commonalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall
+come to the Parliaments, and at other times when occasion shall be when the
+King and his Council shall send for them, to treat of the wants of the king
+and of his kingdom. And the Commonalty shall hold as established that which
+these Twelve shall do." Three permanent committees of barons and prelates
+were named to carry out the work of reform and administration. The reform
+of the Church was left to the original Twenty-four; a second Twenty-four
+negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent Council of Fifteen advised the
+king in the ordinary work of government. The complexity of such an
+arrangement was relieved by the fact that the members of each of these
+committees were in great part the same persons. The Justiciar, Chancellor,
+and the guardians of the king's castles swore to act only with the advice
+and assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two great officers, with
+the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at the end
+of the year. Sheriffs were to be appointed for a single year only, no doubt
+by the Council, from among the chief tenants of the county, and no undue
+fees were to be exacted for the administration of justice in their court.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Government of the Barons]
+
+A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in that tongue since
+the Conquest which has reached us, ordered the observance of these
+Provisions. The king was in fact helpless, and resistance came only from
+the foreign favourites, who refused to surrender the castles and honours
+which had been granted to them. But the Twenty-four were resolute in their
+action; and an armed demonstration of the barons drove the foreigners in
+flight over sea. The whole royal power was now in fact in the hands of the
+committees appointed by the Great Council. But the measures of the barons
+showed little of the wisdom and energy which the country had hoped for. In
+October 1259 the knighthood complained that the barons had done nothing but
+seek their own advantage in the recent changes. This protest produced the
+Provisions of Westminster, which gave protection to tenants against their
+feudal lords, regulated legal procedure in the feudal courts, appointed
+four knights in each shire to watch the justice of the sheriffs, and made
+other temporary enactments for the furtherance of justice. But these
+Provisions brought little fruit, and a tendency to mere feudal privilege
+showed itself in an exemption of all nobles and prelates from attendance at
+the Sheriff's courts. Their foreign policy was more vigorous and
+successful. All further payment to Rome, whether secular or ecclesiastical,
+was prohibited, formal notice was given to the Pope of England's withdrawal
+from the Sicilian enterprise, peace put an end to the incursions of the
+Welsh, and negotiations on the footing of a formal abandonment of the
+king's claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in
+October 1259 in a peace with France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon and the Baronage]
+
+This peace, the triumph of that English policy which had been struggling
+ever since the days of Hubert de Burgh with the Continental policy of Henry
+and his foreign advisers, was the work of the Earl of Leicester. The
+revolution had doubtless been mainly Simon's doing. In the summer of 1258,
+while the great change was going on, a thunderstorm drove the king as he
+passed along the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where the Earl
+was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take shelter with him and have no
+fear of the storm. The king refused with petulant wit. "If I fear the
+thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world." But
+Simon had probably small faith in the cumbrous system of government which
+the Barons devised, and it was with reluctance that he was brought to swear
+to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it. With their home government
+he had little to do, for from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he was
+chiefly busied in negotiation in France. But already his breach with
+Gloucester and the bulk of his fellow councillors was marked. In the Lent
+Parliament of 1259 he had reproached them, and Gloucester above all, with
+faithlessness to their trust. "The things we are treating of," he cried,
+"we have sworn to carry out. With such feeble and faithless men I care not
+to have ought to do!" The peace with France was hardly signed when his
+distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's withdrawal to the French
+court at the close of the year for the formal signature of the treaty was
+the signal for a reactionary movement. From France the king forbade the
+summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his resumption of the
+enterprise against Sicily. Both acts were distinct breaches of the
+Provisions of Oxford, but Henry trusted to the divisions of the
+Twenty-four. Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester; the Justiciar,
+Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the spring; and both of these leaders
+drew cautiously to the king. Roger Mortimer and the Earls of Hereford and
+Norfolk more openly espoused the royal cause, and in February 1260 Henry
+had gained confidence enough to announce that as the barons had failed to
+keep their part of the Provisions he should not keep his.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Counter Revolution]
+
+Earl Simon almost alone remained unshaken. But his growing influence was
+seen in the appointment of his supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar in
+Bigod's place, while his strength was doubled by the accession of the
+King's son Edward to his side. In the moment of the revolution Edward had
+vehemently supported the party of the foreigners. But he had sworn to
+observe the Provisions, and the fidelity to his pledge which remained
+throughout his life the chief note of his temper at once showed itself.
+Like Simon he protested against the faithlessness of the barons in the
+carrying out of their reforms, and it was his strenuous support of the
+petition of the knighthood that brought about the additional Provisions of
+1259. He had been brought up with Earl Simon's sons, and with the Earl
+himself his relations remained friendly even at the later time of their
+fatal hostilities. But as yet he seems to have had no distrust of Simon's
+purposes or policy. His adhesion to the Earl recalled Henry from France;
+and the king was at once joined by Gloucester in London while Edward and
+Simon remained without the walls. But the love of father and son proved too
+strong to bear political severance, and Edward's reconciliation foiled the
+Earl's plans. He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh troubles were
+breaking out, while Henry prepared to deal his final blow at the government
+which, tottering as it was, still held him in check. Rome had resented the
+measures which had put an end to her extortions, and it was to Rome that
+Henry looked for a formal absolution from his oath to observe the
+Provisions. In June 1261 he produced a Bull annulling the Provisions and
+freeing him from his oath in a Parliament at Winchester. The suddenness of
+the blow forbade open protest and Henry quickly followed up his victory.
+Hugh Bigod, who had surrendered the Tower and Dover in the spring,
+surrendered the other castles he held in the autumn. Hugh Despenser was
+deposed from the Justiciarship and a royalist, Philip Basset, appointed in
+his place.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's rising]
+
+The news of this counter-revolution reunited for a moment the barons.
+Gloucester joined Earl Simon in calling an autumn Parliament at St.
+Alban's, and in summoning to it three knights from every shire south of
+Trent. But the union was a brief one. Gloucester consented to refer the
+quarrel with the king to arbitration and the Earl of Leicester withdrew in
+August to France. He saw that for the while there was no means of
+withstanding Henry, even in his open defiance of the Provisions. Foreign
+soldiers were brought into the land; the king won back again the
+appointment of sheriffs. For eighteen months of this new rule Simon could
+do nothing but wait. But his long absence lulled the old jealousies against
+him. The confusion of the realm and a fresh outbreak of troubles in Wales
+renewed the disgust at Henry's government, while his unswerving
+faithfulness to the Provisions fixed the eyes of all Englishmen upon the
+Earl as their natural leader. The death of Gloucester in the summer of 1262
+removed the one barrier to action; and in the spring of 1263 Simon landed
+again in England as the unquestioned head of the baronial party. What
+immediately forced him to action was a march of Edward with a body of
+foreign troops against Llewelyn, who was probably by this time in
+communication if not in actual alliance with the Earl. The chief opponents
+of Llewelyn among the Marcher Lords were ardent supporters of Henry's
+misgovernment, and when a common hostility drew the Prince and Earl
+together, the constitutional position of Llewelyn as an English noble gave
+formal justification for co-operation with him. At Whitsuntide the barons
+met Simon at Oxford and finally summoned Henry to observe the Provisions.
+His refusal was met by an appeal to arms. Throughout the country the
+younger nobles flocked to Simon's standard, and the young Earl of
+Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, became his warmest supporter. His rapid
+movements foiled all opposition. While Henry vainly strove to raise money
+and men, Simon swept the Welsh border, marched through Reading on Dover,
+and finally appeared before London.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Mise of Amiens]
+
+The Earl's triumph was complete. Edward after a brief attempt at resistance
+was forced to surrender Windsor and disband his foreign troops. The rising
+of London in the cause of the barons left Henry helpless. But at the moment
+of triumph the Earl saw himself anew forsaken. The bulk of the nobles again
+drew towards the king; only six of the twelve barons who had formed the
+patriot half of the committee of 1258, only four of the twelve
+representatives of the community at that date, were now with the Earl. The
+dread too of civil war gave strength to the cry for a compromise, and at
+the end of the year it was agreed that the strife should be left to the
+arbitration of the French king, Lewis the Ninth. But saint and just ruler
+as he was, the royal power was in the conception of Lewis a divine thing,
+which no human power could limit or fetter, and his decision, which was
+given in January 1264, annulled the whole of the Provisions. Only the
+Charters granted before the Provisions were to be observed. The appointment
+and removal of all officers of state was to be wholly with the king, and he
+was suffered to call aliens to his councils if he would. The Mise of Amiens
+was at once confirmed by the Pope, and, crushing blow as it was, the barons
+felt themselves bound by the award. It was only the exclusion of aliens--a
+point which they had not purposed to submit to arbitration--which they
+refused to concede. Luckily Henry was as inflexible on this point as on the
+rest, and the mutual distrust prevented any real accommodation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Lewes]
+
+But Henry had to reckon on more than the baronage. Deserted as he was by
+the greater nobles, Simon was far from standing alone. Throughout the
+recent struggle the new city governments of the craft-gilds, which were
+known by the name of "Communes," had shown an enthusiastic devotion to his
+cause. The queen was stopped in her attempt to escape from the Tower by an
+angry mob, who drove her back with stones and foul words. When Henry
+attempted to surprise Leicester in his quarters at Southwark, the Londoners
+burst the gates which had been locked by the richer burghers against him,
+and rescued him by a welcome into the city. The clergy and the universities
+went in sympathy with the towns, and in spite of the taunts of the
+royalists, who accused him of seeking allies against the nobility in the
+common people, the popular enthusiasm gave a strength to the Earl which
+sustained him even in this darkest hour of the struggle. He at once
+resolved on resistance. The French award had luckily reserved the rights of
+Englishmen to the liberties they had enjoyed before the Provisions of
+Oxford, and it was easy for Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave
+to the Crown was as contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions
+themselves. London was the first to reject the decision; in March 1264 its
+citizens mustered at the call of the town-bell at Saint Paul's, seized the
+royal officials, and plundered the royal parks. But an army had already
+mustered in great force at the king's summons, while Leicester found
+himself deserted by the bulk of the baronage. Every day brought news of
+ill. A detachment from Scotland joined Henry's forces. The younger De
+Montfort was taken prisoner. Northampton was captured, the king raised the
+siege of Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl Simon's only saved London
+itself from a surprise by Edward. But, betrayed as he was, the Earl
+remained firm to the cause. He would fight to the end, he said, even were
+he and his sons left to fight alone. With an army reinforced by 15,000
+Londoners, he marched in May to the relief of the Cinque Ports which were
+now threatened by the king. Even on the march he was forsaken by many of
+the nobles who followed him. Halting at Fletching in Sussex, a few miles
+from Lewes, where the royal army was encamped, Earl Simon with the young
+Earl of Gloucester offered the king compensation for all damage if he would
+observe the Provisions. Henry's answer was one of defiance, and though
+numbers were against him, the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a
+soldier reversed the advantages of the ground; marching at dawn on the 14th
+of May he seized the heights eastward of the town, and moved down these
+slopes to an attack. His men with white crosses on back and breast knelt in
+prayer before the battle opened, and all but reached the town before their
+approach was perceived. Edward however opened the fight by a furious charge
+which broke the Londoners on Leicester's left. In the bitterness of his
+hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles,
+slaughtering three thousand men. But he returned to find the battle lost.
+Crowded in the narrow space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space
+broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, the royalist centre
+and left were crushed by Earl Simon. The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the
+Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, "makede him a castel
+of a mulne post" ("he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels" goes on
+the sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.
+Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father's surrender.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's rule]
+
+The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. "Now
+England breathes in the hope of liberty," sang a poet of the time; "the
+English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and
+their foes are vanquished." But the moderation of the terms agreed upon in
+the Mise of Lewes, a convention between the king and his captors, shows
+Simon's sense of the difficulties of his position. The question of the
+Provisions was again to be submitted to arbitration; and a parliament in
+June, to which four knights were summoned from every county, placed the
+administration till this arbitration was complete in the hands of a new
+council of nine to be nominated by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester
+and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester. Responsibility to the community was
+provided for by the declaration of a right in the body of barons and
+prelates to remove either of the Three Electors, who in turn could displace
+or appoint the members of the Council. Such a constitution was of a
+different order from the cumbrous and oligarchical committees of 1258. But
+it had little time to work in. The plans for a fresh arbitration broke
+down. Lewis refused to review his decision, and all schemes for setting
+fresh judges between the king and his people were defeated by a formal
+condemnation of the barons' cause issued by the Pope. Triumphant as he was
+indeed Earl Simon's difficulties thickened every day. The queen with
+Archbishop Boniface gathered an army in France for an invasion; Roger
+Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms and only held in check by
+Llewelyn. It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king,
+yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. The imprisonment
+too gave a shock to public feeling which thinned the Earl's ranks. In the
+new Parliament which he called at the opening of 1265 the weakness of the
+patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only
+twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and
+twenty ecclesiastics.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Summons of the Commons]
+
+But it was just this sense of his weakness which prompted the Earl to an
+act that has done more than any incident of this struggle to immortalize
+his name. Had the strife been simply a strife for power between the king
+and the baronage the victory of either would have been equally fatal in its
+results. The success of the one would have doomed England to a royal
+despotism, that of the other to a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our
+freedom the English baronage had been brought too low by the policy of the
+kings to be able to withstand the crown single-handed. From the first
+moment of the contest it had been forced to make its cause a national one.
+The summons of two knights from each county, elected in its county court,
+to a Parliament in 1254, even before the opening of the struggle, was a
+recognition of the political weight of the country gentry which was
+confirmed by the summons of four knights from every county to the
+Parliament assembled after the battle of Lewes. The Provisions of Oxford,
+in stipulating for attendance and counsel on the part of twelve delegates
+of the "commonalty," gave the first indication of a yet wider appeal to the
+people at large. But it was the weakness of his party among the baronage at
+this great crisis which drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of
+mighty issue in our history. As before, he summoned two knights from every
+county. But he created a new force in English politics when he summoned to
+sit beside them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of
+delegates from the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any
+matter respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ
+issued by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit
+beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the parliament
+of the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's difficulties]
+
+It is only this great event however which enables us to understand the
+large and prescient nature of Earl Simon's designs. Hardly a few months had
+passed away since the victory of Lewes when the burghers took their seats
+at Westminster, yet his government was tottering to its fall. We know
+little of the Parliament's acts. It seems to have chosen Simon as Justiciar
+and to have provided for Edward's liberation, though he was still to live
+under surveillance at Hereford and to surrender his earldom of Chester to
+Simon, who was thus able to communicate with his Welsh allies. The Earl met
+the dangers from without with complete success. In September 1264 a general
+muster of the national forces on Barham Down and a contrary wind put an end
+to the projects of invasion entertained by the mercenaries whom the queen
+had collected in Flanders; the threats of France died away into
+negotiations; the Papal Legate was forbidden to cross the Channel, and his
+bulls of excommunication were flung into the sea. But the difficulties at
+home grew more formidable every day. The restraint upon Henry and Edward
+jarred against the national feeling of loyalty, and estranged the mass of
+Englishmen who always side with the weak. Small as the patriotic party
+among the barons had been from the first, it grew smaller as dissensions
+broke out over the spoils of victory. The Earl's justice and resolve to
+secure the public peace told heavily against him. John Giffard left him
+because he refused to allow him to exact ransom from a prisoner, contrary
+to the agreement made after Lewes. A greater danger opened when the young
+Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the estates of the foreigners,
+held himself aloof from the Justiciar, and resented Leicester's prohibition
+of a tournament, his naming the wardens of the royal castles by his own
+authority, his holding Edward's fortresses on the Welsh marches by his own
+garrisons.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and Gloucester]
+
+Gloucester's later conduct proves the wisdom of Leicester's precautions. In
+the spring Parliament of 1265 he openly charged the Earl with violating the
+Mise of Lewes, with tyranny, and with aiming at the crown. Before its close
+he withdrew to his own lands in the west and secretly allied himself with
+Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Barons. Earl Simon soon followed him to the
+west, taking with him the king and Edward. He moved along the Severn,
+securing its towns, advanced westward to Hereford, and was marching at the
+end of May along bad roads into the heart of South Wales to attack the
+fortresses of Earl Gilbert in Glamorgan when Edward suddenly made his
+escape from Hereford and joined Gloucester at Ludlow. The moment had been
+skilfully chosen, and Edward showed a rare ability in the movements by
+which he took advantage of the Earl's position. Moving rapidly along the
+Severn he seized Gloucester and the bridges across the river, destroyed the
+ships by which Leicester strove to escape across the Channel to Bristol,
+and cut him off altogether from England. By this movement too he placed
+himself between the Earl and his son Simon, who was advancing from the east
+to his father's relief. Turning rapidly on this second force Edward
+surprised it at Kenilworth and drove it with heavy loss within the walls of
+the castle. But the success was more than compensated by the opportunity
+which his absence gave to the Earl of breaking the line of the Severn.
+Taken by surprise and isolated as he was, Simon had been forced to seek for
+aid and troops in an avowed alliance with Llewelyn, and it was with Welsh
+reinforcements that he turned to the east. But the seizure of his ships and
+of the bridges of the Severn held him a prisoner in Edward's grasp, and a
+fierce attack drove him back, with broken and starving forces, into the
+Welsh hills. In utter despair he struck northward to Hereford; but the
+absence of Edward now enabled him on the 2nd of August to throw his troops
+in boats across the Severn below Worcester. The news drew Edward quickly
+back in a fruitless counter-march to the river, for the Earl had already
+reached Evesham by a long night march on the morning of the 4th, while his
+son, relieved in turn by Edward's counter-march, had pushed in the same
+night to the little town of Alcester. The two armies were now but some ten
+miles apart, and their junction seemed secured. But both were spent with
+long marching, and while the Earl, listening reluctantly to the request of
+the King who accompanied him, halted at Evesham for mass and dinner, the
+army of the younger Simon halted for the same purpose at Alcester.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Evesham]
+
+"Those two dinners doleful were, alas!" sings Robert of Gloucester; for
+through the same memorable night Edward was hurrying back from the Severn
+by country cross-lanes to seize the fatal gap that lay between them. As
+morning broke his army lay across the road that led northward from Evesham
+to Alcester. Evesham lies in a loop of the river Avon where it bends to the
+south; and a height on which Edward ranged his troops closed the one outlet
+from it save across the river. But a force had been thrown over the river
+under Mortimer to seize the bridges, and all retreat was thus finally cut
+off. The approach of Edward's army called Simon to the front, and for the
+moment he took it for his son's. Though the hope soon died away a touch of
+soldierly pride moved him as he recognised in the orderly advance of his
+enemies a proof of his own training. "By the arm of St. James," he cried,
+"they come on in wise fashion, but it was from me that they learnt it." A
+glance however satisfied him of the hopelessness of a struggle; it was
+impossible for a handful of horsemen with a mob of half-armed Welshmen to
+resist the disciplined knighthood of the royal army. "Let us commend our
+souls to God," Simon said to the little group around him, "for our bodies
+are the foe's." He bade Hugh Despenser and the rest of his comrades fly
+from the field. "If he died," was the noble answer, "they had no will to
+live." In three hours the butchery was over. The Welsh fled at the first
+onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in the cornfields and
+gardens where they sought refuge. The little group of knights around Simon
+fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. So
+terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but gained the hill-top
+when a lance-thrust brought his horse to the ground, but Simon still
+rejected the summons to yield till a blow from behind felled him mortally
+wounded to the ground. Then with a last cry of "It is God's grace," the
+soul of the great patriot passed away.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Royalist reaction]
+
+The triumphant blare of trumpets which welcomed the rescued king into
+Evesham, "his men weeping for joy," rang out in bitter contrast to the
+mourning of the realm. It sounded like the announcement of a reign of
+terror. The rights and laws for which men had toiled and fought so long
+seemed to have been swept away in an hour. Every town which had supported
+Earl Simon was held to be at the king's mercy, its franchises to be
+forfeited. The Charter of Lynn was annulled; London was marked out as the
+special object of Henry's vengeance, and the farms and merchandise of its
+citizens were seized as first-fruits of its plunder. The darkness which on
+that fatal morning hid their books from the monks of Evesham as they sang
+in choir was but a presage of the gloom which fell on the religious houses.
+From Ramsey, from Evesham, from St. Alban's rose the same cry of havoc and
+rapine. But the plunder of monk and burgess was little to the vast sentence
+of confiscation which the mere fact of rebellion was held to have passed on
+all the adherents of Earl Simon. To "disinherit" these of their lands was
+to confiscate half the estates of the landed gentry of England; but the
+hotter royalists declared them disinherited, and Henry was quick to lavish
+their lands away on favourites and foreigners. The very chroniclers of
+their party recall the pillage with shame. But all thought of resistance
+lay hushed in a general terror. Even the younger Simon "saw no other rede"
+than to release his prisoners. His army, after finishing its meal, was
+again on its march to join the Earl when the news of his defeat met it,
+heralded by a strange darkness that, rising suddenly in the north-west and
+following as it were on Edward's track, served to shroud the mutilations
+and horrors of the battle-field. The news was soon fatally confirmed. Simon
+himself could see from afar his father's head borne off on a spear-point to
+be mocked at Wigmore. But the pursuit streamed away southward and westward
+through the streets of Tewkesbury, heaped with corpses of the panic-struck
+Welshmen whom the townsmen slaughtered without pity; and there was no
+attack as the little force fell back through the darkness and big
+thunder-drops in despair upon Kenilworth. "I may hang up my axe," are the
+bitter words which a poet attributes to their leader, "for feebly have I
+gone"; and once within the castle he gave way to a wild sorrow, day after
+day tasting neither meat nor drink.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward]
+
+He was roused into action again by news of the shameful indignities which
+the Marcher Lords had offered to the body of the great Earl before whom
+they had trembled so long. The knights around him broke out at the tidings
+in a passionate burst of fury, and clamoured for the blood of Richard of
+Cornwall and his son, who were prisoners in the castle. But Simon had
+enough nobleness left to interpose. "To God and him alone was it owing"
+Richard owned afterwards, "that I was snatched from death." The captives
+were not only saved, but set free. A Parliament had been called at
+Winchester at the opening of September, and its mere assembly promised an
+end to the reign of utter lawlessness. A powerful party, too, was known to
+exist in the royal camp which, hostile as it had shown itself to Earl
+Simon, shared his love for English liberties, and the liberation of Richard
+was sure to aid its efforts. At the head of this party stood the young Earl
+of Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, to whose action above all the Earl's
+overthrow was due. And with Gilbert stood Edward himself. The passion for
+law, the instinct of good government, which were to make his reign so
+memorable in our history, had declared themselves from the first. He had
+sided with the barons at the outset of their struggle with Henry; he had
+striven to keep his father true to the Provisions of Oxford. It was only
+when the figure of Earl Simon seemed to tower above that of Henry himself,
+when the Crown seemed falling into bondage, that Edward passed to the royal
+side; and now that the danger which he dreaded was over he returned to his
+older attitude. In the first flush of victory, while the doom of Simon was
+as yet unknown, Edward had stood alone in desiring his captivity against
+the cry of the Marcher Lords for his blood. When all was done he wept over
+the corpse of his cousin and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and followed
+the Earl's body to the tomb. But great as was Edward's position after the
+victory of Evesham, his moderate counsels were as yet of little avail. His
+efforts in fact were met by those of Henry's second son, Edmund, who had
+received the lands and earldom of Earl Simon, and whom the dread of any
+restoration of the house of De Montfort set at the head of the
+ultra-royalists. Nor was any hope of moderation to be found in the
+Parliament which met in September 1265. It met in the usual temper of a
+restoration-Parliament to legalize the outrages of the previous month. The
+prisoners who had been released from the dungeons of the barons poured into
+Winchester to add fresh violence to the demands of the Marchers. The wives
+of the captive loyalists and the widows of the slain were summoned to give
+fresh impulse to the reaction. Their place of meeting added fuel to the
+fiery passions of the throng, for Winchester was fresh from its pillage by
+the younger Simon on his way to Kenilworth, and its stubborn loyalty must
+have been fanned into a flame by the losses it had endured. In such an
+assembly no voice of moderation could find a hearing. The four bishops who
+favoured the national cause, the bishops of London and Lincoln, of
+Worcester and Chichester, were excluded from it, and the heads of the
+religious houses were summoned for the mere purpose of extortion. Its
+measures were but a confirmation of the violence which had been wrought.
+All grants made during the king's "captivity" were revoked. The house of De
+Montfort was banished from the realm. The charter of London was annulled.
+The adherents of Earl Simon were disinherited and seizin of their lands was
+given to the king.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Simon's Miracles]
+
+Henry at once appointed commissioners to survey and take possession of his
+spoil while he moved to Windsor to triumph in the humiliation of London.
+Its mayor and forty of its chief citizens waited in the castle yard only to
+be thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and Henry entered his
+capital in triumph as into an enemy's city. The surrender of Dover came to
+fill his cup of joy, for Richard and Amaury of Montfort had sailed with the
+Earl's treasure to enlist foreign mercenaries, and it was by this port that
+their force was destined to land. But a rising of the prisoners detained
+there compelled its surrender in October, and the success of the royalists
+seemed complete. In reality their difficulties were but beginning. Their
+triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious sentiment of
+the time, and religion avenged itself in its own way. Everywhere the Earl's
+death was looked upon as a martyrdom; and monk and friar united in praying
+for the souls of the men who fell at Evesham as for soldiers of Christ. It
+was soon whispered that heaven was attesting the sanctity of De Montfort by
+miracles at his tomb. How great was the effect of this belief was seen in
+the efforts of King and Pope to suppress the miracles, and in their
+continuance not only through the reign of Edward the First but even in the
+days of his successor. But its immediate result was a sudden revival of
+hope. "Sighs are changed into songs of praise," breaks out a monk of the
+time, "and the greatness of our former joy has come to life again!" Nor was
+it in miracles alone that the "faithful," as they proudly styled
+themselves, began to look for relief "from the oppression of the
+malignants." A monk of St. Alban's who was penning a eulogy of Earl Simon
+in the midst of this uproar saw the rise of a new spirit of resistance in
+the streets of the little town. In dread of war it was guarded and strongly
+closed with bolts and bars, and refused entrance to all strangers, and
+above all to horsemen, who wished to pass through. The Constable of
+Hertford, an old foe of the townsmen, boasted that spite of bolts and bars
+he would enter the place and carry off four of the best villeins captive.
+He contrived to make his way in; but as he loitered idly about a butcher
+who passed by heard him ask his men how the wind stood. The butcher guessed
+his design to burn the town, and felled him to the ground. The blow roused
+the townsmen. They secured the Constable and his followers, struck off
+their heads, and fixed them at the four corners of the borough.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Younger Simon]
+
+The popular reaction gave fresh heart to the younger Simon. Quitting
+Kenilworth, he joined in November John D'Eyvill and Baldewin Wake in the
+Isle of Axholme where the Disinherited were gathering in arms. So fast did
+horse and foot flow in to him that Edward himself hurried into Lincolnshire
+to meet this new danger. He saw that the old strife was just breaking out
+again. The garrison of Kenilworth scoured the country; the men of the
+Cinque Ports, putting wives and children on board their barks, swept the
+Channel and harried the coasts; while Llewelyn, who had brought about the
+dissolution of Parliament by a raid upon Chester, butchered the forces sent
+against him and was master of the border. The one thing needed to link the
+forces of resistance together was a head, and such a head the appearance of
+Simon at Axholme seemed to promise. But Edward was resolute in his plan of
+conciliation. Arriving before the camp at the close of 1265, he at once
+entered into negotiations with his cousin, and prevailed on him to quit the
+island and appear before the king. Richard of Cornwall welcomed Simon at
+the court, he presented him to Henry as the saviour of his life, and on his
+promise to surrender Kenilworth Henry gave him the kiss of peace. In spite
+of the opposition of Roger Mortimer and the Marcher Lords success seemed to
+be crowning this bold stroke of the peace party when the Earl of Gloucester
+interposed. Desirous as he was of peace, the blood of De Montfort lay
+between him and the Earl's sons, and the safety of the one lay in the ruin
+of the other. In the face of this danger Earl Gilbert threw his weight into
+the scale of the ultra-royalists, and peace became impossible. The question
+of restitution was shelved by a reference to arbitrators; and Simon,
+detained in spite of a safe-conduct, moved in Henry's train at Christmas to
+witness the surrender of Kenilworth which had been stipulated as the price
+of his full reconciliation with the king. But hot blood was now stirred
+again on both sides. The garrison replied to the royal summons by a refusal
+to surrender. They had received ward of the castle, they said, not from
+Simon but from the Countess, and to none but her would they give it up. The
+refusal was not likely to make Simon's position an easier one. On his
+return to London the award of the arbitrators bound him to quit the realm
+and not to return save with the assent of king and baronage when all were
+at peace. He remained for a while in free custody at London; but warnings
+that he was doomed to lifelong imprisonment drove him to flight, and he
+finally sought a refuge over sea.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Ban of Kenilworth]
+
+His escape set England again on fire. Llewelyn wasted the border; the
+Cinque Ports held the sea; the garrison of Kenilworth pushed their raids as
+far as Oxford; Baldewin Wake with a band of the Disinherited threw himself
+into the woods and harried the eastern counties; Sir Adam Gurdon, a knight
+of gigantic size and renowned prowess, wasted with a smaller party the
+shires of the south. In almost every county bands of outlaws were seeking a
+livelihood in rapine and devastation, while the royal treasury stood empty
+and the enormous fine imposed upon London had been swept into the coffers
+of French usurers. But a stronger hand than the king's was now at the head
+of affairs, and Edward met his assailants with untiring energy. King
+Richard's son, Henry of Almaine, was sent with a large force to the north;
+Mortimer hurried to hold the Welsh border; Edmund was despatched to Warwick
+to hold Kenilworth in check; while Edward himself marched at the opening of
+March to the south. The Berkshire woods were soon cleared, and at
+Whitsuntide Edward succeeded in dispersing Adam Gurdon's band and in
+capturing its renowned leader in single combat. The last blow was already
+given to the rising in the north, where Henry of Almaine surprised the
+Disinherited at Chesterfield and took their leader, the Earl of Derby, in
+his bed. Though Edmund had done little but hold the Kenilworth knights in
+check, the submission of the rest of the country now enabled the royal army
+to besiege it in force. But the king was penniless, and the Parliament
+which he called to replenish his treasury in August showed the resolve of
+the nation that the strife should cease. They would first establish peace,
+if peace were possible, they said, and then answer the king's demand.
+Twelve commissioners, with Earl Gilbert at their head, were appointed on
+Henry's assent to arrange terms on reconciliation. They at once decided
+that none should be utterly disinherited for their part in the troubles,
+but that liberty of redemption should be left open to all. Furious at the
+prospect of being forced to disgorge their spoil, Mortimer and the
+ultra-royalists broke out in mad threats of violence, even against the life
+of the Papal legate who had pressed for the reconciliation. But the power
+of the ultra-royalists was over. The general resolve was not to be shaken
+by the clamour of a faction, and Mortimer's rout at Brecknock by Llewelyn,
+the one defeat that chequered the tide of success, had damaged that
+leader's influence. Backed by Edward and Earl Gilbert, the legate met their
+opposition with a threat of excommunication, and Mortimer withdrew sullenly
+from the camp. Fresh trouble in the country and the seizure of the Isle of
+Ely by a band of the Disinherited quickened the labours of the Twelve. At
+the close of September they pronounced their award, restoring the lands to
+all who made submission on a graduated scale of redemption, promising
+indemnity for all wrong done during the troubles, and leaving the
+restoration of the house of De Montfort to the royal will. But to these
+provisions was added an emphatic demand that "the king fully keep and
+observe those liberties of the Church, charters of liberties, and forest
+charters, which he is expressly and by his own mouth bound to preserve and
+keep." "Let the King," they add, "establish on a lasting foundation those
+concessions which he has hitherto made of his own will and not on
+compulsion, and those needful ordinances which have been devised by his
+subjects and by his own good pleasure."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Close of the Struggle]
+
+With this Award the struggle came to an end. The garrison of Kenilworth
+held out indeed till November, and the full benefit of the Ban was only
+secured when Earl Gilbert in the opening of the following year suddenly
+appeared in arms and occupied London. But the Earl was satisfied, the
+Disinherited were at last driven from Ely, and Llewelyn was brought to
+submission by the appearance of an army at Shrewsbury. All was over by the
+close of 1267. His father's age and weakness, his own brilliant military
+successes, left Edward practically in possession of the royal power; and
+his influence at once made itself felt. There was no attempt to return to
+the misrule of Henry's reign, to his projects of continental aggrandizement
+or internal despotism. The constitutional system of government for which
+the Barons had fought was finally adopted by the Crown, and the Parliament
+of Marlborough which assembled in November 1267 renewed the provisions by
+which the baronage had remedied the chief abuses of the time in their
+Provisions of Oxford and Westminster. The appointment of all officers of
+state indeed was jealously reserved to the crown. But the royal expenditure
+was brought within bounds. Taxation was only imposed with the assent of the
+Great Council. So utterly was the land at rest that Edward felt himself
+free to take the cross in 1268 and to join the Crusade which was being
+undertaken by St. Lewis of France. He reached Tunis only to find Lewis dead
+and his enterprise a failure, wintered in Sicily, made his way to Acre in
+the spring of 1271, and spent more than a year in exploits which want of
+force prevented from growing into a serious campaign. He was already on his
+way home when the death of Henry the Third in November 1272 called him to
+the throne.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+EDWARD THE FIRST
+1272-1307
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward's Temper]
+
+In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object
+of an almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national
+king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away,
+when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended
+for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger but
+an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair
+or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward's very
+temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the
+typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and
+imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged,
+stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too,
+just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant
+of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. It is
+this oneness with the character of his people which parts the temper of
+Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house. He inherited
+indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his
+punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who
+ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped
+dead from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard
+selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the
+house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered; and for the
+most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful,
+averse from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever asked mercy of me," he
+said in his old age, "and was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of
+his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the
+bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to
+drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. "It is I
+who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty
+fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink."
+Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange
+tenderness and sensitiveness to affection. Every subject throughout his
+realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his
+father's death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of
+vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as
+memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier
+rested. "I loved her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's
+friend, the Abbot of Cluny; "I do not cease to love her now she is dead."
+And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All
+the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign kings disappeared in Edward.
+He was the first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with
+a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them
+we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand
+in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England
+understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels
+between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as
+they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection
+of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene
+during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face
+with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned
+himself frankly in the wrong.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Influence of Chivalry]
+
+But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and
+outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in
+Edward's career. His reign was a time in which a foreign, influence told
+strongly on our manners, our literature, our national spirit, for the
+sudden rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy was now making
+its influence dominant in Western Europe. The "chivalry" so familiar to us
+in the pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of
+heroism, love, and courtesy before which all depth and reality of nobleness
+disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest
+caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially
+of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward's nature from which the
+baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety,
+save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere,
+while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence
+of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of
+his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable
+chivalry of his day. His frame was that of a born soldier--tall,
+deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action, and he
+shared to the full his people's love of venture and hard fighting. When he
+encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he forced him single-handed to beg
+for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting
+in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself
+to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. His fame as a general
+seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. At
+his "Round Table of Kenilworth" a hundred lords and ladies, "clad all in
+silk," renewed the faded glories of Arthur's Court. The false air of
+romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into
+outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when
+rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on
+Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal
+influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its
+exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. "Knight
+without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the
+burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common
+robber.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Influence of Legality]
+
+The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power over Edward's mind than
+the French conception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer
+class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance
+into subjection, loose ties such as commendation into a definite vassalage.
+But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis
+and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman Law were
+brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time. When the "sacred
+majesty" of the Caesars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal
+head of a feudal baronage every constitutional relation was changed. The
+"defiance" by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason,
+his after resistance "sacrilege." That Edward could appreciate what was
+sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of
+our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to
+his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He
+was never wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice,
+fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law.
+The high conception of royalty which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with
+this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or
+liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while
+his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was
+incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which
+made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a
+claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason
+the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their
+fathers had borne.
+
+
+[Sidenote: His Moral Grandeur]
+
+It is in the anomalies of such a character as this, in its strange mingling
+of justice and wrong-doing, of grandeur and littleness, that we must look
+for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in
+Edward's conduct and policy. But what none of these anomalies can hide from
+us is the height of moral temper which shows itself in the tenor of his
+rule. Edward was every inch a king; but his notion of kingship was a lofty
+and a noble one. He loved power; he believed in his sovereign rights and
+clung to them with a stubborn tenacity. But his main end in clinging to
+them was the welfare of his people. Nothing better proves the self-command
+which he drew from the purpose he set before him than his freedom from the
+common sin of great rulers--the lust of military glory. He was the first of
+our kings since William the Conqueror who combined military genius with
+political capacity; but of the warrior's temper, of the temper that finds
+delight in war, he had little or none. His freedom from it was the more
+remarkable that Edward was a great soldier. His strategy in the campaign
+before Evesham marked him as a consummate general. Earl Simon was forced to
+admire the skill of his advance on the fatal field, and the operations by
+which he met the risings that followed it were a model of rapidity and
+military grasp. In his Welsh campaigns he was soon to show a tenacity and
+force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could
+head a furious charge of horse as at Lewes, or organize a commissariat
+which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In
+his old age he was quick to discover the value of the English archery and
+to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But master as he was of the
+art of war, and forced from time to time to show his mastery in great
+campaigns, in no single instance was he the assailant. He fought only when
+he was forced to fight; and when fighting was over he turned back quietly
+to the work of administration and the making of laws.
+
+
+[Sidenote: His Political Genius]
+
+War in fact was with Edward simply a means of carrying out the ends of
+statesmanship, and it was in the character of his statesmanship that his
+real greatness made itself felt. His policy was an English policy; he was
+firm to retain what was left of the French dominion of his race, but he
+abandoned from the first all dreams of recovering the wider dominions which
+his grandfather had lost. His mind was not on that side of the Channel, but
+on this. He concentrated his energies on the consolidation and good
+government of England itself. We can only fairly judge the annexation of
+Wales or his attempt to annex Scotland if we look on his efforts in either
+quarter as parts of the same scheme of national administration to which we
+owe his final establishment of our judicature, our legislation, our
+parliament. The character of his action was no doubt determined in great
+part by the general mood of his age, an age whose special task and aim
+seemed to be that of reducing to distinct form the principles which had
+sprung into a new and vigorous life during the age which preceded it. As
+the opening of the thirteenth century had been an age of founders,
+creators, discoverers, so its close was an age of lawyers, of rulers such
+as St. Lewis of France or Alfonso the Wise of Castille, organizers,
+administrators, framers of laws and institutions. It was to this class that
+Edward himself belonged. He had little of creative genius, of political
+originality, but he possessed in a high degree the passion for order and
+good government, the faculty of organization, and a love of law which broke
+out even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped. In the
+judicial reforms to which so much of his attention was directed he showed
+himself, if not an "English Justinian," at any rate a clear-sighted and
+judicious man of business, developing, reforming, bringing into a shape
+which has borne the test of five centuries' experience the institutions of
+his predecessors. If the excellence of a statesman's work is to be measured
+by its duration and the faculty it has shown of adapting itself to the
+growth and developement of a nation, then the work of Edward rises to the
+highest standard of excellence. Our law courts preserve to this very day
+the form which he gave them. Mighty as has been the growth of our
+Parliament, it has grown on the lines which he laid down. The great roll of
+English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the Statutes of Edward.
+The routine of the first Henry, the administrative changes which had been
+imposed on the nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second,
+were transformed under Edward into a political organization with
+carefully-defined limits, directed not by the king's will alone but by the
+political impulse of the people at large. His social legislation was based
+in the same fashion on principles which had already been brought into
+practical working by Henry the Second. It was no doubt in great measure
+owing to this practical sense of its financial and administrative value
+rather than to any foresight of its political importance that we owe
+Edward's organization of our Parliament. But if the institutions which we
+commonly associate with his name owe their origin to others, they owe their
+form and their perpetuity to him.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Constitutional Aspect of his Reign]
+
+The king's English policy, like his English name, was in fact the sign of a
+new epoch. England was made. The long period of national formation had come
+practically to an end. With the reign of Edward begins the constitutional
+England in which we live. It is not that any chasm separates our history
+before it from our history after it as the chasm of the Revolution divides
+the history of France, for we have traced the rudiments of our constitution
+to the first moment of the English settlement in Britain. But it is with
+these as with our language. The tongue of AElfred is the very tongue we
+speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it has to be
+learned like the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the English of
+Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the historian
+and philologer can study the origin and developement of our national
+speech, in the last a schoolboy can enjoy the story of Troilus and Cressida
+or listen to the gay chat of the Canterbury Pilgrims. In precisely the same
+way a knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for the right
+understanding of later legislation, its origin and its developement, while
+the principles of our Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in
+the Meetings of Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great Council of barons
+after it. But the Parliaments which Edward gathered at the close of his
+reign are not merely illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they
+are absolutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen's. At
+the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons, the Courts of Justice, the
+forms of public administration, the relations of Church and State, all
+local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, in great measure the
+framework of society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially
+retain. In a word the long struggle of the constitution for actual
+existence has come to an end. The contests which follow are not contests
+that tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual fabric of our
+institutions; they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which
+England has learned and is still learning how best to use and how wisely to
+develope the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the balance
+of its social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms
+to the varying conditions of the time.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Earlier Finance]
+
+The news of his father's death found Edward at Capua in the opening of
+1273; but the quiet of his realm under a regency of which Roger Mortimer
+was the practical head left him free to move slowly homewards. Two of his
+acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his mind was already
+dwelling on the state of English finance and of English law. His visit to
+the Pope at Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission to levy from the
+clergy a tenth of their income for the three coming years, while he drew
+from Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco Accursi, to aid in the task
+of legal reform. At Paris he did homage to Philip the Third for his French
+possessions, and then turning southward he devoted a year to the ordering
+of Gascony. It was not till the summer of 1274 that the king reached
+England. But he had already planned the work he had to do, and the measures
+which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the spirit in
+which he was to set about it. The First Statute of Westminster was rather a
+code than a statute. It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was
+an attempt to summarize a number of previous enactments contained in the
+Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the Statute of Marlborough, as
+well as to embody some of the administrative measures of Henry the Second
+and his son. But a more pressing need than that of a codification of the
+law was the need of a reorganization of finance. While the necessities of
+the Crown were growing with the widening of its range of administrative
+action, the revenues of the Crown admitted of no corresponding expansion.
+In the earliest times of our history the outgoings of the Crown were as
+small as its income. All local expenses, whether for justice or road-making
+or fortress-building, were paid by local funds; and the national "fyrd"
+served at its own cost in the field. The produce of a king's private
+estates with the provisions due to him from the public lands scattered over
+each county, whether gathered by the king himself as he moved over his
+realm, or as in later days fixed at a stated rate and collected by his
+sheriff, were sufficient to defray the mere expenses of the Court. The
+Danish wars gave the first shock to this simple system. To raise a ransom
+which freed the land from the invader, the first land-tax, under the name
+of the Danegeld, was laid on every hide of ground; and to this national
+taxation the Norman kings added the feudal burthens of the new military
+estates created by the Conquest, reliefs paid on inheritance, profits of
+marriages and wardship, and the three feudal aids. But foreign warfare soon
+exhausted these means of revenue; the barons and bishops in their Great
+Council were called on at each emergency for a grant from their lands, and
+at each grant a corresponding demand was made by the king as a landlord on
+the towns, as lying for the most part in the royal demesne. The cessation
+of Danegeld under Henry the Second and his levy of scutage made little
+change in the general incidence of taxation: it still fell wholly on the
+land, for even the townsmen paid as holders of their tenements. But a new
+principle of taxation was disclosed in the tithe levied for a Crusade at
+the close of Henry's reign. Land was no longer the only source of wealth.
+The growth of national prosperity, of trade and commerce, was creating a
+mass of personal property which offered irresistible temptations to the
+Angevin financiers. The old revenue from landed property was restricted and
+lessened by usage and compositions. Scutage was only due for foreign
+campaigns: the feudal aids only on rare and stated occasions: and though
+the fines from the shire-courts grew with the growth of society the dues
+from the public lands were fixed and incapable of developement. But no
+usage fettered the Crown in dealing with personal property, and its growth
+in value promised a growing revenue. From the close of Henry the Second's
+reign therefore this became the most common form of taxation. Grants of
+from a seventh to a thirtieth of moveables, household-property, and stock
+were demanded; and it was the necessity of procuring their assent to these
+demands which enabled the baronage through the reign of Henry the Third to
+bring a financial pressure to bear on the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Indirect Taxation]
+
+But in addition to these two forms of direct taxation indirect taxation
+also was coming more and more to the front. The right of the king to grant
+licences to bring goods into or to trade within the realm, a right
+springing from the need for his protection felt by the strangers who came
+there for purposes of traffic, laid the foundation of our taxes on imports.
+Those on exports were only a part of the general system of taxing personal
+property which we have already noticed. How tempting this source of revenue
+was proving we see from a provision of the Great Charter which forbids the
+levy of more than the ancient customs on merchants entering or leaving the
+realm. Commerce was in fact growing with the growing wealth of the people.
+The crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which date from this period
+shows the prosperity of the country. Christian architecture reached its
+highest beauty in the opening of Edward's reign; a reign marked by the
+completion of the abbey church of Westminster and of the cathedral church
+at Salisbury. An English noble was proud to be styled "an incomparable
+builder," while some traces of the art which was rising into life across
+the Alps flowed in, it may be, with the Italian ecclesiastics whom the
+Papacy forced on the English Church. The shrine of the Confessor at
+Westminster, the mosaic pavement beside the altar of the abbey, the
+paintings on the walls of its chapterhouse remind us of the schools which
+were springing up under Giotto and the Pisans. But the wealth which this
+art progress shows drew trade to English shores. England was as yet simply
+an agricultural country. Gascony sent her wines; her linens were furnished
+by the looms of Ghent and Liege; Genoese vessels brought to her fairs the
+silks, the velvets, the glass of Italy. In the barks of the Hanse merchants
+came fur and amber from the Baltic, herrings, pitch, timber, and naval
+stores from the countries of the north. Spain sent us iron and war-horses.
+Milan sent armour. The great Venetian merchant-galleys touched the southern
+coasts and left in our ports the dates of Egypt, the figs and currants of
+Greece, the silk of Sicily, the sugar of Cyprus and Crete, the spices of
+the Eastern seas. Capital too came from abroad. The bankers of Florence and
+Lucca were busy with loans to the court or vast contracts with the
+wool-growers. The bankers of Cahors had already dealt a death-blow to the
+usury of the Jew. Against all this England had few exports to set. The lead
+supplied by the mines of Derbyshire, the salt of the Worcestershire
+springs, the iron of the Weald, were almost wholly consumed at home. The
+one metal export of any worth was that of tin from the tin-mines of
+Cornwall. But the production of wool was fast becoming a main element of
+the nation's wealth. Flanders, the great manufacturing country of the time,
+lay fronting our eastern coast; and with this market close at hand the
+pastures of England found more and more profit in the supply of wool. The
+Cistercian order which possessed vast ranges of moorland in Yorkshire
+became famous as wool-growers; and their wool had been seized for Richard's
+ransom. The Florentine merchants were developing this trade by their
+immense contracts; we find a single company of merchants contracting for
+the purchase of the Cistercian wool throughout the year. It was after
+counsel with the Italian bankers that Edward devised his scheme for drawing
+a permanent revenue from this source. In the Parliament of 1275 he obtained
+the grant of half a mark, or six shillings and eightpence, on each sack of
+wool exported; and this grant, a grant memorable as forming the first legal
+foundation of our customs-revenue, at once relieved the necessities of the
+Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Welsh Campaign]
+
+The grant of the wool tax enabled Edward in fact to deal with the great
+difficulty of his realm. The troubles of the Barons' war, the need which
+Earl Simon felt of Llewelyn's alliance to hold in check the Marcher Barons,
+had all but shaken off from Wales the last traces of dependence. Even at
+the close of the war the threat of an attack from the now united kingdom
+only forced Llewelyn to submission on a practical acknowledgement of his
+sovereignty. Although the title which Llewelyn ap Jorwerth claimed of
+Prince of North Wales was recognized by the English court in the earlier
+days of Henry the Third, it was withdrawn after 1229 and its claimant known
+only as Prince of Aberffraw. But the loftier title of Prince of Wales which
+Llewelyn ap Gruffydd assumed in 1256 was formally conceded to him in 1267,
+and his right to receive homage from the other nobles of his principality
+was formally sanctioned. Near however as he seemed to the final realization
+of his aims, Llewelyn was still a vassal of the English Crown, and the
+accession of Edward to the throne was at once followed by the demand of
+homage. But the summons was fruitless; and the next two years were wasted
+in as fruitless negotiation. The kingdom, however, was now well in hand.
+The royal treasury was filled again, and in 1277 Edward marched on North
+Wales. The fabric of Welsh greatness fell at a single blow. The chieftains
+who had so lately sworn fealty to Llewelyn in the southern and central
+parts of the country deserted him to join his English enemies in their
+attack; an English fleet reduced Anglesea; and the Prince was cooped up in
+his mountain fastnesses and forced to throw himself on Edward's mercy. With
+characteristic moderation the conqueror contented himself with adding to
+the English dominions the coast-district as far as Conway and with
+providing that the title of Prince of Wales should cease at Llewelyn's
+death. A heavy fine which he had incurred by his refusal to do homage was
+remitted; and Eleanor, a daughter of Earl Simon of Montfort whom he had
+sought as his wife but who had been arrested on her way to him, was wedded
+to the Prince at Edward's court.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Judicial Reforms]
+
+For four years all was quiet across the Welsh Marches, and Edward was able
+again to turn his attention to the work of internal reconstruction. It is
+probably to this time, certainly to the earlier years of his reign, that we
+may attribute his modification of our judicial system. The King's Court was
+divided into three distinct tribunals, the Court of Exchequer which took
+cognizance of all causes in which the royal revenue was concerned; the
+Court of Common Pleas for suits between private persons; and the King's
+Bench, which had jurisdiction in all matters that affected the sovereign as
+well as in "pleas of the crown" or criminal causes expressly reserved for
+his decision. Each court was now provided with a distinct staff of judges.
+
+Of yet greater importance than this change, which was in effect but the
+completion of a process of severance that had long been going on, was the
+establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side with that of the
+common law. In his reform of 1178 Henry the Second broke up the older
+King's Court, which had till then served as the final Court of Appeal, by
+the severance of the purely legal judges who had been gradually added to it
+from the general body of his councillors. The judges thus severed from the
+Council retained the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of "the King's
+Court," but the mere fact of their severance changed in an essential way
+the character of the justice they dispensed. The King in Council wielded a
+power which was not only judicial but executive; his decisions though based
+upon custom were not fettered by it, they wore the expressions of his will,
+and it was as his will that they were carried out by officers of the Crown.
+But the separate bench of judges had no longer this unlimited power at
+their command. They had not the king's right as representative of the
+community to make the law for the redress of a wrong. They professed simply
+to declare what the existing law was, even if it was insufficient for the
+full purpose of redress. The authority of their decision rested mainly on
+their adhesion to ancient custom or as it was styled the "common law" which
+had grown up in the past. They could enforce their decisions only by
+directions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and here again their
+right was soon rigidly bounded by set form and custom. These bonds in fact
+became tighter every day, for their decisions were now beginning to be
+reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities
+for their successors. It is plain that such a state of things has the
+utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that
+impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force
+on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of
+precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power. But it threw
+a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress of wrong. The
+increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped
+the efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a
+wrong which sprang from modern circumstances. Sometimes the very pedantry
+and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases the highest
+injustice.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Equitable Jurisdiction]
+
+It was the consciousness of this that made men cling even from the first
+moment of the independent existence of these courts to the judicial power
+which still remained inherent in the Crown itself. If his courts fell short
+in any matter the duty of the king to do justice to all still remained, and
+it was this obligation which was recognized in the provision of Henry the
+Second by which all cases in which his judges failed to do justice were
+reserved for the special cognizance of the royal Council itself. To this
+final jurisdiction of the King in Council Edward gave a wide developement.
+His assembly of the ministers, the higher permanent officials, and the law
+officers of the Crown for the first time reserved to itself in its judicial
+capacity the correction of all breaches of the law which the lower courts
+had failed to repress, whether from weakness, partiality, or corruption,
+and especially of those lawless outbreaks of the more powerful baronage
+which defied the common authority of the judges. Such powers were of course
+capable of terrible abuse, and it shows what real need there was felt to be
+for their exercise that though regarded with jealousy by Parliament the
+jurisdiction of the royal Council appears to have been steadily put into
+force through the two centuries which followed. In the reign of Henry the
+Seventh it took legal and statutory form in the shape of the Court of Star
+Chamber, and its powers are still exercised in our own day by the Judicial
+Committee of the Privy Council. But the same duty of the Crown to do
+justice where its courts fell short of giving due redress for wrong
+expressed itself in the jurisdiction of the Chancellor. This great officer
+of State, who had perhaps originally acted only as President of the Council
+when discharging its judicial functions, acquired at a very early date an
+independent judicial position of the same nature. It is by remembering this
+origin of the Court of Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers
+it gradually acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially those
+which sprang from the misconduct of government officials or of powerful
+oppressors, fell within its cognizance as they fell within that of the
+Royal Council, and to these were added disputes respecting the wardship of
+infants, dower, rent-charges, or tithes. Its equitable jurisdiction sprang
+from the defective nature and the technical and unbending rules of the
+common law. As the Council had given redress in cases where law became
+injustice, so the Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the rules
+of procedure adopted by the common law courts on the petition of a party
+for whose grievance the common law provided no adequate remedy. An
+analogous extension of his powers enabled the Chancellor to afford relief
+in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse of trust, and this side of his
+jurisdiction was largely extended at a later time by the results of
+legislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical bodies. The separate
+powers of the Chancellor, whatever was the original date at which they were
+first exercised, seem to have been thoroughly established under Edward the
+First.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Law and the Baronage]
+
+What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers such as these by the
+Crown and its council was the need which was still to exist for centuries
+of an effective means of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law.
+Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had now become
+established. A king could no longer make laws or levy taxes or even make
+war without their assent. The nation reposed in them an unwavering trust,
+for they were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose violence the
+strong hand of a Norman ruler had been needed to protect his subjects; they
+were as English as the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty
+by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound them to look on
+themselves as its natural guardians. The close of the Barons' War solved
+the problem which had so long troubled the realm, the problem how to ensure
+the government of the realm in accordance with the provisions of the Great
+Charter, by the transfer of the business of administration into the hands
+of a standing committee of the greater barons and prelates, acting as chief
+officers of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers of the
+Crown. The body thus composed was known as the Continual Council; and the
+quiet government of the kingdom by this body in the long interval between
+the death of Henry the Third and his son's return shows how effective this
+rule of the nobles was. It is significant of the new relation which they
+were to strive to establish between themselves and the Crown that in the
+brief which announced Edward's accession the Council asserted that the new
+monarch mounted his throne "by the will of the peers." But while the
+political influence of the baronage as a leading element in the whole
+nation thus steadily mounted, the personal and purely feudal power of each
+individual baron on his own estates as steadily fell. The hold which the
+Crown gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage,
+the circuits of the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds within which
+baronial justice saw itself circumscribed, the blow dealt by scutage at
+their military power, the prompt intervention of the Council in their
+feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to the common level of their fellow
+subjects. Much yet remained to be done; for within the general body of the
+baronage there existed side by side with the nobles whose aims were purely
+national nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal despotism simply a
+chance of setting up again their feudal privileges; and different as the
+English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a feudal _noblesse_ like that
+of Germany or France there is in every military class a natural drift
+towards violence and lawlessness. Throughout Edward's reign his strong hand
+was needed to enforce order on warring nobles. Great earls, such as those
+of Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in Shropshire the Earl
+of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and poorer
+nobles the wealth of the trader, the long wain of goods as it passed along
+the highway, remained a tempting prey. Once, under cover of a mock
+tournament of monks against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded
+in introducing themselves into the great merchant fair at Boston; at
+nightfall every booth was on fire, the merchants robbed and slaughtered,
+and the booty carried off to ships which lay ready at the quay. Streams of
+gold and silver, ran the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down the
+gutters to the sea; "all the money in England could hardly make good the
+loss." Even at the close of Edward's reign lawless bands of
+"trail-bastons," or club-men, maintained themselves by general outrage,
+aided the country nobles in their feuds, and wrested money and goods from
+the great tradesmen.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Baronage]
+
+The king was strong enough to face and imprison the warring earls, to hang
+the chiefs of the Boston marauders, and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous
+commissions. But the repression of baronial outrage was only a part of
+Edward's policy in relation to the Baronage. Here, as elsewhere, he had to
+carry out the political policy of his house, a policy defined by the great
+measures of Henry the Second, his institution of scutage, his general
+assize of arms, his extension of the itinerant judicature of the royal
+judges. Forced by the first to an exact discharge of their military duties
+to the Crown, set by the second in the midst of a people trained equally
+with the nobles to arms, their judicial tyranny curbed and subjected to the
+king's justice by the third, the barons had been forced from their old
+standpoint of an isolated class to the new and nobler position of a
+people's leaders. Edward watched jealously over the ground which the Crown
+had gained. Immediately after his landing he appointed a commission of
+enquiry into the judicial franchises then existing, and on its report (of
+which the existing "Hundred-Rolls" are the result) itinerant justices were
+sent in 1278 to discover by what right these franchises were held. The
+writs of "quo warranto" were roughly met here and there. Earl Warenne bared
+a rusty sword and flung it on the justices' table. "This, sirs," he said,
+"is my warrant. By the sword our fathers won their lands when they came
+over with the Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep them." But the king
+was far from limiting himself to the mere carrying out of the plans of
+Henry the Second. Henry had aimed simply at lowering the power of the great
+feudatories; Edward aimed rather at neutralizing their power by raising the
+whole body of landowners to the same level. We shall see at a later time
+the measures which were the issues of this policy, but in the very opening
+of his reign a significant step pointed to the king's drift. In the summer
+of 1278 a royal writ ordered all freeholders who held lands to the value of
+twenty pounds to receive knighthood at the king's hands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Church]
+
+Acts as significant announced Edward's purpose of carrying out another side
+of Henry's policy, that of limiting in the same way the independent
+jurisdiction of the Church. He was resolute to force it to become
+thoroughly national by bearing its due part of the common national
+burthens, and to break its growing dependence upon Rome. But the
+ecclesiastical body was jealous of its position as a power distinct from
+the power of the Crown, and Edward's policy had hardly declared itself when
+in 1279 Archbishop Peckham obtained a canon from the clergy by which copies
+of the Great Charter, with its provisions in favour of the liberties of the
+Church, were to be affixed to the doors of churches. The step was meant as
+a defiant protest against all interference, and it was promptly forbidden.
+An order issued by the Primate to the clergy to declare to their flocks the
+sentences of excommunication directed against all who obtained royal writs
+to obstruct suits in church courts, or who, whether royal officers or no,
+neglected to enforce their sentences, was answered in a yet more emphatic
+way. By falling into the "dead hand" or "mortmain" of the Church land
+ceased to render its feudal services; and in 1279 the Statute "de
+Religiosis," or as it is commonly called "of Mortmain," forbade any further
+alienation of land to religious bodies in such wise that it should cease to
+render its due service to the king. The restriction was probably no
+beneficial one to the country at large, for Churchmen were the best
+landlords, and it was soon evaded by the ingenuity of the clerical lawyers;
+but it marked the growing jealousy of any attempt to set aside what was
+national from serving the general need and profit of the nation. Its
+immediate effect was to stir the clergy to a bitter resentment. But Edward
+remained firm, and when the bishops proposed to restrict the royal courts
+from dealing with cases of patronage or causes which touched the chattels
+of Churchmen he met their proposals by an instant prohibition.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of Wales]
+
+The resentment of the clergy had soon the means of showing itself during a
+new struggle with Wales. The persuasions of his brother David, who had
+deserted him in the previous war but who deemed his desertion
+insufficiently rewarded by an English lordship, roused Llewelyn to a fresh
+revolt. A prophecy of Merlin was said to promise that when English money
+became round a Prince of Wales should be crowned in London; and at this
+moment a new coinage of copper money, coupled with a prohibition to break
+the silver penny into halves and quarters, as had been commonly done, was
+supposed to fulfil the prediction. In 1282 Edward marched in overpowering
+strength into the heart of Wales. But Llewelyn held out in Snowdon with the
+stubbornness of despair, and the rout of an English force which had crossed
+into Anglesea prolonged the contest into the winter. The cost of the war
+fell on the king's treasury. Edward had called for but one general grant
+through the past eight years of his reign; but he was now forced to appeal
+to his people, and by an expedient hitherto without precedent two
+provincial Councils were called for this purpose. That for Southern England
+met at Northampton, that for Northern at York; and clergy and laity were
+summoned, though in separate session, to both. Two knights came from every
+shire, two burgesses from every borough, while the bishops brought their
+archdeacons, abbots, and the proctors of their cathedral clergy. The grant
+of the laity was quick and liberal. But both at York and Northampton the
+clergy showed their grudge at Edward's measures by long delays in supplying
+his treasury. Pinched however as were his resources and terrible as were
+the sufferings of his army through the winter Edward's firmness remained
+unbroken; and rejecting all suggestions of retreat he issued orders for the
+formation of a new army at Caermarthen to complete the circle of investment
+round Llewelyn. But the war came suddenly to an end. The Prince sallied
+from his mountain hold for a raid upon Radnorshire and fell in a petty
+skirmish on the banks of the Wye. With him died the independence of his
+race. After six months of flight his brother David was made prisoner; and a
+Parliament summoned at Shrewsbury in the autumn of 1283, to which each
+county again sent its two knights and twenty boroughs their two burgesses,
+sentenced him to a traitor's death. The submission of the lesser chieftains
+soon followed: and the country was secured by the building of strong
+castles at Conway and Caernarvon, and the settlement of English barons on
+the confiscated soil. The Statute of Wales which Edward promulgated at
+Rhuddlan in 1284 proposed to introduce English law and the English
+administration of justice and government into Wales. But little came of the
+attempt; and it was not till the time of Henry the Eighth that the country
+was actually incorporated with England and represented in the English
+Parliament. What Edward had really done was to break the Welsh resistance.
+The policy with which he followed up his victory (for the "massacre of the
+bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and though two later
+rebellions and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English towns in
+their midst showed that the country was still far from being reconciled to
+its conquest, it ceased to be any serious danger to England for a hundred
+years.
+
+
+[Sidenote: New Legislation]
+
+From the work of conquest Edward again turned to the work of legislation.
+In the midst of his struggle with Wales he had shown his care for the
+commercial classes by a Statute of Merchants in 1283, which provided for
+the registration of the debts of leaders and for their recovery by
+distraint of the debtor's goods and the imprisonment of his person. The
+close of the war saw two measures of even greater importance. The second
+Statute of Westminster which appeared in 1285 is a code of the same sort as
+the first, amending the Statutes of Mortmain, of Merton, and of Gloucester,
+as well as the laws of dower and advowson, remodelling the system of
+justices of assize, and curbing the abuses of manorial jurisdiction. In the
+same year appeared the greatest of Edward's measures for the enforcement of
+public order. The Statute of Winchester revived and reorganized the old
+institutions of national police and national defence. It regulated the
+action of the hundred, the duty of watch and ward, and the gathering of the
+fyrd or militia of the realm as Henry the Second had moulded it into form
+in his Assize of Arms. Every man was bound to hold himself in readiness,
+duly armed, for the king's service in case of invasion or revolt, and to
+pursue felons when hue and cry was made after them. Every district was held
+responsible for crimes committed within its bounds; the gates of each town
+were to be shut at nightfall; and all strangers were required to give an
+account of themselves to the magistrates of any borough which they entered.
+By a provision which illustrates at once the social and physical condition
+of the country at the time all brushwood was ordered to be destroyed within
+a space of two hundred feet on either side of the public highway as a
+security for travellers against sudden attacks from robbers. To enforce the
+observance of this act knights were appointed in every shire under the name
+of Conservators of the Peace, a name which as the benefit of these local
+magistrates was more sensibly felt and their powers were more largely
+extended was changed into that which they still retain of Justices of the
+Peace. So orderly however was the realm that Edward was able in 1286 to
+pass over sea to his foreign dominions, and to spend the next three years
+in reforming their government. But the want of his guiding hand was at last
+felt; and the Parliament of 1289 refused a new tax till the king came home
+again.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "Quia Emptores"]
+
+He returned to find the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford at war, and his
+judges charged with violence and corruption. The two Earls were brought to
+peace, and Earl Gilbert allied closely to the royal house by a marriage
+with the king's daughter Johanna. After a careful investigation the
+judicial abuses were recognized and amended. Two of the chief justices were
+banished from the realm and their colleagues imprisoned and fined. But
+these administrative measures were only preludes to a great legislative act
+which appeared in 1290. The Third Statute of Westminster, or, to use the
+name by which it is more commonly known, the Statute "Quia Emptores," is
+one of those legislative efforts which mark the progress of a wide social
+revolution in the country at large. The number of the greater barons was
+diminishing every day, while the number of the country gentry and of the
+more substantial yeomanry was increasing with the increase of the national
+wealth. The increase showed itself in a growing desire to become
+proprietors of land. Tenants of the barons received under-tenants on
+condition of their rendering them similar services to those which they
+themselves rendered to their lords; and the baronage, while duly receiving
+the services in compensation for which they had originally granted their
+lands in fee, saw with jealousy the feudal profits of these new
+under-tenants, the profits of wardships or of reliefs and the like, in a
+word the whole increase in the value of the estate consequent on its
+subdivision and higher cultivation, passing into other hands than their
+own. The purpose of the statute "Quia Emptores" was to check this process
+by providing that in any case of alienation the sub-tenant should
+henceforth hold, not of the tenant, but directly of the superior lord. But
+its result was to promote instead of hindering the transfer and subdivision
+of land. The tenant who was compelled before the passing of the statute to
+retain in any case so much of the estate as enabled him to discharge his
+feudal services to the overlord of whom he held it, was now enabled by a
+process analogous to the modern sale of "tenant-right," to transfer both
+land and services to new holders. However small the estates thus created
+might be, the bulk were held directly of the Crown; and this class of
+lesser gentry and freeholders grew steadily from this time in numbers and
+importance.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Crown and the Jews]
+
+The year which saw "Quia Emptores" saw a step which remains the great blot
+upon Edward's reign. The work abroad had exhausted the royal treasury, and
+he bought a grant from his Parliament by listening to their wishes in the
+matter of the Jews. Jewish traders had followed William the Conqueror from
+Normandy, and had been enabled by his protection to establish themselves in
+separate quarters or "Jewries" in all larger English towns. The Jew had no
+right or citizenship in the land. The Jewry in which he lived was exempt
+from the common law. He was simply the king's chattel, and his life and
+goods were at the king's mercy. But he was too valuable a possession to be
+lightly thrown away. If the Jewish merchant had no standing-ground in the
+local court the king enabled him to sue before a special justiciary; his
+bonds were deposited for safety in a chamber of the royal palace at
+Westminster; he was protected against the popular hatred in the free
+exercise of his religion and allowed to build synagogues and to manage his
+own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi. The royal protection
+was dictated by no spirit of tolerance or mercy. To the kings the Jew was a
+mere engine of finance. The wealth which he accumulated was wrung from him
+whenever the crown had need, and torture and imprisonment were resorted to
+when milder means failed. It was the gold of the Jew that filled the royal
+treasury at the outbreak of war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers
+that the foreign kings found strength, to hold their baronage at bay.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Popular Hatred of the Jews]
+
+That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier years of his
+settlement, beneficial to the nation at large there can be little doubt.
+His arrival was the arrival of a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he
+necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time his loans gave an
+impulse to industry. The century which followed the Conquest witnessed an
+outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with castles and
+cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed their erection to the loans
+of the Jew. His own example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture. The
+buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmund's, still retain their
+name of "Jews' Houses" were almost the first houses of stone which
+superseded the mere hovels of the English burghers. Nor was their influence
+simply industrial. Through their connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain
+and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences. A
+Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself
+studied under English rabbis. But the general progress of civilization now
+drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and
+Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial finance. He fell
+back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily
+accompanied with much of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the
+religious hatred against their race. Wild stories floated about of children
+carried off to be circumcised or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was found
+slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as "St. Hugh."
+The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish quarters and
+attempt their conversion, but the popular fury rose too fast for these
+gentler means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews
+from hanging by their prayer to Henry the Third the populace angrily
+refused the brethren alms.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Jewish Defiance]
+
+But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance. The picture which
+is commonly drawn of the Jew as timid, silent, crouching under oppression,
+however truly it may represent the general position of his race throughout
+mediaeval Europe, is far from being borne out by historical fact on this
+side the Channel. In England the attitude of the Jew, almost to the very
+end, was an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. He knew that the
+royal policy exempted him from the common taxation, the common justice, the
+common obligations of Englishmen. Usurer, extortioner as the realm held him
+to be, the royal justice would secure him the repayment of his bonds. A
+royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence
+against the king's "chattels." The Red King actually forbade the conversion
+of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a poor exchange, he said, that
+would rid him of a valuable property and give him only a subject. We see in
+such a case as that of Oxford the insolence that grew out of this
+consciousness of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a
+town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its
+peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could penetrate into
+the square of little alleys which lay behind the present Town Hall; the
+Church itself was powerless to prevent a synagogue from rising in haughty
+rivalry over against the cloister of St. Frideswide. Prior Philip of St.
+Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at his door as
+the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles which were
+said to be wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his
+feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open
+his fingers, the Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd that
+flocked to St. Frideswide's shrine on the ground that such recoveries of
+life and limb were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever wrought.
+Sickness and death in the prior's story avenge the saint on her blasphemer,
+but no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to
+deal with him. A more daring act of fanaticism showed the temper of the
+Jews even at the close of Henry the Third's reign. As the usual procession
+of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's on the Ascension
+Day of 1268 a Jew suddenly burst from a group of his comrades in front of
+the synagogue, and wrenching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under
+foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the
+Crown sheltered the Oxford Jews from any burst of popular vengeance. The
+sentence of the king condemned them to set up a cross of marble on the spot
+where the crime was committed, but even this sentence was in part remitted,
+and a less offensive place was found for the cross in an open plot by
+Merton College.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Expulsion of the Jews]
+
+Up to Edward's day indeed the royal protection had never wavered. Henry the
+Second granted the Jews a right of burial outside every city where they
+dwelt. Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and
+organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration of
+their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself, though he
+once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The
+troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater than even the royal
+greed could reap; the Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates; and only
+a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would have
+enabled them to own freeholds. But the sack of Jewry after Jewry showed the
+popular hatred during the Barons' war, and at its close fell on the Jews
+the more terrible persecution of the law. To the cry against usury and the
+religious fanaticism which threatened them was now added the jealousy with
+which the nation that had grown up round the Charter regarded all
+exceptional jurisdictions or exemptions from the common law and the common
+burthens of the realm. As Edward looked on the privileges of the Church or
+the baronage, so his people looked on the privileges of the Jews. The
+growing weight of the Parliament told against them. Statute after statute
+hemmed them in. They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ
+Christian servants, to move through the streets without the two white
+tablets of wool on their breasts which distinguished their race. They were
+prohibited from building new synagogues or eating with Christians or acting
+as physicians to them. Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the
+bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order which bade them
+renounce usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do no more,
+and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies for his treasury and
+himself swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects, bought the grant of a
+fifteenth from clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his
+realm. No share of the enormities which accompanied this expulsion can fall
+upon the king, for he not only suffered the fugitives to take their
+personal wealth with them but punished with the halter those who plundered
+them at sea. But the expulsion was none the less cruel. Of the sixteen
+thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few reached the shores of France.
+Many were wrecked, others robbed and flung overboard. One shipmaster turned
+out a crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank and bade them call a new
+Moses to save them from the sea.
+
+[Illustration: Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland]
+
+From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his nobler schemes of legal and
+administrative reforms, Edward was suddenly called away to face complex
+questions which awaited him in the North. At the moment which we have
+reached the kingdom of the Scots was still an aggregate of four distinct
+countries, each with its different people, its different tongue, its
+different history. The old Pictish kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the
+original Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or Strathclyde,
+and the Lowlands which stretched from the Firth of Forth to the English
+border, had become united under the kings of the Scots; Pictland by
+inheritance, Cumbria by a grant from the English king Eadmund, the Lowlands
+by conquest, confirmed as English tradition alleged by a grant from Cnut.
+The shadowy claim of dependence on the English Crown which dated from the
+days when a Scotch king "commended" himself and his people to AElfred's son
+Eadward, a claim strengthened by the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm as a
+"fellow worker" of the English sovereign "by sea and land," may have been
+made more real through this last convention. But whatever change the
+acquisition of the Lowlands made in the relation of the Scot kings to the
+English sovereigns, it certainly affected in a very marked way their
+relation both to England and to their own realm. Its first result was the
+fixing of the royal residence in their new southern dominion at Edinburgh;
+and the English civilization which surrounded them from the moment of this
+settlement on what was purely English ground changed the Scot kings in all
+but blood into Englishmen. The marriage of King Malcolm with Margaret, the
+sister of Eadgar AEtheling, not only hastened this change but opened a way
+to the English crown. Their children were regarded by a large party within
+England as representatives of the older royal race and as claimants of the
+throne, and this danger grew as William's devastation of the North not only
+drove fresh multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the Lowlands but filled
+the Scotch court with English nobles who fled thither for refuge. So
+formidable indeed became the pretensions of the Scot kings that they forced
+the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into a complete change of policy. The
+Conqueror and William the Red had met the threats of the Scot sovereigns by
+invasions which ended again and again in an illusory homage, but the
+marriage of Henry the First with the Scottish Matilda robbed the claims of
+the Scottish line of much of their force while it enabled him to draw their
+kings into far closer relations with the Norman throne. King David not only
+abandoned the ambitious dreams of his predecessors to place himself at the
+head of his niece Matilda's party in her contest with Stephen, but as
+Henry's brother-in-law he figured as the first noble of the English Court
+and found English models and English support in the work of organization
+which he attempted within his own dominions. As the marriage with Margaret
+had changed Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain into an English king, so that
+of Matilda brought about the conversion of David into a Norman and feudal
+sovereign. His court was filled with Norman nobles from the South, such as
+the Balliols and Bruces who were destined to play so great a part
+afterwards but who now for the first time obtained fiefs in the Scottish
+realm, and a feudal jurisprudence modelled on that of England was
+introduced into the Lowlands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotch and English Crowns]
+
+A fresh connexion between Scotland and the English sovereigns began with
+the grant of lordships within England itself to the Scot kings or their
+sons. The Earldom of Northumberland was held by David's son Henry, that of
+Huntingdon by David, brother of William the Lion. Homage was sometimes
+rendered, whether for these lordships, for the Lowlands, or for the whole
+Scottish realm, but it was the capture of William the Lion during the
+revolt of the English baronage which first suggested to the ambition of
+Henry the Second the project of a closer dependence of Scotland on the
+English Crown. To gain his freedom William consented to hold his kingdom of
+Henry and his heirs. The prelates and lords of Scotland did homage to Henry
+as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in all Scotch causes was
+allowed to the superior court of the English suzerain. From this bondage
+however Scotland was freed by the prodigality of Richard who allowed her to
+buy back the freedom she had forfeited. Both sides fell into their old
+position, but both were ceasing gradually to remember the distinctions
+between the various relations in which the Scot king stood for his
+different provinces to the English Crown. Scotland had come to be thought
+of as a single country; and the court of London transferred to the whole of
+it those claims of direct feudal suzerainty which at most applied only to
+Strathclyde, while the court of Edinburgh looked on the English Lowlands as
+holding no closer relation to England than the Pictish lands beyond the
+Forth. Any difficulties which arose were evaded by a legal compromise. The
+Scot kings repeatedly did homage to the English sovereign but with a
+reservation of rights which were prudently left unspecified. The English
+king accepted the homage on the assumption that it was rendered to him as
+overlord of the Scottish realm, and this assumption was neither granted nor
+denied. For nearly a hundred years the relations of the two countries were
+thus kept peaceful and friendly, and the death of Alexander the Third
+seemed destined to remove even the necessity of protests by a closer union
+of the two kingdoms. Alexander had wedded his only daughter to the King of
+Norway, and after long negotiation the Scotch Parliament proposed the
+marriage of Margaret, "The Maid of Norway," the girl who was the only issue
+of this marriage and so heiress of the kingdom, with the son of Edward the
+First. It was however carefully provided in the marriage treaty which was
+concluded at Brigham in 1290 that Scotland should remain a separate and
+free kingdom, and that its laws and customs should be preserved inviolate.
+No military aid was to be claimed by the English king, no Scotch appeal to
+be carried to an English court. But this project was abruptly frustrated by
+the child's death during her voyage to Scotland in the following October,
+and with the rise of claimant after claimant of the vacant throne Edward
+was drawn into far other relations to the Scottish realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch Succession]
+
+Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland only three could be
+regarded as serious claimants. By the extinction of the line of William the
+Lion the right of succession passed to the daughters of his brother David.
+The claim of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, rested on his descent from the
+elder of these; that of Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, on his descent
+from the second; that of John Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, on his descent
+from the third. It is clear that at this crisis every one in Scotland or
+out of it recognized some sort of overlordship in Edward, for the Norwegian
+king, the Primate of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch Earls had already
+appealed to him before Margaret's death; and her death was followed by the
+consent both of the claimants and the Council of Regency to refer the
+question of the succession to his decision in a Parliament at Norham. But
+the overlordship which the Scots acknowledged was something far less direct
+and definite than the superiority which Edward claimed at the opening of
+this conference in May 1291. His claim was supported by excerpts from
+monastic chronicles and by the slow advance of an English army; while the
+Scotch lords, taken by surprise, found little help in the delay which was
+granted them. At the opening of June therefore in common with nine of the
+claimants they formally admitted Edward's direct suzerainty. To the nobles
+in fact the concession must have seemed a small one, for like the principal
+claimants they were for the most part Norman in blood, with estates in both
+countries, and looking for honours and pensions from the English Court.
+From the Commons who were gathered with the nobles at Norham no such
+admission of Edward's claims could be extorted; but in Scotland, feudalized
+as it had been by David, the Commons were as yet of little weight and their
+opposition was quietly passed by. All the rights of a feudal suzerain were
+at once assumed by the English king; he entered into the possession of the
+country as into that of a disputed fief to be held by its overlord till the
+dispute was settled, his peace was sworn throughout the land, its castles
+delivered into his charge, while its bishops and nobles swore homage to him
+directly as their lord superior. Scotland was thus reduced to the
+subjection which she had experienced under Henry the Second; but the full
+discussion which followed over the various claims to the throne showed that
+while exacting to the full what he believed to be his right Edward desired
+to do justice to the country itself. The body of commissioners which the
+king named to report on the claims to the throne were mainly Scotch. A
+proposal for the partition of the realm among the claimants was rejected as
+contrary to Scotch law. On the report of the commissioners after a
+twelvemonth's investigation in favour of Balliol as representative of the
+elder branch at the close of the year 1292, his homage was accepted for the
+whole kingdom of Scotland with a full acknowledgement of the services due
+from him to its overlord. The castles were at once delivered to the new
+monarch, and for a time there was peace.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and Scotland]
+
+With the accession of Balliol and the rendering of his homage for the
+Scottish realm the greatness of Edward reached its height. He was lord of
+Britain as no English king had been before. The last traces of Welsh
+independence were trodden under foot. The shadowy claims of supremacy over
+Scotland were changed into a direct overlordship. Across the one sea Edward
+was lord of Guienne, across the other of Ireland, and in England itself a
+wise and generous policy had knit the whole nation round his throne. Firmly
+as he still clung to prerogatives which the baronage were as firm not to
+own, the main struggle for the Charter was over. Justice and good
+government were secured. The personal despotism which John had striven to
+build up, the imperial autocracy which had haunted the imagination of Henry
+the Third, were alike set aside. The rule of Edward, vigorous and effective
+as it was, was a rule of law, and of law enacted not by the royal will, but
+by the common council of the realm. Never had English ruler reached a
+greater height of power, nor was there any sign to warn the king of the
+troubles which awaited him. France, jealous as it was of his greatness and
+covetous of his Gascon possessions, he could hold at bay. Wales was growing
+tranquil. Scotland gave few signs of discontent or restlessness in the
+first year that followed the homage of its king. Under John Balliol it had
+simply fallen back into the position of dependence which it held under
+William the Lion; and Edward had no purpose of pushing further his rights
+as suzerain than Henry the Second had done. One claim of the English Crown
+indeed was soon a subject of dispute between the lawyers of the Scotch and
+of the English Council boards. Edward would have granted as freely as
+Balliol himself that though Scotland was a dependent kingdom it was far
+from being an ordinary fief of the English Crown. By feudal custom a
+distinction had always been held to exist between the relations of a
+dependent king to a superior lord and those of a vassal noble to his
+sovereign. At Balliol's homage indeed Edward had disclaimed any right to
+the ordinary feudal incidents of a fief, those of wardship or marriage, and
+in this disclaimer he was only repeating the reservations of the marriage
+treaty of Brigham. There were other customs of the Scotch realm as
+incontestable as these. Even after the treaty of Falaise the Scotch king
+had not been held bound to attend the council of the English baronage, to
+do service in English warfare, or to contribute on the part of his Scotch
+realm to English aids. If no express acknowledgement of these rights had
+been made by Edward, for some time after his acceptance of Balliol's homage
+they were practically observed. The claim of independent justice was more
+doubtful, as it was of higher import than these. The judicial independence
+of Scotland had been expressly reserved in the marriage treaty. It was
+certain that no appeal from a Scotch King's Court to that of his overlord
+had been allowed since the days of William the Lion. But in the
+jurisprudence of the feudal lawyers the right of ultimate appeal was the
+test of sovereignty, and Edward regarded Balliol's homage as having placed
+him precisely in the position of William the Lion and subjected his
+decisions to those of his overlord. He was resolute therefore to assert the
+supremacy of his court and to receive Scotch appeals.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The French Attack]
+
+Even here however the quarrel seemed likely to end only in legal bickering.
+Balliol at first gave way, and it was not till 1293 that he alleged himself
+forced by the resentment both of his Baronage and his people to take up an
+attitude of resistance. While appearing therefore formally at Westminster
+he refused to answer an appeal before the English courts save by advice of
+his Council. But real as the resentment of his barons may have been, it was
+not Scotland which really spurred Balliol to this defiance. His wounded
+pride had made him the tool of a power beyond the sea. The keenness with
+which France had watched every step of Edward's success in the north sprang
+not merely from a natural jealousy of his greatness but from its bearing on
+a great object of French ambition. One fragment of Eleanor's inheritance
+still remained to her descendants, Guienne and Gascony, the fair lands
+along the Garonne and the territory which stretched south of that river to
+the Pyrenees. It was this territory that now tempted the greed of Philip
+the Fair, and it was in feeding the strife between England and the Scotch
+king that Philip saw an opening for winning it. French envoys therefore
+brought promises of aid to the Scotch Court; and no sooner had these
+intrigues moved Balliol to resent the claims of his overlord than Philip
+found a pretext for open quarrel with Edward in the frays which went
+constantly on in the Channel between the mariners of Normandy and those of
+the Cinque Ports. They culminated at this moment in a great sea-fight which
+proved fatal to eight thousand Frenchmen, and for this Philip haughtily
+demanded redress. Edward saw at once the danger of his position. He did his
+best to allay the storm by promise of satisfaction to France, and by
+addressing threats of punishment to the English seamen. But Philip still
+clung to his wrong, while the national passion which was to prove for a
+hundred years to come strong enough to hold down the royal policy of peace
+showed itself in a characteristic defiance with which the seamen of the
+Cinque Ports met Edward's menaces. "Be the King's Council well advised,"
+ran this remonstrance, "that if wrong or grievance be done them in any
+fashion against right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and all
+that they have, and go seek through the seas where they shall think to make
+their profit." In spite therefore of Edward's efforts the contest
+continued, and Philip found in it an opportunity to cite the king before
+his court at Paris for wrongs done to him as suzerain. It was hard for
+Edward to dispute the summons without weakening the position which his own
+sovereign courts had taken up towards the Scotch king, and in a final
+effort to avert the conflict the king submitted to a legal decision of the
+question, and to a formal cession of Guienne into Philip's hands for forty
+days in acknowledgement of his supremacy. Bitter as the sacrifice must have
+been it failed to win peace. The forty days had no sooner passed than
+Philip refused to restore the fortresses which had been left in pledge. In
+February 1294 he declared the English king contumacious, and in May
+declared his fiefs forfeited to the French Crown. Edward was driven to take
+up arms, but a revolt in Wales deferred the expedition to the following
+year. No sooner however was it again taken in hand than it became clear
+that a double danger had to be met. The summons which Edward addressed to
+the Scotch barons to follow him in arms to Guienne was disregarded. It was
+in truth, as we have seen, a breach of customary law, and was probably
+meant to force Scotland into an open declaration of its connexion with
+France. A second summons was followed by a more formal refusal. The
+greatness of the danger threw Edward on England itself. For a war in
+Guienne and the north he needed supplies; but he needed yet more the firm
+support of his people in a struggle which, little as he foresaw its
+ultimate results, would plainly be one of great difficulty and danger. In
+1295 he called a Parliament to counsel with him on the affairs of the
+realm, but with the large statesmanship which distinguished him he took
+this occasion of giving the Parliament a shape and organization which has
+left its assembly the most important event in English history.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Council]
+
+To realize its importance we must briefly review the changes by which the
+Great Council of the Norman kings had been gradually transforming itself
+into what was henceforth to be known as the English Parliament. Neither the
+Meeting of the Wise Men before the Conquest nor the Great Council of the
+Barons after it had been in any legal or formal way representative bodies.
+The first theoretically included all free holders of land, but it shrank at
+an early time into a gathering of earls, higher nobles, and bishops, with
+the officers and thegns of the royal household. Little change was made in
+the composition of this assembly by the Conquest, for the Great Council of
+the Norman kings was supposed to include all tenants who held directly of
+the Crown, the bishops and greater abbots (whose character as independent
+spiritual members tended more and more to merge in their position as
+barons), and the high officers of the Court. But though its composition
+remained the same, the character of the assembly was essentially altered;
+from a free gathering of "Wise Men" it sank to a Royal Court of feudal
+vassals. Its functions too seem to have become almost nominal and its
+powers to have been restricted to the sanctioning, without debate or
+possibility of refusal, all grants demanded from it by the Crown. But
+nominal as such a sanction might be, the "counsel and consent" of the Great
+Council was necessary for the legal validity of every considerable fiscal
+or political measure. Its existence therefore remained an effectual protest
+against the imperial theories advanced by the lawyers of Henry the Second
+which declared all legislative power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It
+was in fact under Henry that these assemblies became more regular, and
+their functions more important. The reforms which marked his reign were
+issued in the Great Council, and even financial matters were suffered to be
+debated there. But it was not till the grant of the Great Charter that the
+powers of this assembly over taxation were formally recognized, and the
+principle established that no burthen beyond the customary feudal aids
+might be imposed "save by the Common Council of the Realm."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Greater and Lesser Barons]
+
+The same document first expressly regulated its form. In theory, as we have
+seen, the Great Council consisted of all who held land directly of the
+Crown. But the same causes which restricted attendance at the Witenagemot
+to the greater nobles told on the actual composition of the Council of
+Barons. While the attendance of the ordinary tenants in chief, the Knights
+or "Lesser Barons" as they were called, was burthensome from its expense to
+themselves, their numbers and their dependence on the higher nobles made
+the assembly of these knights dangerous to the Crown. As early therefore as
+the time of Henry the First we find a distinction recognized between the
+"Greater Barons," of whom the Council was usually composed, and the "Lesser
+Barons" who formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown. But though the
+attendance of the latter had become rare their right of attendance remained
+intact. While enacting that the prelates and greater barons should be
+summoned by special writs to each gathering of the Council a remarkable
+provision of the Great Charter orders a general summons to be issued
+through the Sheriff to all direct tenants of the Crown. The provision was
+probably intended to rouse the lesser Baronage to the exercise of rights
+which had practically passed into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted
+in later issues of the Charter we may doubt whether the principle it
+embodied ever received more than a very limited application. There are
+traces of the attendance of a few of the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps
+of the neighbourhood where the assembly was held, in some of its meetings
+under Henry the Third, but till a late period in the reign of his successor
+the Great Council practically remained a gathering of the greater barons,
+the prelates, and the high officers of the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Constitutional Influence of Finance]
+
+The change which the Great Charter had failed to accomplish was now however
+brought about by the social circumstances of the time. One of the most
+remarkable of these was a steady decrease in the number of the greater
+nobles. The bulk of the earldoms had already lapsed to the Crown through
+the extinction of the families of their possessors; of the greater
+baronies, many had practically ceased to exist by their division among
+female co-heiresses, many through the constant struggle of the poorer
+nobles to rid themselves of their rank by a disclaimer so as to escape the
+burthen of higher taxation and attendance in Parliament which it involved.
+How far this diminution had gone we may see from the fact that hardly more
+than a hundred barons sat in the earlier Councils of Edward's reign. But
+while the number of those who actually exercised the privilege of assisting
+in Parliament was rapidly diminishing, the numbers and wealth of the
+"lesser baronage," whose right of attendance had become a mere
+constitutional tradition, was as rapidly increasing. The long peace and
+prosperity of the realm, the extension of its commerce and the increased
+export of wool, were swelling the ranks and incomes of the country gentry
+as well as of the freeholders and substantial yeomanry. We have already
+noticed the effects of the increase of wealth in begetting a passion for
+the possession of land which makes this reign so critical a period in the
+history of the English freeholder; but the same tendency had to some extent
+existed in the preceding century, and it was a consciousness of the growing
+importance of this class of rural proprietors which induced the barons at
+the moment of the Great Charter to make their fruitless attempt to induce
+them to take part in the deliberations of the Great Council. But while the
+barons desired their presence as an aid against the Crown, the Crown itself
+desired it as a means of rendering taxation more efficient. So long as the
+Great Council remained a mere assembly of magnates it was necessary for the
+King's ministers to treat separately with the other orders of the state as
+to the amount and assessment of their contributions. The grant made in the
+Great Council was binding only on the barons and prelates who made it; but
+before the aids of the boroughs, the Church, or the shires could reach the
+royal treasury, a separate negotiation had to be conducted by the officers
+of the Exchequer with the reeves of each town, the sheriff and shire-court
+of each county, and the archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of this sort
+would be the more tedious and disappointing as the necessities of the Crown
+increased in the later years of Edward, and it became a matter of fiscal
+expediency to obtain the sanction of any proposed taxation through the
+presence of these classes in the Great Council itself.
+
+The effort however to revive the old personal attendance of the lesser
+baronage which had broken down half a century before could hardly be
+renewed at a time when the increase of their numbers made it more
+impracticable than ever; but a means of escape from this difficulty was
+fortunately suggested by the very nature of the court through which alone a
+summons could be addressed to the landed knighthood. Amidst the many
+judicial reforms of Henry or Edward the Shire Court remained unchanged. The
+haunted mound or the immemorial oak round which the assembly gathered (for
+the court was often held in the open air) were the relics of a time before
+the free kingdom had sunk into a shire and its Meetings of the Wise into a
+County Court. But save that the king's reeve had taken the place of the
+king and that the Norman legislation had displaced the Bishop and set four
+Coroners by the Sheriff's side, the gathering of the freeholders remained
+much as of old. The local knighthood, the yeomanry, the husbandmen of the
+county, were all represented in the crowd that gathered round the Sheriff,
+as guarded by his liveried followers he published the king's writs,
+announced his demand of aids, received the presentment of criminals and the
+inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or
+listened solemnly to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who
+held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke.
+It was in the County Court alone that the Sheriff could legally summon the
+lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, and it was in the actual
+constitution of this assembly that the Crown found a solution of the
+difficulty which we have stated. For the principle of representation by
+which it was finally solved was coeval with the Shire Court itself. In all
+cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the
+Sheriff, as members of a class, though not formally deputed for that
+purpose, practically represented the judicial opinion of the county at
+large. From every hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the
+"jurors" through whom the presentments of the district were made to the
+royal officer and with whom the assessment of its share in the general
+taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on the outskirts of the crowd, clad
+in the brown smock frock which still lingers in the garb of our carters and
+ploughmen, were broken up into little knots of five, a reeve and four
+assistants, each of which knots formed the representative of a rural
+township. If in fact we regard the Shire Courts as lineally the descendants
+of our earliest English Witenagemots, we may justly claim the principle of
+parliamentary representation as among the oldest of our institutions.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Knights of the Shire]
+
+It was easy to give this principle a further extension by the choice of
+representatives of the lesser barons in the shire courts to which they were
+summoned; but it was only slowly and tentatively that this process was
+applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council. As early as the close
+of John's reign there are indications of the approaching change in the
+summons of "four discreet knights" from every county. Fresh need of local
+support was felt by both parties in the conflict of the succeeding reign,
+and Henry and his barons alike summoned knights from each shire "to meet on
+the common business of the realm." It was no doubt with the same purpose
+that the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights in each shire
+for his famous Parliament of 1265. Something like a continuous attendance
+may be dated from the accession of Edward, but it was long before the
+knights were regarded as more than local deputies for the assessment of
+taxation or admitted to a share in the general business of the Great
+Council. The statute "Quia Emptores," for instance, was passed in it before
+the knights who had been summoned could attend. Their participation in the
+deliberative power of Parliament, as well as their regular and continuous
+attendance, dates only from the Parliament of 1295. But a far greater
+constitutional change in their position had already taken place through the
+extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large. The one class
+entitled to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the
+lesser baronage; and it was of the lesser baronage alone that the knights
+were in theory the representatives. But the necessity of holding their
+election in the County Court rendered any restriction of the electoral body
+physically impossible. The court was composed of the whole body of
+freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish the "aye, aye" of the yeoman
+from the "aye, aye" of the lesser baron. From the first moment therefore of
+their attendance we find the knights regarded not as mere representatives
+of the baronage but as knights of the shire, and by this silent revolution
+the whole body of the rural freeholders were admitted to a share in the
+government of the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Boroughs and the Crown]
+
+The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far more radical
+revolution in the admission into the Great Council of representatives from
+the boroughs. The presence of knights from each shire was the recognition
+of an older right, but no right of attendance or share in the national
+"counsel and assent" could be pleaded for the burgesses of the towns. On
+the other hand the rapid developement of their wealth made them every day
+more important as elements in the national taxation. From all payment of
+the dues or fines exacted by the king as the original lord of the soil on
+which they had in most cases grown up the towns had long since freed
+themselves by what was called the purchase of the "farm of the borough"; in
+other words, by the commutation of these uncertain dues for a fixed sum
+paid annually to the Crown and apportioned by their own magistrates among
+the general body of the burghers. All that the king legally retained was
+the right enjoyed by every great proprietor of levying a corresponding
+taxation on his tenants in demesne under the name of "a free aid" whenever
+a grant was made for the national necessities by the barons of the Great
+Council. But the temptation of appropriating the growing wealth of the
+mercantile class proved stronger than legal restrictions, and we find both
+Henry the Third and his son assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure
+and without any authority from the Council even over London itself. The
+burgesses could refuse indeed the invitation to contribute to the "free
+aids" demanded by the royal officers, but the suspension of their markets
+or trading privileges brought them in the end to submission. Each of these
+"free aids" however had to be extorted after a long wrangle between the
+borough and the officers of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven to
+comply with what they considered an extortion they could generally force
+the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise and abatement of its
+original demands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Burgesses in Parliament]
+
+The same financial reasons therefore existed for desiring the presence of
+borough representatives in the Great Council as existed in the case of the
+shires; but it was the genius of Earl Simon which first broke through the
+older constitutional tradition and summoned two burgesses from each town to
+the Parliament of 1265. Time had indeed to pass before the large and
+statesmanlike conception of the great patriot could meet with full
+acceptance. Through the earlier part of Edward's reign we find a few
+instances of the presence of representatives from the towns, but their
+scanty numbers and the irregularity of their attendance show that they were
+summoned rather to afford financial information to the Great Council than
+as representatives in it of an Estate of the Realm. But every year pleaded
+stronger and stronger for their inclusion, and in the Parliament of 1295
+that of 1265 found itself at last reproduced. "It was from me that he
+learnt it," Earl Simon had cried, as he recognized the military skill of
+Edward's onset at Evesham; "it was from me that he learnt it," his spirit
+might have exclaimed as he saw the king gathering at last two burgesses
+"from every city, borough, and leading town" within his realm to sit side
+by side with the knights, nobles, and barons of the Great Council. To the
+Crown the change was from the first an advantageous one. The grants of
+subsidies by the burgesses in Parliament proved more profitable than the
+previous extortions of the Exchequer. The proportions of their grant
+generally exceeded that of the other estates. Their representatives too
+proved far more compliant with the royal will than the barons or knights of
+the shire; only on one occasion during Edward's reign did the burgesses
+waver from their general support of the Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Reluctance to attend]
+
+It was easy indeed to control them, for the selection of boroughs to be
+represented remained wholly in the king's hands, and their numbers could be
+increased or diminished at the king's pleasure. The determination was left
+to the sheriff, and at a hint from the royal Council a sheriff of Wilts
+would cut down the number of represented boroughs in his shire from eleven
+to three, or a sheriff of Bucks declare he could find but a single borough,
+that of Wycombe, within the bounds of his county. Nor was this exercise of
+the prerogative hampered by any anxiety on the part of the towns to claim
+representative privileges. It was hard to suspect that a power before which
+the Crown would have to bow lay in the ranks of soberly-clad traders,
+summoned only to assess the contributions of their boroughs, and whose
+attendance was as difficult to secure as it seemed burthensome to
+themselves and the towns who sent them. The mass of citizens took little or
+no part in their choice, for they were elected in the county court by a few
+of the principal burghers deputed for the purpose; but the cost of their
+maintenance, the two shillings a day paid to the burgess by his town as
+four were paid to the knight by his county, was a burden from which the
+boroughs made desperate efforts to escape. Some persisted in making no
+return to the sheriff. Some bought charters of exemption from the
+troublesome privilege. Of the 165 who were summoned by Edward the First
+more than a third ceased to send representatives after a single compliance
+with the royal summons. During the whole time from the reign of Edward the
+Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the sheriff of Lancashire declined to
+return the names of any boroughs at all within that county "on account of
+their poverty." Nor were the representatives themselves more anxious to
+appear than their boroughs to send them. The busy country squire and the
+thrifty trader were equally reluctant to undergo the trouble and expense of
+a journey to Westminster. Legal measures were often necessary to ensure
+their presence. Writs still exist in abundance such as that by which Walter
+le Rous is "held to bail in eight oxen and four cart-horses to come before
+the King on the day specified" for attendance in Parliament. But in spite
+of obstacles such as these the presence of representatives from the
+boroughs may be regarded as continuous from the Parliament of 1295. As the
+representation of the lesser barons had widened through a silent change
+into that of the shire, so that of the boroughs--restricted in theory to
+those in the royal demesne--seems practically from Edward's time to have
+been extended to all who were in a condition to pay the cost of their
+representatives' support. By a change as silent within the Parliament
+itself the burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters of
+taxation, was at last admitted to a full share in the deliberations and
+authority of the other orders of the State.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the Clergy]
+
+The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire to the assembly of
+1295 completed the fabric of our representative constitution. The Great
+Council of the Barons became the Parliament of the Realm. Every order of
+the state found itself represented in this assembly, and took part in the
+grant of supplies, the work of legislation, and in the end the control of
+government. But though in all essential points the character of Parliament
+has remained the same from that time to this, there were some remarkable
+particulars in which the assembly of 1295 differed widely from the present
+Parliament at St. Stephen's. Some of these differences, such as those which
+sprang from the increased powers and changed relations of the different
+orders among themselves, we shall have occasion to consider at a later
+time. But a difference of a far more startling kind than these lay in the
+presence of the clergy. If there is any part in the parliamentary scheme of
+Edward the First which can be regarded as especially his own, it is his
+project for the representation of the ecclesiastical order. The King had
+twice at least summoned its "proctors" to Great Councils before 1295, but
+it was then only that the complete representation of the Church was
+definitely organized by the insertion of a clause in the writ which
+summoned a bishop to Parliament requiring the personal attendance of all
+archdeacons, deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for each
+cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy within his diocese. The clause is
+repeated in the writs of the present day, but its practical effect was
+foiled almost from the first by the resolute opposition of those to whom it
+was addressed. What the towns failed in doing the clergy actually did. Even
+when forced to comply with the royal summons, as they seem to have been
+forced during Edward's reign, they sat jealously by themselves, and their
+refusal to vote supplies in any but their own provincial assemblies, or
+convocations, of Canterbury and York left the Crown without a motive for
+insisting on their continued attendance. Their presence indeed, though
+still at times granted on some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality
+that by the end of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into desuetude.
+In their anxiety to preserve their existence as an isolated and privileged
+order the clergy flung away a power which, had they retained it, would have
+ruinously hampered the healthy developement of the state. To take a single
+instance, it is difficult to see how the great changes of the Reformation
+could have been brought about had a good half of the House of Commons
+consisted purely of churchmen, whose numbers would have been backed by the
+weight of their property as possessors of a third of the landed estates of
+the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament at Westminster]
+
+A hardly less important difference may be found in the gradual restriction
+of the meetings of Parliament to Westminster. The names of Edward's
+statutes remind us of its convocation at the most various quarters, at
+Winchester, Acton Burnell, Northampton. It was at a later time that
+Parliament became settled in the straggling village which had grown up in
+the marshy swamp of the Isle of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled
+pile towered over the Thames and the new Westminster which was still rising
+in Edward's day on the site of the older church of the Confessor. It is
+possible that, while contributing greatly to its constitutional importance,
+this settlement of the Parliament may have helped to throw into the
+background its character as a supreme court of appeal. The proclamation by
+which it was called together invited "all who had any grace to demand of
+the King in Parliament, or any plaint to make of matters which could not be
+redressed or determined by ordinary course of law, or who had been in any
+way aggrieved by any of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or
+their bailiffs, or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated,
+charged, or surcharged to aids, subsidies, or taxes," to deliver their
+petitions to receivers who sat in the Great Hall of the Palace of
+Westminster. The petitions were forwarded to the King's Council, and it was
+probably the extension of the jurisdiction of that body and the rise of the
+Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient right of the subject to the
+formal election of "Triers of Petitions" at the opening of every new
+Parliament by the House of Lords, a usage which is still continued. But it
+must have been owing to some memory of the older custom that the subject
+always looked for redress against injuries from the Crown or its ministers
+to the Parliament of the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of Scotland]
+
+The subsidies granted by the Parliament of 1295 furnished the king with the
+means of warfare with both Scotland and France while they assured him of
+the sympathy of his people in the contest. But from the first the
+reluctance of Edward to enter on the double war was strongly marked. The
+refusal of the Scotch baronage to obey his summons had been followed on
+Balliol's part by two secret steps which made a struggle inevitable, by a
+request to Rome for absolution from his oath of fealty and by a treaty of
+alliance with Philip the Fair. As yet however no open breach had taken
+place, and while Edward in 1296 summoned his knighthood to meet him in the
+north he called a Parliament at Newcastle in the hope of bringing about an
+accommodation with the Scot king. But all thought of accommodation was
+roughly ended by the refusal of Balliol to attend the Parliament, by the
+rout of a small body of English troops, and by the Scotch investment of
+Carlisle. Taken as he was by surprise, Edward showed at once the vigour and
+rapidity of his temper. His army marched upon Berwick. The town was a rich
+and well-peopled one, and although a wooden stockade furnished its only
+rampart the serried ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope of an easy
+conquest. Their taunts indeed stung the king to the quick. As his engineers
+threw up rough entrenchments for the besieging army the burghers bade him
+wait till he won the town before he began digging round it. "Kynge Edward,"
+they shouted, "waune thou havest Berwick, pike thee; waune thou havest
+geten, dike thee." But the stockade was stormed with the loss of a single
+knight, nearly eight thousand of the citizens were mown down in a ruthless
+carnage, and a handful of Flemish traders who held the town-hall stoutly
+against all assailants were burned alive in it. The massacre only ceased
+when a procession of priests bore the host to the king's presence, praying
+for mercy. Edward with a sudden and characteristic burst of tears called
+off his troops; but the town was ruined for ever, and the greatest merchant
+city of northern Britain sank from that time into a petty seaport.
+
+At Berwick Edward received Balliol's formal defiance. "Has the fool done
+this folly?" the king cried in haughty scorn; "if he will not come to us,
+we will come to him." The terrible slaughter however had done its work, and
+his march northward was a triumphal progress. Edinburgh, Stirling, and
+Perth opened their gates, Bruce joined the English army, and Balliol
+himself surrendered and passed without a blow from his throne to an English
+prison. No further punishment however was exacted from the prostrate realm.
+Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared its forfeiture to be the
+legal consequence of Balliol's treason. It lapsed in fact to its suzerain;
+and its earls, barons, and gentry swore homage in Parliament at Berwick to
+Edward as their king. The sacred stone on which its older sovereigns had
+been installed, an oblong block of limestone which legend asserted to have
+been the pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended upon him, was
+removed from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the
+Confessor. It was enclosed by Edward's order in a stately seat, which
+became from that hour the coronation chair of English kings. To the king
+himself the whole business must have seemed another and easier conquest of
+Wales, and the mercy and just government which had followed his first
+success followed his second also. The government of the new dependency was
+entrusted to John of Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English
+Council of Regency. Pardon was freely extended to all who had resisted the
+invasion, and order and public peace were rigidly enforced.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Confirmation of the Charters]
+
+But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had more than exhausted the
+aids granted by the Parliament. The treasury was utterly drained. The
+struggle indeed widened as every month went on; the costly fight with the
+French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward was planning a yet
+costlier attack on northern France with the aid of Flanders. Need drove him
+on his return from Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion
+which seemed to recall the times of John. His first blow fell on the
+Church. At the close of 1294 he had already demanded half their annual
+income from the clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance
+that the Dean of St. Paul's, who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead
+of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose the King's demand," said a
+royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that he may
+be noted as an enemy to the King's peace." The outraged Churchmen fell back
+on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and alleged the
+bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by Boniface the Eighth at this moment, a
+bull which forbade the clergy to pay secular taxes from their
+ecclesiastical revenues, as a ground for refusing to comply with further
+taxation. In 1297 Archbishop Winchelsey refused on the ground of this bull
+to make any grant, and Edward met his refusal by a general outlawry of the
+whole order. The King's Courts were closed, and all justice denied to those
+who refused the king aid. By their actual plea the clergy had put
+themselves formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon forced them to
+submission; but their aid did little to recruit the exhausted treasury. The
+pressure of the war steadily increased, and far wider measures of arbitrary
+taxation were needful to equip an expedition which Edward prepared to lead
+in person to Flanders. The country gentlemen were compelled to take up
+knighthood or to compound for exemption from the burthensome honour, and
+forced contributions of cattle and corn were demanded from the counties.
+Edward no doubt purposed to pay honestly for these supplies, but his
+exactions from the merchant class rested on a deliberate theory of his
+royal rights. He looked on the customs as levied absolutely at his
+pleasure, and the export duty on wool--now the staple produce of the
+country--was raised to six times its former amount. Although he infringed
+no positive provision of charter or statute in his action, it was plain
+that his course really undid all that had been gained by the Barons' war.
+But the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward found stout resistance
+within his realm. The barons drew together and called a meeting for the
+redress of their grievances. The two greatest of the English nobles,
+Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk,
+placed themselves at the head of the opposition. The first was Constable,
+the second Earl Marshal, and Edward bade them lead a force to Gascony as
+his lieutenants while he himself sailed to Flanders. Their departure would
+have left the Baronage without leaders, and the two earls availed
+themselves of a plea that they were not bound to foreign service save in
+attendance on the king to refuse obedience to the royal orders. "By God,
+Sir Earl," swore the king to the Earl Marshal, "you shall either go or
+hang!" "By God, Sir King," was the cool reply, "I will neither go nor
+hang!" Both parties separated in bitter anger; the king to seize fresh
+wool, to outlaw the clergy, and to call an army to his aid; the barons to
+gather in arms, backed by the excommunication of the Primate. But the
+strife went no further than words. Ere the Parliament he had convened could
+meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness; Winchelsey offered his
+mediation; and Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of
+Forests as the price of a grant from the clergy and a subsidy from the
+Commons. With one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of which his nature
+was capable the king stood before his people in Westminster Hall and owned
+with a burst of tears that he had taken their substance without due warrant
+of law. His passionate appeal to their loyalty wrested a reluctant assent
+to the prosecution, of the war, and in August Edward sailed for Flanders,
+leaving his son regent of the realm. But the crisis had taught the need of
+further securities against the royal power, and as Edward was about to
+embark the barons demanded his acceptance of additional articles to the
+Charter, expressly renouncing his right of taxing the nation without its
+own consent. The king sailed without complying, but Winchelsey joined the
+two earls and the citizens of London in forbidding any levy of supplies
+till the Great Charter with these clauses was again confirmed, and the
+trouble in Scotland as well as the still pending strife with France left
+Edward helpless in the barons' hands. The Great Charter and the Charter of
+the Forests were solemnly confirmed by him at Ghent in November; and formal
+pardon was issued to the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Revolt of Scotland]
+
+The confirmation of the Charter, the renunciation of any right to the
+exactions by which the people were aggrieved, the pledge that the king
+would no more take "such aids, tasks, and prizes but by common assent of
+the realm," the promise not to impose on wool any heavy customs or
+"maltote" without the same assent, was the close of the great struggle
+which had begun at Runnymede. The clauses so soon removed from the Great
+Charter were now restored; and, evade them as they might, the kings were
+never able to free themselves from the obligation to seek aid solely from
+the general consent of their subjects. It was Scotland which had won this
+victory for English freedom. At the moment when Edward and the earls stood
+face to face the king saw his work in the north suddenly undone. Both the
+justice and injustice of the new rule proved fatal to it. The wrath of the
+Scots, already kindled by the intrusion of English priests into Scotch
+livings and by the grant of lands across the border to English barons, was
+fanned to fury by the strict administration of law and the repression of
+feuds and cattle-lifting. The disbanding too of troops, which was caused by
+the penury of the royal exchequer, united with the licence of the soldiery
+who remained to quicken the national sense of wrong. The disgraceful
+submission of their leaders brought the people themselves to the front. In
+spite of a hundred years of peace the farmer of Fife or the Lowlands and
+the artizan of the towns remained stout-hearted Northumbrian Englishmen.
+They had never consented to Edward's supremacy, and their blood rose
+against the insolent rule of the stranger. The genius of an outlaw knight,
+William Wallace, saw in their smouldering discontent a hope of freedom for
+his country, and his daring raids on outlying parties of the English
+soldiery roused the country at last into revolt.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wallace]
+
+Of Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we know little or nothing; the
+very traditions of his gigantic stature and enormous strength are dim and
+unhistorical. But the instinct of the Scotch people has guided it aright in
+choosing him for its national hero. He was the first to assert freedom as a
+national birthright, and amidst the despair of nobles and priests to call
+the people itself to arms. At the head of an army drawn principally from
+the coast districts north of the Tay, which were inhabited by a population
+of the same blood as that of the Lowlands, Wallace in September 1297
+encamped near Stirling, the pass between the north and the south, and
+awaited the English advance. It was here that he was found by the English
+army. The offers of John of Warenne were scornfully rejected: "We have
+come," said the Scottish leader, "not to make peace, but to free our
+country." The position of Wallace behind a loop of Forth was in fact chosen
+with consummate skill. The one bridge which crossed the river was only
+broad enough to admit two horsemen abreast; and though the English army had
+been passing from daybreak but half its force was across at noon when
+Wallace closed on it and cut it after a short combat to pieces in sight of
+its comrades. The retreat of the Earl of Surrey over the border left
+Wallace head of the country he had freed, and for a few months he acted as
+"Guardian of the Realm" in Balliol's name, and headed a wild foray into
+Northumberland in which the barbarous cruelties of his men left a bitter
+hatred behind them which was to wreak its vengeance in the later bloodshed
+of the war. His reduction of Stirling Castle at last called Edward to the
+field. In the spring of 1298 the king's diplomacy had at last wrung a truce
+for two years from Philip the Fair; and he at once returned to England to
+face the troubles in Scotland. Marching northward with a larger host than
+had ever followed his banner, he was enabled by treachery to surprise
+Wallace as he fell back to avoid an engagement, and to force him on the
+twenty-second of July to battle near Falkirk. The Scotch force consisted
+almost wholly of foot, and Wallace drew up his spearmen in four great
+hollow circles or squares, the outer ranks kneeling and the whole supported
+by bowmen within, while a small force of horse were drawn up as a reserve
+in the rear. It was the formation of Waterloo, the first appearance in our
+history since the day of Senlac of "that unconquerable British infantry"
+before which chivalry was destined to go down. For a moment it had all
+Waterloo's success. "I have brought you to the ring, hop (dance) if you
+can," are words of rough humour that reveal the very soul of the patriot
+leader, and the serried ranks answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of
+Durham who led the English van shrank wisely from the look of the squares.
+"Back to your mass, Bishop," shouted the reckless knights behind him, but
+the body of horse dashed itself vainly on the wall of spears. Terror spread
+through the English army, and its Welsh auxiliaries drew off in a body from
+the field. But the generalship of Wallace was met by that of the king.
+Drawing his bowmen to the front, Edward riddled the Scottish ranks with
+arrows and then hurled his cavalry afresh on the wavering line. In a moment
+all was over, the maddened knights rode in and out of the broken ranks,
+slaying without mercy. Thousands fell on the field, and Wallace himself
+escaped with difficulty, followed by a handful of men.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Second Conquest of Scotland]
+
+But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his work was done. He had roused
+Scotland into life, and even a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered.
+Edward remained master only of the ground he stood on: want of supplies
+forced him at last to retreat; and in the summer of the following year,
+1299, when Balliol, released from his English prison, withdrew into France,
+a regency of the Scotch nobles under Robert Bruce and John Comyn continued
+the struggle for independence. Troubles at home and danger from abroad
+stayed Edward's hand. The barons still distrusted his sincerity, and though
+at their demand he renewed the Confirmation in the spring of 1299, his
+attempt to add an evasive clause saving the right of the Crown proved the
+justice of their distrust. In spite of a fresh and unconditional renewal of
+it a strife over the Forest Charter went on till the opening of 1301 when a
+new gathering of the barons in arms with the support of Archbishop
+Winchelsey wrested from him its full execution. What aided freedom within
+was as of old the peril without. France was still menacing, and a claim
+advanced by Pope Boniface the Eighth at its suggestion to the feudal
+superiority over Scotland arrested a new advance of the king across the
+border. A quarrel however which broke out between Philip le Bel and the
+Papacy removed all obstacles. It enabled Edward to defy Boniface and to
+wring from France a treaty in which Scotland was abandoned. In 1304 he
+resumed the work of invasion, and again the nobles flung down their arms as
+he marched to the North. Comyn, at the head of the Regency, acknowledged
+his sovereignty, and the surrender of Stirling completed the conquest of
+Scotland. But the triumph of Edward was only the prelude to the carrying
+out of his designs for knitting the two countries together by a generosity
+and wisdom which reveal the greatness of his statesmanship. A general
+amnesty was extended to all who had shared in the resistance. Wallace, who
+refused to avail himself of Edward's mercy, was captured and condemned to
+death at Westminster on charges of treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The
+head of the great patriot, crowned in mockery with a circlet of laurel, was
+placed upon London Bridge. But the execution of Wallace was the one blot on
+Edward's clemency. With a masterly boldness he entrusted the government of
+the country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of whom were freshly
+pardoned for their share in the war, and anticipated the policy of Cromwell
+by allotting ten representatives to Scotland in the Common Parliament of
+his realm. A Convocation was summoned at Perth for the election of these
+representatives, and a great judicial scheme which was promulgated in this
+assembly adopted the amended laws of King David as the base of a new
+legislation, and divided the country for judicial purposes into four
+districts, Lothian, Galloway, the Highlands, and the land between the
+Highlands and the Forth, at the head of each of which were placed two
+justiciaries, the one English and the other Scotch.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Rising of Bruce]
+
+With the conquest and settlement of Scotland the glory of Edward seemed
+again complete. The bitterness of his humiliation at home indeed still
+preyed upon him, and in measure after measure we see his purpose of
+renewing the strife with the baronage. In 1303 he found a means of evading
+his pledge to levy no new taxes on merchandise save by assent of the realm
+in a consent of the foreign merchants, whether procured by royal pressure
+or no, to purchase by stated payments certain privileges of trading. In
+this "New Custom" lay the origin of our import duties. A formal absolution
+from his promises which he obtained from Pope Clement the Fifth in 1305
+showed that he looked on his triumph in the North as enabling him to reopen
+the questions which he had yielded. But again Scotland stayed his hand.
+Only four months had passed since its submission, and he was preparing for
+a joint Parliament of the two nations at Carlisle, when the conquered
+country suddenly sprang again to arms. Its new leader was Robert Bruce, a
+grandson of one of the original claimants of the crown. The Norman house of
+Bruce formed a part of the Yorkshire baronage, but it had acquired through
+intermarriages the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale. Both
+the claimant and his son had been pretty steadily on the English side in
+the contest with Balliol and Wallace, and Robert had himself been trained
+in the English court and stood high in the king's favour. But the
+withdrawal of Balliol gave a new force to his claims upon the crown, and
+the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on foot with the Bishop of
+St. Andrews so roused Edward's jealousy that Bruce fled for his life across
+the border. Early in 1306 he met Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to whose
+treachery he attributed the disclosure of his plans, in the church of the
+Grey Friars at Dumfries, and after the interchange of a few hot words
+struck him with his dagger to the ground. It was an outrage that admitted
+of no forgiveness, and Bruce for very safety was forced to assume the crown
+six weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. The news roused Scotland again to
+arms, and summoned Edward to a fresh contest with his unconquerable foe.
+But the murder of Comyn had changed the king's mood to a terrible
+pitilessness. He threatened death against all concerned in the outrage, and
+exposed the Countess of Buchan, who had set the crown on Bruce's head, in a
+cage or open chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers of Berwick.
+At the solemn feast which celebrated his son's knighthood Edward vowed on
+the swan which formed the chief dish at the banquet to devote the rest of
+his days to exact vengeance from the murderer himself. But even at the
+moment of the vow Bruce was already flying for his life to the western
+islands. "Henceforth" he said to his wife at their coronation "thou art
+Queen of Scotland and I King." "I fear" replied Mary Bruce "we are only
+playing at royalty like children in their games." The play was soon turned
+into bitter earnest. A small English force under Aymer de Valence sufficed
+to rout the disorderly levies which gathered round the new monarch, and the
+flight of Bruce left his followers at Edward's mercy. Noble after noble was
+sent to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred with royalty. "His
+only privilege," burst forth the king, "shall be that of being hanged on a
+higher gallows than the rest." Knights and priests were strung up side by
+side by the English justiciaries; while the wife and daughters of Robert
+Bruce were flung into Edward's prisons. Bruce himself had offered to
+capitulate to Prince Edward. But the offer only roused the old king to
+fury. "Who is so bold," he cried, "as to treat with our traitors without
+our knowledge?" and rising from his sick-bed he led his army northwards in
+the summer of 1307 to complete the conquest. But the hand of death was upon
+him, and in the very sight of Scotland the old man breathed his last at
+Burgh-upon-Sands.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+THE PARLIAMENT
+1307-1461
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV
+
+
+For Edward the Second we have three important contemporaries: Thomas de la
+More, Trokelowe's Annals, and the life by a monk of Malmesbury printed by
+Hearne. The sympathies of the first are with the King, those of the last
+two with the Barons. Murimuth's short Chronicle is also contemporary. John
+Barbour's "Bruce," the great legendary storehouse for his hero's
+adventures, is historically worthless.
+
+Important as it is, the reign of Edward the Third is by no means fortunate
+in its annalists. The concluding part of the Chronicle of Walter of
+Hemingford or Heminburgh seems to have been jotted down as news of the
+passing events reached its author: it ends at the battle of Crecy. Hearne
+has published another contemporary account, that of Robert of Avesbury,
+which closes in 1356. A third account by Knyghton, a canon of Leicester,
+will be found in the collection of Twysden. At the end of this century and
+the beginning of the next the annals which had been carried on in the Abbey
+of St. Albans were thrown together by Walsingham in the "Historia
+Anglicana" which bears his name, a compilation whose history may be found
+in the prefaces to the "Chronica Monasterii S. Albani" issued in the Rolls
+Series. An anonymous chronicler whose work is printed in the 22nd volume of
+the "Archaeologia" has given us the story of the Good Parliament, another
+account is preserved in the "Chronica Angliae from 1328 to 1388," published
+in the Rolls Series, and fresh light has been recently thrown on the time
+by the publication of a Chronicle by Adam of Usk which extends from 1377 to
+1404. Fortunately the scantiness of historical narrative is compensated by
+the growing fulness and abundance of our State papers. Rymer's Foedera is
+rich in diplomatic and other documents for this period, and from this time
+we have a storehouse of political and social information in the
+Parliamentary Rolls.
+
+For the French war itself our primary authority is the Chronicle of Jehan
+le Bel, a canon of the church of St. Lambert of Liege, who himself served
+in Edward's campaign against the Scots and spent the rest of his life at
+the court of John of Hainault. Up to the Treaty of Bretigny, where it
+closes, Froissart has done little more than copy this work, making however
+large additions from his own enquiries, especially in the Flemish and
+Breton campaigns and in the account of Crecy. Froissart was himself a
+Hainaulter of Valenciennes; he held a post in Queen Philippa's household
+from 1361 to 1369, and under this influence produced in 1373 the first
+edition of his well-known Chronicle. A later edition is far less English in
+tone, and a third version, begun by him in his old age after long absence
+from England, is distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity
+and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of his details; as an
+historical authority he is of little value. The "Fasciculi Zizaniorum" in
+the Rolls Series with the documents appended to it is a work of primary
+authority for the history of Wyclif and his followers: a selection from his
+English tracts has been made by Mr. T. Arnold for the University of Oxford,
+which has also published his "Trias." The version of the Bible that bears
+his name has been edited with a valuable preface by the Rev. J. Forshall
+and Sir F. Madden. William Langland's poem, "The Complaint of Piers the
+Ploughman" (edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society), throws
+a flood of light on the social state of England after the Treaty of
+Bretigny.
+
+The "Annals of Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth," now published by
+the Master of the Rolls, are our main authority for the period which
+follows Edward's death. They serve as the basis of the St. Albans
+compilation which bears the name of Walsingham, and from which the "Life of
+Richard" by a monk of Evesham is for the most part derived. The same
+violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through Walsingham and the fifth book of
+Knyghton's Chronicle. The French authorities on the other hand are
+vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is
+supplemented by the metrical history of Creton ("Archaeologia," vol. xx.),
+and by the "Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart" (English Historical
+Society), both works of French authors and published in France in the time
+of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French feeling
+against the House of Lancaster and the war-policy which it had revived. The
+popular feeling in England may be seen in "Political Songs from Edward III.
+to Richard III." (Rolls Series). A poem on "The Deposition of Richard II."
+which has been published by the Camden Society is now ascribed to William
+Langland.
+
+With Henry the Fifth our historic materials become more abundant. We have
+the "Gesta Henrici Quinti" by Titus Livius, a chaplain in the royal army; a
+life by Elmham, prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical in
+arrangement and facts with the former work; a biography by Robert Redman; a
+metrical chronicle by Elmham (published in Rolls Series in "Memorials of
+Henry the Fifth"); and the meagre chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne.
+The King's Norman campaigns may be studied in M. Puiseux's "Siege de Rouen"
+(Caen, 1867). The "Wars of the English in France" and Blondel's work "De
+Reductione Normanniae" (both in Rolls Series) give ample information on the
+military side of this and the next reign. But with the accession of Henry
+the Sixth we again enter on a period of singular dearth in its historical
+authorities. The "Proces de Jeanne d'Arc" (published by the Societe de
+l'Histoire de France) is the only real authority for her history. For
+English affairs we are reduced to the meagre accounts of William of
+Worcester, of the Continuator of the Crowland Chronicle, and of Fabyan.
+Fabyan is a London alderman with a strong bias in favour of the House of
+Lancaster, and his work is useful for London only. The Continuator is one
+of the best of his class; and though connected with the house of York, the
+date of his work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field, makes him
+fairly impartial; but he is sketchy and deficient in information. The more
+copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in literary
+ability, but of later date, and strongly Lancastrian in tone. For the
+struggle between Edward and Warwick, the valuable narrative of "The Arrival
+of Edward the Fourth" (Camden Society) may be taken as the official account
+on the royal side. The Paston Letters are the first instance in English
+history of a family correspondence, and throw great light on the social
+condition of the time.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+EDWARD II
+1307-1327
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the Kings]
+
+In his calling together the estates of the realm Edward the First
+determined the course of English history. From the first moment of its
+appearance the Parliament became the centre of English affairs. The hundred
+years indeed which follow its assembly at Westminster saw its rise into a
+power which checked and overawed the Crown.
+
+Of the kings in whose reigns the Parliament gathered this mighty strength
+not one was likely to look with indifference on the growth of a rival
+authority, and the bulk of them were men who in other times would have
+roughly checked it. What held their hand was the need of the Crown. The
+century and a half that followed the gathering of the estates at
+Westminster was a time of almost continual war, and of the financial
+pressure that springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered them.
+In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought mainly an effective means
+of procuring supplies for that policy of national consolidation which had
+triumphed in Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. But the
+triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one, and the strife brought
+wider strifes in its train. When Edward wrung from Balliol an
+acknowledgement of his suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France,
+the war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the upgrowth of social, of
+political, of religious revolution within England itself, of which that
+acknowledgement was to be the prelude. But the thicker troubles gathered
+round England the more the royal treasury was drained, and now that
+arbitrary taxation was impossible the one means of filling it lay in a
+summons of the Houses. The Crown was chained to the Parliament by a tie of
+absolute need. From the first moment of parliamentary existence the life
+and power of the estates assembled at Westminster hung on the question of
+supplies. So long as war went on no ruler could dispense with the grants
+which fed the war and which Parliament alone could afford. But it was
+impossible to procure supplies save by redressing the grievances of which
+Parliament complained and by granting the powers which Parliament demanded.
+It was in vain that king after king, conscious that war bound them to the
+Parliament, strove to rid themselves of the war. So far was the ambition of
+our rulers from being the cause of the long struggle that, save in the one
+case of Henry the Fifth, the desperate effort of every ruler was to arrive
+at peace. Forced as they were to fight, their restless diplomacy strove to
+draw from victory as from defeat a means of escape from the strife that was
+enslaving the Crown. The royal Council, the royal favourites, were always
+on the side of peace. But fortunately for English freedom peace was
+impossible. The pride of the English people, the greed of France, foiled
+every attempt at accommodation. The wisest ministers sacrificed themselves
+in vain. King after king patched up truces which never grew into treaties,
+and concluded marriages which brought fresh discord instead of peace. War
+went ceaselessly on, and with the march of war went on the ceaseless growth
+of the Parliament.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Robert Bruce]
+
+The death of Edward the First arrested only for a moment the advance of his
+army to the north. The Earl of Pembroke led it across the border, and found
+himself master of the country without a blow. Bruce's career became that of
+a desperate adventurer, for even the Highland chiefs in whose fastnesses he
+found shelter were bitterly hostile to one who claimed to be king of their
+foes in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that transformed the murderer
+of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation's cause. Strong and of
+commanding presence, brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships
+of his career with a courage and hopefulness that never failed. In the
+legends that clustered round his name we see him listening in Highland
+glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass
+single-handed against a crowd of savage clansmen. Sometimes the small band
+which clung to him were forced to support themselves by hunting and
+fishing, sometimes to break up for safety as their enemies tracked them to
+their lair. Bruce himself had more than once to fling off his coat-of-mail
+and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags. Little by little,
+however, the dark sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed. James Douglas,
+the darling of Scottish story, was the first of the Lowland Barons to rally
+to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the king's cause. Once he
+surprised his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the
+dinner which was prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed
+their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate. Then he staved in the
+wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house and
+wood-pile on fire.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward the Second]
+
+A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of freedom; but the
+revival of the country went steadily on. Pembroke and the English forces
+were in fact paralyzed by a strife which had broken out in England between
+the new king and his baronage. The moral purpose which had raised his
+father to grandeur was wholly wanting in Edward the Second; he was showy,
+idle, and stubborn in temper; but he was far from being destitute of the
+intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in the Plantagenets. He had no
+love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign
+struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to
+taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses
+added to the Charter. The son's purpose was the same, that of throwing off
+what he looked on as the yoke of the baronage; but the means by which he
+designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a minister wholly
+dependent on the Crown. We have already noticed the change by which the
+"clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary
+government under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been quietly
+superseded by the prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the close
+of the late reign a direct demand on the part of the barons to nominate the
+great officers of state had been curtly rejected, but the royal choice had
+been practically limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of
+prelates and nobles, and however closely connected with royalty they might
+be such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and opinions
+of their order. The aim of the young king seems to have been to undo the
+change which had been silently brought about, and to imitate the policy of
+the contemporary sovereigns of France by choosing as his ministers men of
+an inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown for their power, and
+representatives of nothing but the policy and interests of their master.
+Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from a family of Guienne, had been his
+friend and companion during his father's reign, at the close of which he
+had been banished from the realm for his share in intrigues which divided
+Edward from his son. At the accession of the new king he was at once
+recalled, created Earl of Cornwall, and placed at the head of the
+administration. When Edward crossed the sea to wed Isabella of France, the
+daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage planned by his father to provide
+against any further intervention of France in his difficulties with
+Scotland, the new minister was left as Regent in his room. The offence
+given by this rapid promotion was embittered by his personal temper. Gay,
+genial, thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the quickness and
+audacity of Southern Gaul. The older ministers were dismissed, all claims
+of precedence or inheritance were set aside in the distribution of offices
+at the coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud baronage to
+fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and his lance unhorsed his
+opponents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit flung nicknames about
+the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was "the Actor," Pembroke "the Jew,"
+Warwick "the Black Dog." But taunt and defiance broke helplessly against
+the iron mass of the baronage. After a few months of power the formal
+demand of the Parliament for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in
+May 1308 Gaveston was formally banished from the realm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Thomas of Lancaster]
+
+But Edward was far from abandoning his favourite. In Ireland he was
+unfettered by the baronage, and here Gaveston found a refuge as the King's
+Lieutenant while Edward sought to obtain his recall by the intervention of
+France and the Papacy. But the financial pressure of the Scotch war again
+brought the king and his Parliament together in the spring of 1309. It was
+only by conceding the rights which his father had sought to establish of
+imposing import duties on the merchants by their own assent that he
+procured a subsidy. The firmness of the baronage sprang from their having
+found a head. In no point had the policy of Henry the Third more utterly
+broken down than in his attempt to weaken the power of the nobles by
+filling the great earldoms with kinsmen of the royal house. He had made
+Simon of Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to the nation
+in the Barons' war. In loading his second son, Edmund Crouchback, with
+honours and estates he raised a family to greatness which overawed the
+Crown. Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham he had
+received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of Derby
+on the extinction of the house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lancaster,
+was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these lordships
+the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the weight of these great baronies was added
+his royal blood. The father of Thomas had been a titular king of Sicily.
+His mother was dowager queen of Navarre. His half-sister by the mother's
+side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel and mother of the English
+queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not far
+from the succession to the throne. Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a
+nobler man, his adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided the
+king into a really national policy. As it was his weight proved
+irresistible. When Edward at the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston
+the Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament
+which met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the realm
+should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-one "Ordainers" with
+Archbishop Winchelsey at their head.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Ordainers]
+
+Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North. A triumph in Scotland
+would have given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of
+his father's military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep an
+army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his southern
+realm to meet the Parliament of 1311 and the "Ordinances" which the
+twenty-one laid before it. By this long and important statute Gaveston was
+banished, other advisers were driven from the Council, and the Florentine
+bankers whose loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out
+of the realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First were declared
+to be illegal. Its administrative provisions showed the relations which the
+barons sought to establish between the new Parliament and the Crown.
+Parliaments were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the
+king's servants were to be brought, if need were, to justice. The great
+officers of state were to be appointed with the counsel and consent of the
+baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament. The same consent of the barons in
+Parliament was to be needful ere the king could declare war or absent
+himself from the realm. As the Ordinances show, the baronage still looked
+on Parliament rather as a political organization of the nobles than as a
+gathering of the three Estates of the realm. The lower clergy pass
+unnoticed; the Commons are regarded as mere taxpayers whose part was still
+confined to the presentation of petitions of grievances and the grant of
+money. But even in this imperfect fashion the Parliament was a real
+representation of the country. The barons no longer depended for their
+force on the rise of some active leader, or gathered in exceptional
+assemblies to wrest reforms from the Crown by threat of war. Their action
+was made regular and legal. Even if the Commons took little part in forming
+decisions, their force when formed hung on the assent of the knights and
+burgesses to them; and the grant which alone could purchase from the Crown
+the concessions which the Baronage demanded lay absolutely within the
+control of the Third Estate. It was this which made the king's struggles so
+fruitless. He assented to the Ordinances, and then withdrawing to the North
+recalled Gaveston and annulled them. But Winchelsey excommunicated the
+favourite, and the barons, gathering in arms, besieged him in Scarborough.
+His surrender in May 1312 ended the strife. The "Black Dog" of Warwick had
+sworn that the favourite should feel his teeth; and Gaveston flung himself
+in vain at the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, praying for pity "from his
+gentle lord." In defiance of the terms of his capitulation he was beheaded
+on Blacklow Hill.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Bannockburn]
+
+The king's burst of grief was as fruitless as his threats of vengeance; a
+feigned submission of the conquerors completed the royal humiliation, and
+the barons knelt before Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon
+which seemed the deathblow of the royal power. But if Edward was powerless
+to conquer the baronage he could still by evading the observance of the
+Ordinances throw the whole realm into confusion. The two years that follow
+Gaveston's death are among the darkest in our history. A terrible
+succession of famines intensified the suffering which sprang from the utter
+absence of all rule as dissension raged between the barons and the king. At
+last a common peril drew both parties together. The Scots had profited by
+the English troubles, and Bruce's "harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of
+its Earl, who had joined the English army, fairly turned the tide of
+success in his favour. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and most of the Scotch
+fortresses fell one by one into King Robert's hands. The clergy met in
+council and owned him as their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who
+still held to the English cause were coerced into submission, and Bruce
+found himself strong enough to invest Stirling, the last and the most
+important of the Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward. Stirling was
+in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused England out of its civil
+strife to an effort for the recovery of its prey. At the close of 1313
+Edward recognized the Ordinances, and a liberal grant from the Parliament
+enabled him to take the field. Lancaster indeed still held aloof on the
+ground that the king had not sought the assent of Parliament to the war,
+but thirty thousand men followed Edward to the North, and a host of wild
+marauders were summoned from Ireland and Wales. The army which Bruce
+gathered to oppose this inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen, and was
+stationed to the south of Stirling on a rising ground flanked by a little
+brook, the Bannockburn, which gave its name to the engagement. The battle
+took place on the twenty-fourth of June 1314. Again two systems of warfare
+were brought face to face as they had been brought at Falkirk, for Robert
+like Wallace drew up his forces in hollow squares or circles of spearmen.
+The English were dispirited at the very outset by the failure of an attempt
+to relieve Stirling and by the issue of a single combat between Bruce and
+Henry de Bohun, a knight who bore down upon him as he was riding peacefully
+along the front of his army. Robert was mounted on a small hackney and held
+only a light battle-axe in his hand, but warding off his opponent's spear
+he cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the handle of his axe was
+shattered in his grasp. At the opening of the battle the English archers
+were thrown forward to rake the Scottish squares, but they were without
+support and were easily dispersed by a handful of horse whom Bruce held in
+reserve for the purpose. The body of men-at-arms next flung themselves on
+the Scottish front, but their charge was embarrassed by the narrow space
+along which the line was forced to move, and the steady resistance of the
+squares soon threw the knighthood into disorder. "The horses that were
+stickit," says an exulting Scotch writer, "rushed and reeled right rudely."
+In the moment of failure the sight of a body of camp-followers, whom they
+mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, spread panic through the English
+host. It broke in a headlong rout. Its thousands of brilliant horsemen were
+soon floundering in pits which guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or
+riding in wild haste for the border. Few however were fortunate enough to
+reach it. Edward himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded in
+escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of his knighthood fell into
+the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and the footmen were ruthlessly
+cut down by the country folk as they fled. For centuries to come the rich
+plunder of the English camp left its traces on the treasure-rolls and the
+vestment-rolls of castle and abbey throughout the Lowlands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Lancaster]
+
+Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland: but terrible as the blow was
+England could not humble herself to relinquish her claim on the Scottish
+crown. Edward was eager indeed for a truce, but with equal firmness Bruce
+refused all negotiation while the royal title was withheld from him and
+steadily pushed on the recovery of his southern dominions. His progress was
+unhindered. Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and Lancaster at the head of
+the Ordainers became supreme. But it was still impossible to trust the king
+or to act with him, and in the dead-lock of both parties the Scots
+plundered as they would. Their ravages in the North brought shame on
+England such as it had never known. At last Bruce's capture of Berwick in
+the spring of 1318 forced the king to give way. The Ordinances were
+formally accepted, an amnesty granted, and a small number of peers
+belonging to the barons' party added to the great officers of state. Had a
+statesman been at the head of the baronage the weakness of Edward might
+have now been turned to good purpose. But the character of the Earl of
+Lancaster seems to have fallen far beneath the greatness of his position.
+Distrustful of his cousin, yet himself incapable of governing, he stood
+sullenly aloof from the royal Council and the royal armies, and Edward was
+able to lay his failure in recovering Berwick during the campaign of 1319
+to the Earl's charge. His influence over the country was sensibly weakened;
+and in this weakness the new advisers on whom the king was leaning saw a
+hope of destroying his power. These were a younger and elder Hugh Le
+Despenser, son and grandson of the Justiciar who had fallen beside Earl
+Simon at Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they may have been, they were
+able men, and their policy was of a higher stamp than the wilful defiance
+of Gaveston. It lay, if we may gather it from the faint indications which
+remain, in a frank recognition of the power of the three Estates as opposed
+to the separate action of the baronage. The rise of the younger Hugh, on
+whom the king bestowed the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of its
+coheiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, was rapid enough to
+excite general jealousy; and in 1321 Lancaster found little difficulty in
+extorting by force of arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of
+popular sympathy was already wavering, and it was turned to the royal cause
+by an insult offered to the queen, against whom Lady Badlesmere closed the
+doors of Ledes Castle. The unexpected energy shown by Edward in avenging
+this insult gave fresh strength to his cause. At the opening of 1322 he
+found himself strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lancaster
+convoked the baronage to force him again into exile, the weakness of their
+party was shown by some negotiations into which the Earl entered with the
+Scots and by his precipitate retreat to the north on the advance of the
+royal army. At Boroughbridge his forces were arrested and dispersed, and
+Thomas himself, brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, was tried and
+condemned to death as a traitor. "Have mercy on me, King of Heaven," cried
+Lancaster, as, mounted on a grey pony without a bridle, he was hurried to
+execution, "for my earthly king has forsaken me." His death was followed by
+that of a number of his adherents and by the captivity of others; while a
+Parliament at York annulled the proceedings against the Despensers and
+repealed the Ordinances.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Despensers]
+
+It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence
+of the royalists, that we owe the famous provision which reveals the policy
+of the Despensers, the provision that all laws concerning "the estate of
+our Lord the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm and the
+people shall be treated, accorded, and established in Parliaments by our
+Lord the King and by the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and
+commonalty of the realm according as hath been hitherto accustomed." It
+would seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that much of the
+sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the assumption of all
+legislative action by the baronage alone. The same policy was seen in a
+reissue in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most beneficial
+provisions of the Ordinances which had been formally repealed. But the
+arrogance of the Despensers gave new offence; and the utter failure of a
+fresh campaign against Scotland again weakened the Crown. The barbarous
+forays in which the borderers under Earl Douglas were wasting
+Northumberland woke a general indignation; and a grant from the Parliament
+at York enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North. But Bruce
+as of old declined an engagement till the wasted Lowlands starved the
+invaders into a ruinous retreat. The failure forced England in the spring
+of 1323 to stoop to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which
+Bruce was suffered to take the royal title. We see in this act of the
+Despensers the first of a series of such attempts by which minister after
+minister strove to free the Crown from the bondage under which the
+war-pressure laid it to the growing power of Parliament; but it ended, as
+these after attempts ended, only in the ruin of the counsellors who planned
+it. The pride of the country had been roused by the struggle, and the
+humiliation of such a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.
+It led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed this disastrous
+reign.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Isabella]
+
+In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his father, had been hampered
+not only by internal divisions but by the harassing intervention of France.
+The rising under Bruce had been backed by French aid as well as by a
+revival of the old quarrel over Guienne, and on the accession of Charles
+the Fourth in 1322 a demand of homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called
+Edward over sea. But the Despensers dared not let him quit the realm, and a
+fresh dispute as to the right of possession in the Agenois brought about
+the seizure of the bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the part of the
+French. The quarrel verged upon open war, and to close it Edward's queen,
+Isabella, a sister of the French king, undertook in 1325 to revisit her
+home and bring about a treaty of peace between the two countries. Isabella
+hated the Despensers; she was alienated from her husband; but hatred and
+alienation were as yet jealously concealed. At the close of the year the
+terms of peace seemed to be arranged; and though declining to cross the
+sea, Edward evaded the difficulty created by the demand for personal homage
+by investing his son with the Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and
+despatching him to join his mother at Paris. The boy did homage to King
+Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the Agenois being reserved for
+legal decision, and Edward at once recalled his wife and son to England.
+Neither threats nor prayers however could induce either wife or child to
+return to his court. Roger Mortimer, the most powerful of the Marcher
+barons and a deadly foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and
+his influence over the queen made her the centre of a vast conspiracy. With
+the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the
+Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter; the Italian
+bankers supplied funds; and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail
+in the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed
+when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at
+Orwell. Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens of London whose aid he
+implored, the king fled hastily to the west and embarked with the
+Despensers for Lundy Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible
+refuge; but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast, where he
+fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster, the brother of the Earl
+whom they had slain. The younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at
+once hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the king placed in ward at
+Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that
+purpose at Westminster in January 1327.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Deposition of Edward]
+
+The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the
+earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king who had
+proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in Edward's behalf,
+and only four prelates protested when the young Prince was proclaimed king
+by acclamation and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes without.
+The revolution took legal form in a bill which charged the captive monarch
+with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his
+coronation oath and oppression of the Church and baronage; and on the
+approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had
+ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor. A
+deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent
+of the discrowned king to his own deposition, and Edward "clad in a plain
+black gown" bowed quietly to his fate. Sir William Trussel at once
+addressed him in words which better than any other mark the nature of the
+step which the Parliament had taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor of the
+earls, barons, and others, having for this full and sufficient power, do
+render and give back to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and
+fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and acquit and discharge them
+thereof in the best manner that law and custom will give. And I now make
+protestation in their name that they will no longer be in your fealty and
+allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as king, but will account you
+hereafter as a private person, without any manner of royal dignity." A
+significant act followed these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount, the
+steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony used only
+at a king's death, and declared that all persons engaged in the royal
+service were discharged. The act of Blount was only an omen of the fate
+which awaited the miserable king. In the following September he was
+murdered in Berkeley Castle.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+EDWARD THE THIRD
+1327-1347
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Estate of the Commons]
+
+The deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed to the world the power which
+the English Parliament had gained. In thirty years from their first
+assembly at Westminster the Estates had wrested from the Crown the last
+relic of arbitrary taxation, had forced on it new ministers and a new
+system of government, had claimed a right of confirming the choice of its
+councillors and of punishing their misconduct, and had established the
+principle that redress of grievances precedes a grant of supply. Nor had
+the time been less important in the internal growth of Parliament. Step by
+step the practical sense of the Houses themselves completed the work of
+Edward by bringing about change after change in its composition. The very
+division into a House of Lords and a House of Commons formed no part of the
+original plan of Edward the First; in the earlier Parliaments each of the
+four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses met, deliberated, and
+made their grants apart from each other. This isolation however of the
+Estates soon showed signs of breaking down. Though the clergy held steadily
+aloof from any real union with its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire
+were drawn by the similarity of their social position into a close
+connexion with the lords. They seem in fact to have been soon admitted by
+the baronage to an almost equal position with themselves, whether as
+legislators or counsellors of the Crown. The burgesses on the other hand
+took little part at first in Parliamentary proceedings, save in those which
+related to the taxation of their class. But their position was raised by
+the strifes of the reign of Edward the Second when their aid was needed by
+the baronage in its struggle with the Crown; and their right to share fully
+in all legislative action was asserted in the statute of 1322. From this
+moment no proceedings can have been considered as formally legislative save
+those conducted in full Parliament of all the estates. In subjects of
+public policy however the barons were still regarded as the sole advisers
+of the Crown, though the knights of the shire were sometimes consulted with
+them. But the barons and knighthood were not fated to be drawn into a
+single body whose weight would have given an aristocratic impress to the
+constitution. Gradually, through causes with which we are imperfectly
+acquainted, the knights of the shire drifted from their older connexion
+with the baronage into so close and intimate a union with the
+representatives of the towns that at the opening of the reign of Edward the
+Third the two orders are found grouped formally together, under the name of
+"The Commons." It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this
+change. Had Parliament remained broken up into its four orders of clergy,
+barons, knights, and citizens, its power would have been neutralized at
+every great crisis by the jealousies and difficulty of co-operation among
+its component parts. A permanent union of the knighthood and the baronage
+on the other hand would have converted Parliament into the mere
+representative of an aristocratic caste, and would have robbed it of the
+strength which it has drawn from its connexion with the great body of the
+commercial classes. The new attitude of the knighthood, their social
+connexion as landed gentry with the baronage, their political union with
+the burgesses, really welded the three orders into one, and gave that unity
+of feeling and action to our Parliament on which its power has ever since
+mainly depended.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotch War]
+
+The weight of the two Houses was seen in their settlement of the new
+government by the nomination of a Council with Earl Henry of Lancaster at
+its head. The Council had at once to meet fresh difficulties in the North.
+The truce so recently made ceased legally with Edward's deposition; and the
+withdrawal of his royal title in further offers of peace warned Bruce of
+the new temper of the English rulers. Troops gathered on either side, and
+the English Council sought to pave the way for an attack by dividing
+Scotland against itself. Edward Balliol, a son of the former king John, was
+solemnly received as a vassal-king of Scotland at the English court. Robert
+was disabled by leprosy from taking the field in person, but the insult
+roused him to hurl his marauders again over the border under Douglas and
+Sir Thomas Randolph. The Scotch army has been painted for us by an
+eye-witness whose description is embodied in the work of Jehan le Bel. "It
+consisted of four thousand men-at-arms, knights, and esquires, well
+mounted, besides twenty thousand men bold and hardy, armed after the manner
+of their country, and mounted upon little hackneys that are never tied up
+or dressed, but turned immediately after the day's march to pasture on the
+heath or in the fields.... They bring no carriages with them on account of
+the mountains they have to pass in Northumberland, neither do they carry
+with them any provisions of bread or wine, for their habits of sobriety are
+such in time of war that they will live for a long time on flesh
+half-sodden without bread, and drink the river water without wine. They
+have therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress the flesh of
+the cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, and being sure to
+find plenty of them in the country which they invade they carry none with
+them. Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries a broad piece of
+metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of
+the sodden flesh and their stomach appears weak and empty, they set this
+plate over the fire, knead the meal with water, and when the plate is hot
+put a little of the paste upon it in a thin cake like a biscuit, which they
+eat to warm their stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they perform a
+longer day's march than other soldiers." Though twenty thousand horsemen
+and forty thousand foot marched under their boy-king to protect the border,
+the English troops were utterly helpless against such a foe as this. At one
+time the whole army lost its way in the border wastes: at another all
+traces of the enemy disappeared, and an offer of knighthood and a hundred
+marks was made to any who could tell where the Scots were encamped. But
+when they were found their position behind the Wear proved unassailable,
+and after a bold sally on the English camp Douglas foiled an attempt at
+intercepting him by a clever retreat. The English levies broke hopelessly
+up, and a fresh foray into Northumberland forced the English Court in 1328
+to submit to peace. By the treaty of Northampton which was solemnly
+confirmed by Parliament in September the independence of Scotland was
+recognized, and Robert Bruce owned as its king. Edward formally abandoned
+his claim of feudal superiority over Scotland; while Bruce promised to make
+compensation for the damage done in the North, to marry his son David to
+Edward's sister Joan, and to restore their forfeited estates to those
+nobles who had sided with the English king.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Mortimer]
+
+But the pride of England had been too much roused by the struggle with the
+Scots to bear this defeat easily, and the first result of the treaty of
+Northampton was the overthrow of the government which concluded it. This
+result was hastened by the pride of Roger Mortimer, who was now created
+Earl of March, and who had made himself supreme through his influence over
+Isabella and his exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all practical
+share in the administration of the realm. The first efforts to shake
+Roger's power were unsuccessful. The Earl of Lancaster stood, like his
+brother, at the head of the baronage; the parliamentary settlement at
+Edward's accession had placed him first in the royal Council; and it was to
+him that the task of defying Mortimer naturally fell. At the close of 1328
+therefore Earl Henry formed a league with the Archbishop of Canterbury and
+with the young king's uncles, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent, to bring
+Mortimer to account for the peace with Scotland and the usurpation of the
+government as well as for the late king's murder, a murder which had been
+the work of his private partizans and which had profoundly shocked the
+general conscience. But the young king clave firmly to his mother, the
+Earls of Norfolk and Kent deserted to Mortimer, and powerful as it seemed
+the league broke up without result. A feeling of insecurity however spurred
+the Earl of March to a bold stroke at his opponents. The Earl of Kent, who
+was persuaded that his brother, Edward the Second, still lived a prisoner
+in Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to restore him to
+the throne, tried before a Parliament filled with Mortimer's adherents, and
+sent to the block. But the death of a prince of the royal blood roused the
+young king to resentment at the greed and arrogance of a minister who
+treated Edward himself as little more than a state-prisoner. A few months
+after his uncle's execution the king entered the Council chamber in
+Nottingham Castle with a force which he had introduced through a secret
+passage in the rock on which it stands, and arrested Mortimer with his own
+hands. A Parliament which was at once summoned condemned the Earl of March
+to a traitor's death, and in November 1330 he was beheaded at Tyburn, while
+the queen-mother was sent for the rest of her life into confinement at
+Castle Rising.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and France]
+
+Young as he was, and he had only reached his eighteenth year, Edward at
+once assumed the control of affairs. His first care was to restore good
+order throughout the country, which under the late government had fallen
+into ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with France for further
+enterprises in the North. A formal peace had been concluded by Isabella
+after her husband's fall; but the death of Charles the Fourth soon brought
+about new jealousies between the two courts. The three sons of Philip the
+Fair had followed him on the throne in succession, but all had now died
+without male issue, and Isabella, as Philip's daughter, claimed the crown
+for her son. The claim in any case was a hard one to make out. Though her
+brothers had left no sons, they had left daughters, and if female
+succession were admitted these daughters of Philip's sons would precede a
+son of Philip's daughter. Isabella met this difficulty by a contention that
+though females could transmit the right of succession they could not
+themselves possess it, and that her son, as the nearest living male
+descendant of Philip the Fair, and born in the lifetime of the king from
+whom he claimed, could claim in preference to females who were related to
+Philip in as near a degree. But the bulk of French jurists asserted that
+only male succession gave right to the French throne. On such a theory the
+right inheritable from Philip the Fair was exhausted; and the crown passed
+to the son of Philip's younger brother, Charles of Valois, who in fact
+peacefully mounted the throne as Philip the Sixth. Purely formal as the
+claim which Isabella advanced seems to have been, it revived the irritation
+between the two courts, and though Edward's obedience to a summons which
+Philip addressed to him to do homage for Aquitaine brought about an
+agreement that both parties should restore the gains they had made since
+the last treaty the agreement was never carried out. Fresh threats of war
+ended in the conclusion of a new treaty of peace, but the question whether
+liege or simple homage was due for the duchies remained unsettled when the
+fall of Mortimer gave the young king full mastery of affairs. His action
+was rapid and decisive. Clad as a merchant, and with but fifteen horsemen
+at his back, Edward suddenly made his appearance in 1331 at the French
+court and did homage as fully as Philip required. The question of the
+Agenois remained unsettled, though the English Parliament insisted that its
+decision should rest with negotiation and not with war, but on all other
+points a complete peace was made; and the young king rode back with his
+hands free for an attack which he was planning on the North.
+
+
+[Sidenote: New Scotch War]
+
+The provisions of the Treaty of Northampton for the restitution of estates
+had never been fully carried out. Till this was done the English court held
+that the rights of feudal superiority over Scotland which it had yielded in
+the treaty remained in force; and at this moment an opening seemed to
+present itself for again asserting these rights with success. Fortune
+seemed at last to have veered to the English side. The death of Robert
+Bruce only a year after the Treaty of Northampton left the Scottish throne
+to his son David, a child of but eight years old. The death of the king was
+followed by the loss of Randolph and Douglas; and the internal difficulties
+of the realm broke out in civil strife. To the great barons on either side
+the border the late peace involved serious losses, for many of the Scotch
+houses held large estates in England as many of the English lords held
+large estates in Scotland, and although the treaty had provided for their
+claims they had in each case been practically set aside. It is this
+discontent of the barons at the new settlement which explains the sudden
+success of Edward Balliol in a snatch which he made at the Scottish throne.
+Balliol's design was known at the English court, where he had found shelter
+for some years; and Edward, whether sincerely or no, forbade his barons
+from joining him and posted troops on the border to hinder his crossing it.
+But Balliol found little difficulty in making his attack by sea. He sailed
+from England at the head of a body of nobles who claimed estates in the
+North, landed in August 1332 on the shores of Fife, and after repulsing
+with immense loss an army which attacked him near Perth was crowned at
+Scone two months after his landing, while David Bruce fled helplessly to
+France. Edward had given no open aid to this enterprise, but the crisis
+tempted his ambition, and he demanded and obtained from Balliol an
+acknowledgement of the English suzerainty. The acknowledgement however was
+fatal to Balliol himself. Surprised at Annan by a party of Scottish nobles,
+their sudden attack drove him in December over the border after a reign of
+but five months; and Berwick, which he had agreed to surrender to Edward,
+was strongly garrisoned against an English attack. The sudden breakdown of
+his vassal-king left Edward face to face with a new Scotch war. The
+Parliament which he summoned to advise on the enforcement of his claim
+showed no wish to plunge again into the contest and met him only with
+evasions and delays. But Edward had gone too far to withdraw. In March 1333
+he appeared before Berwick, and besieged the town. A Scotch army under the
+regent, Sir Archibald Douglas, brother to the famous Sir James, advanced to
+its relief in July and attacked a covering force which was encamped on the
+strong position of Halidon Hill. The English bowmen however vindicated the
+fame they had first won at Falkirk and were soon to crown in the victory of
+Crecy. The Scotch only struggled through the marsh which covered the
+English front to be riddled with a storm of arrows and to break in utter
+rout. The battle decided the fate of Berwick. From that time the town has
+remained English territory. It was in fact the one part of Edward's
+conquests which was preserved in the end by the English crown. But fragment
+as it was, it was always viewed legally as representing the realm of which
+it once formed a part. As Scotland, it had its chancellor, chamberlain, and
+other officers of State: and the peculiar heading of Acts of Parliament
+enacted for England "and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed" still preserves
+the memory of its peculiar position. But the victory did more than give
+Berwick to England. The defeat of Douglas was followed by the submission of
+a large part of the Scotch nobles, by the flight of the boy-king David, and
+by the return of Balliol unopposed to the throne. Edward exacted a heavy
+price for his aid. All Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded to
+England, and Balliol did homage as vassal-king for the rest.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland freed]
+
+It was at the moment of this submission that the young king reached the
+climax of his success. A king at fourteen, a father at seventeen, he had
+carried out at eighteen a political revolution in the overthrow of
+Mortimer, and restored at twenty-two the ruined work of his grandfather.
+The northern frontier was carried to its old line under the Northumbrian
+kings. His kingdom within was peaceful and orderly; and the strife with
+France seemed at an end. During the next three years Edward persisted in
+the line of policy he had adopted, retaining his hold over Southern
+Scotland, aiding his sub-king Balliol in campaign after campaign against
+the despairing efforts of the nobles who still adhered to the house of
+Bruce, a party who were now headed by Robert the Steward of Scotland and by
+Earl Randolph of Moray. His perseverance was all but crowned with success,
+when Scotland was again saved by the intervention of France. The successes
+of Edward roused anew the jealousy of the French court. David Bruce found a
+refuge with Philip; French ships appeared off the Scotch coast and brought
+aid to the patriot nobles; and the old legal questions about the Agenois
+and Aquitaine were mooted afresh by the French council. For a time Edward
+staved off the contest by repeated embassies; but his refusal to accept
+Philip as a mediator between England and the Scots stirred France to
+threats of war. In 1335 fleets gathered on its coast; descents were made on
+the English shores; and troops and galleys were hired in Italy and the
+north for an invasion of England. The mere threat of war saved Scotland.
+Edward's forces there were drawn to the south to meet the looked-for attack
+from across the Channel; and the patriot party freed from their pressure at
+once drew together again. The actual declaration of war against France at
+the close of 1337 was the knell of Balliol's greatness; he found himself
+without an adherent and withdrew two years later to the court of Edward,
+while David returned to his kingdom in 1342 and won back the chief
+fastnesses of the Lowlands. From that moment the freedom of Scotland was
+secured. From a war of conquest and patriotic resistance the struggle died
+into a petty strife between two angry neighbours, which became a mere
+episode in the larger contest which it had stirred between England and
+France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Hundred Years War]
+
+Whether in its national or in its European bearings it is difficult to
+overestimate the importance of the contest which was now to open between
+these two nations. To England it brought a social, a religious, and in the
+end a political revolution. The Peasant Revolt, Lollardry, and the New
+Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred Years War. With it began the
+military renown of England; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of
+the seas. The pride begotten by great victories and a sudden revelation of
+warlike prowess roused the country not only to a new ambition, a new
+resolve to assert itself as a European power, but to a repudiation of the
+claims of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical independence
+both of Church and Crown which paved the way for and gave its ultimate form
+to the English Reformation. The peculiar shape which English warfare
+assumed, the triumph of the yeoman and archer over noble and knight, gave
+new force to the political advance of the Commons. On the other hand the
+misery of the war produced the first great open feud between labour and
+capital. The glory of Crecy or Poitiers was dearly bought by the upgrowth
+of English pauperism. The warlike temper nursed on foreign fields begot at
+home a new turbulence and scorn of law, woke a new feudal spirit in the
+baronage, and sowed in the revolution which placed a new house on the
+throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the succession which troubled
+England to the days of Elizabeth. Nor was the contest of less import in the
+history of France. If it struck her for the moment from her height of
+pride, it raised her in the end to the front rank among the states of
+Europe. It carried her boundaries to the Rhone and the Pyrenees. It wrecked
+alike the feudal power of her _noblesse_ and the hopes of constitutional
+liberty which might have sprung from the emancipation of the peasant or the
+action of the burgher. It founded a royal despotism which reached its
+height in Richelieu and finally plunged France into the gulf of the
+Revolution.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Imperial Alliance]
+
+Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the moment when Philip
+and Edward declared war. But from the very first the war took European
+dimensions. The young king saw clearly the greater strength of France. The
+weakness of the Empire, the captivity of the Papacy at Avignon, left her
+without a rival among European powers. The French chivalry was the envy of
+the world, and its military fame had just been heightened by a victory over
+the Flemish communes at Cassel. In numbers, in wealth, the French people
+far surpassed their neighbours over the Channel. England can hardly have
+counted more than four millions of inhabitants, France boasted of twenty.
+The clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the
+fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have
+equalled in number their subjects in England. There was the same
+disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in
+their military resources. Edward could bring only eight thousand
+men-at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force was busy
+elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty thousand. Of the revolution in
+warfare which was to reverse this superiority, to make the footman rather
+than the horseman the strength of an army, the world and even the English
+king, in spite of Falkirk and Halidon, as yet recked little. Edward's whole
+energy was bent on meeting the strength of France by a coalition of powers
+against her, and his plans were helped by the dread which the great
+feudatories of the empire who lay nearest to him, the Duke of Brabant, the
+Counts of Hainault and Gelders, the Markgrave of Juliers, felt of French
+annexation. They listened willingly enough to his offers. Sixty thousand
+crowns purchased the alliance of Brabant. Lesser subsidies bought that of
+the two counts and the Markgrave. The king's work was helped indeed by his
+domestic relations. The Count of Hainault was Edward's father-in-law; he
+was also the father-in-law of the Count of Gelders. But the marriage of a
+third of the Count's daughters brought the English king a more important
+ally. She was wedded to the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, and the connexion
+that thus existed between the English and Imperial Courts facilitated the
+negotiations which ended in a formal alliance.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Relation to the Papacy]
+
+But the league had a more solid ground. The Emperor, like Edward, had his
+strife with France. His strife sprang from the new position of the Papacy.
+The removal of the Popes to Avignon which followed on the quarrel of
+Boniface the Eighth with Philip le Bel and the subjection to the French
+court which resulted from it affected the whole state of European politics.
+In the ever-recurring contest between the Papacy and the Empire France had
+of old been the lieutenant of the Roman See. But with the settlement at
+Avignon the relation changed, and the Pope became the lieutenant of France.
+Instead of the Papacy using the French kings in its war of ideas against
+the Empire the French kings used the Papacy as an instrument in their
+political rivalry with the Emperors. But if the position of the Pope drew
+Lewis to the side of England, it had much to do with drawing Edward to the
+side of Lewis. It was this that made the alliance, fruitless as it proved
+in a military sense, so memorable in its religious results. Hitherto
+England had been mainly on the side of the Popes in their strife against
+the Emperors. Now that the Pope had become a tool in the hands of a power
+which was to be its great enemy, the country was driven to close alliances
+with the Empire and to an evergrowing alienation from the Roman See. In
+Scotch affairs the hostility of the Popes had been steady and vexatious
+ever since Edward the First's time, and from the moment that this fresh
+struggle commenced they again showed their French partizanship. When Lewis
+made a last appeal for peace, Philip of Valois made Benedict XII. lay down
+as a condition that the Emperor should form no alliance with an enemy of
+France. The quarrel of both England and Germany with the Papacy at once
+grew ripe. The German Diet met to declare that the Imperial power came from
+God alone, and that the choice of an Emperor needed no Papal confirmation,
+while Benedict replied by a formal excommunication of Lewis. England on the
+other hand entered on a religious revolution when she stood hand in hand
+with an excommunicated power. It was significant that though worship ceased
+in Flanders on the Pope's interdict, the English priests who were brought
+over set the interdict at nought.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Failure of the Alliance]
+
+The negotiation of this alliance occupied the whole of 1337; it ended in a
+promise of the Emperor on payment of 3000 gold florins to furnish two
+thousand men-at-arms. In the opening of 1338 an attack of Philip on the
+Agenois forced Edward into open war. His profuse expenditure however
+brought little fruit. Though Edward crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the
+year was spent in negotiations with the princes of the Lower Rhine and in
+an interview with the Emperor at Coblentz, where Lewis appointed him
+Vicar-General of the Emperor for all territories on the left bank of the
+Rhine. The occupation of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French king gave
+a formal ground for calling the princes of this district to Edward's
+standard. But already the great alliance showed signs of yielding. Edward,
+uneasy at his connexion with an Emperor under the ban of the Church and
+harassed by vehement remonstrances from the Pope, entered again into
+negotiations with France in the winter of 1338; and Lewis, alarmed in his
+turn, listened to fresh overtures from Benedict, who held out vague hopes
+of reconciliation while he threatened a renewed excommunication if Lewis
+persisted in invading France. The non-arrival of the English subsidy
+decided the Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and the attitude
+of Lewis told on the temper of Edward's German allies. Though all joined
+him in the summer of 1339 on his formal summons of them as Vicar-General of
+the Empire, and his army when it appeared before Cambray numbered forty
+thousand men, their ardour cooled as the town held out. Philip approached
+it from the south, and on Edward's announcing his resolve to cross the
+river and attack him he was at once deserted by the two border princes who
+had most to lose from a contest with France, the Counts of Hainault and
+Namur. But the king was still full of hope. He pushed forward to the
+country round St. Quentin between the head waters of the Somme and the Oise
+with the purpose of forcing a decisive engagement. But he found Philip
+strongly encamped, and declaring their supplies exhausted his allies at
+once called for a retreat. It was in vain that Edward moved slowly for a
+week along the French border. Philip's position was too strongly guarded by
+marshes and entrenchments to be attacked, and at last the allies would stay
+no longer. At the news that the French king had withdrawn to the south the
+whole army in turn fell back upon Brussels.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Papacy]
+
+The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes which Edward had drawn from
+his alliance with the Empire. With the exhaustion of his subsidies the
+princes of the Low Countries became inactive. The Duke of Brabant became
+cooler in his friendship. The Emperor himself, still looking to an
+accommodation with the Pope and justly jealous of Edward's own intrigues at
+Avignon, wavered and at last fell away. But though the alliance ended in
+disappointment it had given a new impulse to the grudge against the Papacy
+which began with its extortions in the reign of Henry the Third. The hold
+of Rome on the loyalty of England was sensibly weakening. Their transfer
+from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed the Popes of half the awe which
+they had inspired among Englishmen. Not only did it bring them nearer and
+more into the light of common day, but it dwarfed them into mere agents of
+French policy. The old bitterness at their exactions was revived by the
+greed to which they were driven through their costly efforts to impose a
+French and Papal Emperor on Germany as well as to secure themselves in
+their new capital on the Rhone. The mighty building, half fortress, half
+palace, which still awes the traveller at Avignon has played its part in
+our history. Its erection was to the rise of Lollardry what the erection of
+St. Peter's was to the rise of Lutheranism. Its massive walls, its stately
+chapel, its chambers glowing with the frescoes of Simone Memmi, the garden
+which covered its roof with a strange verdure, called year by year for
+fresh supplies of gold; and for this as for the wider and costlier schemes
+of Papal policy gold could be got only by pressing harder and harder on the
+national churches the worst claims of the Papal court, by demands of
+first-fruits and annates from rectory and bishoprick, by pretensions to the
+right of bestowing all benefices which were in ecclesiastical patronage and
+by the sale of these presentations, by the direct taxation of the clergy,
+by the intrusion of foreign priests into English livings, by opening a mart
+for the disposal of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, and by
+encouraging appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the Papal
+court. No grievance was more bitterly felt than this grievance of appeals.
+Cases of the most trifling importance were called for decision out of the
+realm to a tribunal whose delays were proverbial and whose fees were
+enormous. The envoy of an Oxford College which sought only a formal licence
+to turn a vicarage into a rectory had not only to bear the expense and toil
+of a journey which then occupied some eighteen days but was kept dangling
+at Avignon for three-and-twenty weeks. Humiliating and vexatious however as
+these appeals were, they were but one among the means of extortion which
+the Papal court multiplied as its needs grew greater. The protest of a
+later Parliament, exaggerated as its statements no doubt are, shows the
+extent of the national irritation, if not of the grievances which produced
+it. It asserted that the taxes levied by the Pope amounted to five times
+the amount of those levied by the king; that by reservations during the
+life of actual holders the Pope disposed of the same bishoprick four or
+five times over, receiving each time the first-fruits. "The brokers of the
+sinful city of Rome promote for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to
+benefices to the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned
+hardly obtain one of twenty. So decays sound learning. They present aliens
+who neither see nor care to see their parishioners, despise God's services,
+convey away the treasure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens.
+The Pope's revenue from England alone is larger than that of any prince in
+Christendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven and
+shorn." At the close of this reign indeed the deaneries of Lichfield,
+Salisbury, and York, the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was reputed the
+wealthiest English benefice, together with a host of prebends and
+preferments, were held by Italian cardinals and priests, while the Pope's
+collector from his office in London sent twenty thousand marks a year to
+the Papal treasury.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Protest of the Parliament]
+
+But the greed of the Popes was no new grievance, though the increase of
+these exactions since the removal to Avignon gave it a new force. What
+alienated England most was their connexion with and dependence on France.
+From the first outset of the troubles in the North their attitude had been
+one of hostility to the English projects. France was too useful a supporter
+of the Papal court to find much difficulty in inducing it to aid in
+hampering the growth of English greatness. Boniface the Eighth released
+Balliol from his oath of fealty, and forbade Edward to attack Scotland on
+the ground that it was a fief of the Roman See. His intervention was met by
+a solemn and emphatic protest from the English Parliament; but it none the
+less formed a terrible obstacle in Edward's way. The obstacle was at last
+removed by the quarrel of Boniface with Philip the Fair; but the end of
+this quarrel only threw the Papacy more completely into the hands of
+France. Though Avignon remained imperial soil, the removal of the Popes to
+this city on the verge of their dominions made them mere tools of the
+French kings. Much no doubt of the endless negotiation which the Papal
+court carried on with Edward the Third in his strife with Philip of Valois
+was an honest struggle for peace. But to England it seemed the mere
+interference of a dependant on behalf of "our enemy of France." The people
+scorned a "French Pope," and threatened Papal legates with stoning when
+they landed on English shores. The alliance of Edward with an
+excommunicated Emperor, the bold defiance with which English priests said
+mass in Flanders when an interdict reduced the Flemish priests to silence,
+were significant tokens of the new attitude which England was taking up in
+the face of Popes who were leagued with its enemy. The old quarrel over
+ecclesiastical wrongs was renewed in a formal and decisive way. In 1343 the
+Commons petitioned for the redress of the grievance of Papal appointments
+to vacant livings in despite of the rights of patrons or the Crown; and
+Edward formally complained to the Pope of his appointing "foreigners, most
+of them suspicious persons, who do not reside on their benefices, who do
+not know the faces of the flocks entrusted to them, who do not understand
+their language, but, neglecting the cure of souls, seek as hirelings only
+their worldly hire." In yet sharper words the king rebuked the Papal greed.
+"The successor of the Apostles was set over the Lord's sheep to feed and
+not to shear them." The Parliament declared "that they neither could nor
+would tolerate such things any longer"; and the general irritation moved
+slowly towards those statutes of Provisors and Praemunire which heralded
+the policy of Henry the Eighth.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Flanders]
+
+But for the moment the strife with the Papacy was set aside in the efforts
+which were needed for a new struggle with France. The campaign of 1339 had
+not only ended in failure, it had dispelled the trust of Edward in an
+Imperial alliance. But as this hope faded away a fresh hope dawned on the
+king from another quarter. Flanders, still bleeding from the defeat of its
+burghers by the French knighthood, was his natural ally. England was the
+great wool-producing country of the west, but few woollen fabrics were
+woven in England. The number of weavers' gilds shows that the trade was
+gradually extending, and at the very outset of his reign Edward had taken
+steps for its encouragement. He invited Flemish weavers to settle in his
+country, and took the new immigrants, who chose the eastern counties for
+the seat of their trade, under his royal protection. But English
+manufactures were still in their infancy and nine-tenths of the English
+wool went to the looms of Bruges or of Ghent. We may see the rapid growth
+of this export trade in the fact that the king received in a single year
+more than L30,000 from duties levied on wool alone. The woolsack which
+forms the Chancellor's seat in the House of Lords is said to witness to the
+importance which the government attached to this new source of wealth. A
+stoppage of this export threw half the population of the great Flemish
+towns out of work, and the irritation caused in Flanders by the
+interruption which this trade sustained through the piracies that Philip's
+ships were carrying on in the Channel showed how effective the threat of
+such a stoppage would be in securing their alliance. Nor was this the only
+ground for hoping for aid from the Flemish towns. Their democratic spirit
+jostled roughly with the feudalism of France. If their counts clung to the
+French monarchy, the towns themselves, proud of their immense population,
+their thriving industry, their vast wealth, drew more and more to
+independence. Jacques van Arteveldt, a great brewer of Ghent, wielded the
+chief influence in their councils, and his aim was to build up a
+confederacy which might hold France in check along her northern border.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Flemish Alliance]
+
+His plans had as yet brought no help from the Flemish towns, but at the
+close of 1339 they set aside their neutrality for open aid. The great plan
+of Federation which Van Arteveldt had been devising as a check on the
+aggression of France was carried out in a treaty concluded between Edward,
+the Duke of Brabant, the cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Louvain, Ghent,
+Bruges, Ypres, and seven others. By this remarkable treaty it was provided
+that war should be begun and ended only by mutual consent, free commerce be
+encouraged between Flanders and Brabant, and no change made in their
+commercial arrangements save with the consent of the whole league. By a
+subsequent treaty the Flemish towns owned Edward as King of France, and
+declared war against Philip of Valois. But their voice was decisive on the
+course of the campaign which opened in 1340. As Philip held the Upper
+Scheldt by the occupation of Cambray, so he held the Lower Scheldt by that
+of Tournay, a fortress which broke the line of commerce between Flanders
+and Brabant. It was a condition of the Flemish alliance therefore that the
+war should open with the capture of Tournay. It was only at the cost of a
+fight however that Edward could now cross the Channel to undertake the
+siege. France was as superior in force at sea as on land; and a fleet of
+two hundred vessels gathered at Sluys to intercept him. But the fine
+seamanship of the English sailors justified the courage of their king in
+attacking this fleet with far smaller forces; the French ships were utterly
+destroyed and twenty thousand Frenchmen slain in the encounter. It was with
+the lustre of this great victory about him that Edward marched upon
+Tournay. Its siege however proved as fruitless as that of Cambray in the
+preceding year, and after two months of investment his vast army of one
+hundred thousand men broke up without either capturing the town or bringing
+Philip when he approached it to an engagement. Want of money forced Edward
+to a truce for a year, and he returned beggared and embittered to England.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward's distress]
+
+He had been worsted in war as in diplomacy. One naval victory alone
+redeemed years of failure and expense. Guienne was all but lost, England
+was suffering from the terrible taxation, from the ruin of commerce, from
+the ravages of her coast. Five years of constant reverses were hard blows
+for a king of twenty-eight who had been glorious and successful at
+twenty-three. His financial difficulties indeed were enormous. It was in
+vain that, availing himself of an Act which forbade the exportation of wool
+"till by the King and his Council it is otherwise provided," he turned for
+the time the wool-trade into a royal monopoly and became the sole wool
+exporter, buying at L3 and selling at L20 the sack. The campaign of 1339
+brought with it a crushing debt: that of 1340 proved yet more costly.
+Edward attributed his failure to the slackness of his ministers in sending
+money and supplies, and this to their silent opposition to the war. But
+wroth as he was on his return, a short struggle between the ministers and
+the king ended in a reconciliation, and preparations for renewed
+hostilities went on. Abroad indeed nothing could be done. The Emperor
+finally withdrew from Edward's friendship. A new Pope, Clement the Sixth,
+proved even more French in sentiment than his predecessor. Flanders alone
+held true of all England's foreign allies. Edward was powerless to attack
+Philip in the realm he claimed for his own; what strength he could gather
+was needed to prevent the utter ruin of the English cause in Scotland on
+the return of David Bruce. Edward's soldiers had been driven from the open
+country and confined to the fortresses of the Lowlands. Even these were at
+last reft away. Perth was taken by siege, and the king was too late to
+prevent the surrender of Stirling. Edinburgh was captured by a stratagem.
+Only Roxburgh and Berwick were saved by a truce which Edward was driven to
+conclude with the Scots.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Progress of Parliament]
+
+But with the difficulties of the Crown the weight of the two Houses made
+itself more and more sensibly felt. The almost incessant warfare which had
+gone on since the accession of Edward the Third consolidated and developed
+the power which they had gained from the dissensions of his father's reign.
+The need of continual grants brought about an assembly of Parliament year
+by year, and the subsidies that were accorded to the king showed the
+potency of the financial engine which the Crown could now bring into play.
+In a single year the Parliament granted twenty thousand sacks, or half the
+wool of the realm. Two years later the Commons voted an aid of thirty
+thousand sacks. In 1339 the barons granted the tenth sheep and fleece and
+lamb. The clergy granted two tenths in one year, and a tenth for three
+years in the next. But with each supply some step was made to greater
+political influence. In his earlier years Edward showed no jealousy of the
+Parliament. His policy was to make the struggle with France a national one
+by winning for it the sympathy of the people at large; and with this view
+he not only published in the County Courts the efforts he had made for
+peace, but appealed again and again for the sanction and advice of
+Parliament in his enterprise. In 1331 he asked the Estates whether they
+would prefer negotiation or war: in 1338 he declared that his expedition to
+Flanders was made by the assent of the Lords and at the prayer of the
+Commons. The part of the last in public affairs grew greater in spite of
+their own efforts to remain obscure. From the opening of the reign a crowd
+of enactments for the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, shows
+the influence of the burgesses. But the final division of Parliament into
+two Houses, a change which was completed by 1341, necessarily increased the
+weight of the Commons. The humble trader who shrank from counselling the
+Crown in great matters of policy gathered courage as he found himself
+sitting side by side with the knights of the shire. It was at the moment
+when this great change was being brought about that the disasters of the
+war spurred the Parliament to greater activity. The enormous grants of 1340
+were bought by the king's assent to statutes which provided remedies for
+grievances of which the Commons complained. The most important of these put
+an end to the attempts which Edward had made like his grandfather to deal
+with the merchant class apart from the Houses. No charge or aid was
+henceforth to be made save by the common assent of the Estates assembled in
+Parliament. The progress of the next year was yet more important. The
+strife of the king with his ministers, the foremost of whom was Archbishop
+Stratford, ended in the Primate's refusal to make answer to the royal
+charges save in full Parliament, and in the assent of the king to a
+resolution of the Lords that none of their number, whether ministers of the
+Crown or no, should be brought to trial elsewhere than before his peers.
+The Commons demanded and obtained the appointment of commissioners elected
+in Parliament to audit the grants already made. Finally it was enacted that
+at each Parliament the ministers should hold themselves accountable for all
+grievances; that on any vacancy the king should take counsel with his lords
+as to the choice of the new minister; and that, when chosen, each minister
+should be sworn in Parliament.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Close of the truce]
+
+At the moment which we have reached therefore the position of the
+Parliament had become far more important than at Edward's accession. Its
+form was settled. The third estate had gained a fuller parliamentary power.
+The principle of ministerial responsibility to the Houses had been
+established by formal statute. But the jealousy of Edward was at last
+completely roused, and from this moment he looked on the new power as a
+rival to his own. The Parliament of 1341 had no sooner broken up than he
+revoked by Letters Patent the statutes it had passed as done in prejudice
+of his prerogative and only assented to for the time to prevent worse
+confusion. The regular assembly of the estates was suddenly interrupted,
+and two years passed without a Parliament. It was only the continual
+presence of war which from this time drove Edward to summon the Houses at
+all. Though the truce still held good between England and France a quarrel
+of succession to the Duchy of Britanny which broke out in 1341 and called
+Philip to the support of one claimant, his cousin Charles of Blois, and
+Edward to the support of a rival claimant, John of Montfort, dragged on
+year after year. In Flanders things went ill for the English cause. The
+dissensions between the great and the smaller towns, and in the greater
+towns themselves between the weavers and fullers, dissensions which had
+taxed the genius of Van Arteveldt through the nine years of his wonderful
+rule, broke out in 1345 into a revolt at Ghent in which the great statesman
+was slain. With him fell a design for the deposition of the Count of
+Flanders and the reception of the Prince of Wales in his stead which he was
+ardently pressing, and whose political results might have been immense.
+Deputies were at once sent to England to excuse Van Arteveldt's murder and
+to promise loyalty to Edward; but the king's difficulties had now reached
+their height. His loans from the Florentine bankers amounted to half a
+million. His claim on the French crown found not a single adherent save
+among the burghers of the Flemish towns. The overtures which he made for
+peace were contemptuously rejected, and the expiration of the truce in 1345
+found him again face to face with France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward marches on Paris]
+
+But it was perhaps this breakdown of all foreign hope that contributed to
+Edward's success in the fresh outbreak of war. The war opened in Guienne,
+and Henry of Lancaster, who was now known as the Earl of Derby, and who
+with the Hainaulter Sir Walter Maunay took the command in that quarter, at
+once showed the abilities of a great general. The course of the Garonne was
+cleared by his capture of La Reole and Aiguillon, that of the Dordogne by
+the reduction of Bergerac, and a way opened for the reconquest of Poitou by
+the capture of Angouleme. These unexpected successes roused Philip to
+strenuous efforts, and a hundred thousand men gathered under his son, John,
+Duke of Normandy, for the subjugation of the South. Angouleme was won back,
+and Aiguillon besieged when Edward sailed to the aid of his hard-pressed
+lieutenant. It was with an army of thirty thousand men, half English, half
+Irish and Welsh, that he commenced a march which was to change the whole
+face of the war. His aim was simple. Flanders was still true to Edward's
+cause, and while Derby was pressing on in the south a Flemish army besieged
+Bouvines and threatened France from the north. The king had at first
+proposed to land in Guienne and relieve the forces in the south; but
+suddenly changing his design he disembarked at La Hogue and advanced
+through Normandy. By this skilful movement Edward not only relieved Derby
+but threatened Paris, and left himself able to co-operate with either his
+own army in the south or the Flemings in the north. Normandy was totally
+without defence, and after the sack of Caen, which was then one of the
+wealthiest towns in France, Edward marched upon the Seine. His march
+threatened Rouen and Paris, and its strategical value was seen by the
+sudden panic of the French king. Philip was wholly taken by surprise. He
+attempted to arrest Edward's march by an offer to restore the Duchy of
+Aquitaine as Edward the Second had held it, but the offer was fruitless.
+Philip was forced to call his son to the rescue. John at once raised the
+siege of Aiguillon, and the French army moved rapidly to the north, its
+withdrawal enabling Derby to capture Poitiers and make himself thorough
+master of the south. But John was too distant from Paris for his forces to
+avail Philip in his emergency, for Edward, finding the bridges on the Lower
+Seine broken, pushed straight on Paris, rebuilt the bridge of Poissy, and
+threatened the capital.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Crecy]
+
+At this crisis however France found an unexpected help in a body of German
+knights. The long strife between Lewis of Bavaria and the Papacy had ended
+at last in Clement's carrying out his sentence of deposition by the
+nomination and coronation as emperor of Charles of Luxemburg, a son of King
+John of Bohemia, the well-known Charles IV. of the Golden Bull. But against
+this Papal assumption of a right to bestow the German Crown Germany rose as
+one man. Not a town opened its gates to the Papal claimant, and driven to
+seek help and refuge from Philip of Valois he found himself at this moment
+on the eastern frontier of France with his father and 500 knights. Hurrying
+to Paris this German force formed the nucleus of an army which assembled at
+St. Denys; and which was soon reinforced by 15,000 Genoese cross-bowmen who
+had been hired from among the soldiers of the Lord of Monaco on the sunny
+Riviera and arrived at this hour of need. With this host rapidly gathering
+in his front Edward abandoned his march on Paris, which had already served
+its purpose in relieving Derby, and threw himself across the Seine to carry
+out the second part of his programme by a junction with the Flemings at
+Gravelines and a campaign in the north. But the rivers in his path were
+carefully guarded, and it was only by surprising the ford of Blanche-Taque
+on the Somme that the king escaped the necessity of surrendering to the
+vast host which was now hastening in pursuit. His communications however
+were no sooner secured than he halted on the twenty-sixth of August at the
+little village of Crecy in Ponthieu and resolved to give battle. Half of
+his army, which had been greatly reduced in strength by his rapid marches,
+consisted of light-armed footmen from Ireland and Wales; the bulk of the
+remainder was composed of English bowmen. The king ordered his men-at-arms
+to dismount, and drew up his forces on a low rise sloping gently to the
+south-east, with a deep ditch covering its front, and its flanks protected
+by woods and a little brook. From a windmill on the summit of this rise
+Edward could overlook the whole field of battle. Immediately beneath him
+lay his reserve, while at the base of the slope was placed the main body of
+the army in two divisions, that to the right commanded by the young Prince
+of Wales, Edward "the Black Prince," as he was called, that to the left by
+the Earl of Northampton. A small ditch protected the English front, and
+behind it the bowmen were drawn up "in the form of a harrow" with small
+bombards between them "which with fire threw little iron balls to frighten
+the horses," the first instance known of the use of artillery in
+field-warfare.
+
+The halt of the English army took Philip by surprise, and he attempted for
+a time to check the advance of his army. But the attempt was fruitless and
+the disorderly host rolled on to the English front. The sight of his
+enemies indeed stirred Philip's own blood to fury, "for he hated them." The
+fight began at vespers. The Genoese cross-bowmen were ordered to open the
+attack, but the men were weary with their march, a sudden storm wetted and
+rendered useless their bowstrings, and the loud shouts with which they
+leapt forward to the encounter were met with dogged silence in the English
+ranks. Their first arrow-flight however brought a terrible reply. So rapid
+was the English shot "that it seemed as if it snowed." "Kill me these
+scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Genoese fell back; and his men-at-arms
+plunged butchering into their broken ranks while the Counts of Alenicon and
+Flanders at the head of the French knighthood fell hotly on the Prince's
+line. For an instant his small force seemed lost, and he called his father
+to support him. But Edward refused to send him aid. "Is he dead, or
+unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?" he asked the envoy.
+"No, sir," was the reply, "but he is in a hard passage of arms, and sorely
+needs your help." "Return to those that sent you," said the king, "and bid
+them not send to me again so long as my son lives! Let the boy win his
+spurs, for, if God so order it, I will that the day may be his and that the
+honour may be with him and them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward
+could see in fact from his higher ground that all went well. The English
+bowmen and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly while the Welshmen stabbed
+the French horses in the melly and brought knight after knight to the
+ground. Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion. "You are my
+vassals, my friends," cried the blind John of Bohemia to the German nobles
+around him, "I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I
+may strike one good blow with this sword of mine!" Linking their bridles
+together, the little company plunged into the thick of the combat to fall
+as their fellows were falling. The battle went steadily against the French.
+At last Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat became a
+rout. Twelve hundred knights and thirty thousand foot-men--a number equal
+to the whole English force--lay dead upon the ground.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Yeoman]
+
+"God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. Denys in a
+passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he
+had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was
+hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a
+system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had
+risen out of that system. Feudalism rested on the superiority of the
+horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl. The
+real fighting power of a feudal army lay in its knighthood, in the baronage
+and landowners who took the field, each with his group of esquires and
+mounted men-at-arms. A host of footmen followed them, but they were ill
+armed, ill disciplined, and seldom called on to play any decisive part on
+the actual battle-field. In France, and especially at the moment we have
+reached, the contrast between the efficiency of these two elements of
+warfare was more striking than elsewhere. Nowhere was the chivalry so
+splendid, nowhere was the general misery and oppression of the poor more
+terribly expressed in the worthlessness of the mob of footmen who were
+driven by their lords to the camp. In England, on the other hand, the
+failure of feudalism to win a complete hold on the country was seen in the
+persistence of the older national institutions which based its defence on
+the general levy of its freemen. If the foreign kings added to this a
+system of warlike organization grounded on the service due from its
+military tenants to the Crown, they were far from regarding this as
+superseding the national "fyrd." The Assize of Arms, the Statute of
+Winchester, show with what care the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency.
+Its force indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between the age of
+Henry the Second and that of Edward the Third. The social changes on which
+we have already dwelt, the facilities given to alienation and the
+subdivision of lands, the transition of the serf into a copyholder and of
+the copyholder by redemption of his services into a freeholder, the rise of
+a new class of "farmers" as the lords ceased to till their demesne by means
+of bailiffs and adopted the practice of leasing it at a rent or "farm" to
+one of the customary tenants, the general increase of wealth which was
+telling on the social position even of those who still remained in
+villenage, undid more and more the earlier process which had degraded the
+free ceorl of the English Conquest into the villein of the Norman Conquest,
+and covered the land with a population of yeomen, some freeholders, some
+with services that every day became less weighty and already left them
+virtually free.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Bow]
+
+Such men, proud of their right to justice and an equal law, called by
+attendance in the county court to a share in the judicial, the financial,
+and the political life of the realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a
+different sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords of the
+Continent; and they were equipped with a weapon which as they wielded it
+was enough of itself to make a revolution in the art of war. The bow,
+identified as it became with English warfare, was the weapon not of
+Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors. It was the Norman arrow-flight
+that decided the day of Senlac. But in the organization of the national
+army it had been assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were
+liable to serve at the king's summons; and we see how closely it had become
+associated with them in the picture of Chaucer's yeoman. "In his hand he
+bore a mighty bow." Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy
+war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but in its force. The
+English archer, taught from very childhood "how to draw, how to lay his
+body to the bow," his skill quickened by incessant practice and constant
+rivalry with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of war.
+Thrown out along the front in a loose order that alone showed their vigour
+and self-dependence, the bowmen faced and riddled the splendid line of
+knighthood as it charged upon them. The galled horses "reeled right
+rudely." Their riders found even the steel of Milan a poor defence against
+the grey-goose shaft. Gradually the bow dictated the very tactics of an
+English battle. If the mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen of
+archers broke to right and left and the men-at-arms who lay in reserve
+behind them made short work of the broken and disordered horsemen, while
+the light troops from Wales and Ireland flinging themselves into the melly
+with their long knives and darts brought steed after steed to the ground.
+It was this new military engine that Edward the Third carried to the fields
+of France. His armies were practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the
+short period of feudal service was insufficient for foreign campaigns, and
+yeoman and baron were alike drawn by a high rate of pay. An archer's daily
+wages equalled some five shillings of our present money. Such payment when
+coupled with the hope of plunder was enough to draw yeomen from thorpe and
+farm; and though the royal treasury was drained as it had never been
+drained before the English king saw himself after the day of Crecy the
+master of a force without rival in the stress of war.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Siege of Calais]
+
+To England her success was the beginning of a career of military glory,
+which fatal as it was destined to prove to the higher sentiments and
+interests of the nation gave it a warlike energy such as it had never known
+before. Victory followed victory. A few months after Crecy a Scotch army
+marched over the border and faced on the seventeenth of October an English
+force at Neville's Cross. But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the
+English archers, and the Scotch king David Bruce was taken prisoner. The
+withdrawal of the French from the Garonne enabled Henry of Derby to recover
+Poitou. Edward meanwhile with a decision which marks his military capacity
+marched from the field of Crecy to form the siege of Calais. No measure
+could have been more popular with the English merchant class, for Calais
+was a great pirate-haven and in a single year twenty-two privateers from
+its port had swept the Channel. But Edward was guided by weightier
+considerations than this. In spite of his victory at Sluys the superiority
+of France at sea had been a constant embarrassment. From this difficulty
+the capture of Calais would do much to deliver him, for Dover and Calais
+together bridled the Channel. Nor was this all. Not only would the
+possession of the town give Edward a base of operations against France, but
+it afforded an easy means of communication with the only sure allies of
+England, the towns of Flanders. Flanders seemed at this moment to be
+wavering. Its Count had fallen at Crecy, but his son Lewis le Male, though
+his sympathies were as French as his father's, was received in November by
+his subjects with the invariable loyalty which they showed to their rulers;
+and his own efforts to detach them from England were seconded by the
+influence of the Duke of Brabant. But with Edward close at hand beneath the
+walls of Calais the Flemish towns stood true. They prayed the young Count
+to marry Edward's daughter, imprisoned him on his refusal, and on his
+escape to the French Court in the spring of 1347 they threw themselves
+heartily into the English cause. A hundred thousand Flemings advanced to
+Cassel and ravaged the French frontier.
+
+The danger of Calais roused Philip from the panic which had followed his
+defeat, and with a vast army he advanced to the north. But Edward's lines
+were impregnable. The French king failed in another attempt to dislodge the
+Flemings, and was at last driven to retreat without a blow. Hopeless of
+further succour, the town after a year's siege was starved into surrender
+in August 1347. Mercy was granted to the garrison and the people on
+condition that six of the citizens gave themselves into the English king's
+hands. "On them," said Edward with a burst of bitter hatred, "I will do my
+will." At the sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, the folk of
+Calais gathered round the bearer of these terms, "desiring to hear their
+good news, for they were all mad with hunger. When the said knight told
+them his news, then began they to weep and cry so loudly that it was great
+pity. Then stood up the wealthiest burgess of the town, Master Eustache de
+St. Pierre by name, and spake thus before all: 'My masters, great grief and
+mishap it were for all to leave such a people as this is to die by famine
+or otherwise; and great charity and grace would he win from our Lord who
+could defend them from dying. For me, I have great hope in the Lord that if
+I can save this people by my death I shall have pardon for my faults,
+wherefore will I be the first of the six, and of my own will put myself
+barefoot in my shirt and with a halter round my neck in the mercy of King
+Edward.'" The list of devoted men was soon made up, and the victims were
+led before the king. "All the host assembled together; there was great
+press, and many bade hang them openly, and many wept for pity. The noble
+King came with his train of counts and barons to the place, and the Queen
+followed him, though great with child, to see what there would be. The six
+citizens knelt down at once before the King, and Master Eustache spake
+thus:--'Gentle King, here we be six who have been of the old bourgeoisie of
+Calais and great merchants; we bring you the keys of the town and castle of
+Calais, and render them to you at your pleasure. We set ourselves in such
+wise as you see purely at your will, to save the remnant of the people that
+has suffered much pain. So may you have pity and mercy on us for your high
+nobleness' sake.' Certes there was then in that place neither lord nor
+knight that wept not for pity, nor who could speak for pity; but the King
+had his heart so hardened by wrath that for a long while he could not
+reply; than he commanded to cut off their heads. All the knights and lords
+prayed him with tears, as much as they could, to have pity on them, but he
+would not hear. Then spoke the gentle knight, Master Walter de Maunay, and
+said, 'Ha, gentle sire! bridle your wrath; you have the renown and good
+fame of all gentleness; do not a thing whereby men can speak any villany of
+you! If you have no pity, all men will say that you have a heart full of
+all cruelty to put these good citizens to death that of their own will are
+come to render themselves to you to save the remnant of the people.' At
+this point the King changed countenance with wrath, and said 'Hold your
+peace, Master Walter! it shall be none otherwise. Call the headsman. They
+of Calais have made so many of my men die, that they must die themselves!'
+Then did the noble Queen of England a deed of noble lowliness, seeing she
+was great with child, and wept so tenderly for pity that she could no
+longer stand upright; therefore she cast herself on her knees before her
+lord the King and spake on this wise: 'Ah, gentle sire, from the day that I
+passed over sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked for nothing: now
+pray I and beseech you, with folded hands, for the love of our Lady's Son
+to have mercy upon them.' The gentle King waited a while before speaking,
+and looked on the Queen as she knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then
+began his heart to soften a little, and he said, 'Lady, I would rather you
+had been otherwhere; you pray so tenderly that I dare not refuse you; and
+though I do it against my will, nevertheless take them, I give them to
+you.' Then took he the six citizens by the halters and delivered them to
+the Queen, and released from death all those of Calais for the love of her;
+and the good lady bade them clothe the six burgesses and make them good
+cheer."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE PEASANT REVOLT
+1347-1381
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward the Third]
+
+Still in the vigour of manhood, for he was but thirty-five, Edward the
+Third stood at the height of his renown. He had won the greatest victory of
+his age. France, till now the first of European states, was broken and
+dashed from her pride of place at a single blow. The kingdom seemed to lie
+at Edward's mercy, for Guienne was recovered, Flanders was wholly on his
+side, and Britanny, where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the
+success of his rival and the English party which supported him, opened the
+road to Paris. At home his government was popular, and Scotland, the one
+enemy he had to dread, was bridled by the capture of her king. How great
+his renown was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the death of Lewis of
+Bavaria the electors offered him the Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a
+general of a high order, and he had shown himself as consummate a
+strategist in the campaign as a tactician in the field. But to the world
+about him he was even more illustrious as the foremost representative of
+the showy chivalry of his day. He loved the pomp of tournaments; he revived
+the Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated his victories by the
+creation of a new order of knighthood. He had varied the sterner operations
+of the siege of Calais by a hand-to-hand combat with one of the bravest of
+the French knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches Edward for us as
+he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet which was sweeping the narrow seas. We
+see the king sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head
+covered by a black beaver hat "which became him well," and calling on Sir
+John Chandos to troll out the songs he had brought with him from Germany,
+till the Spanish ships heave in sight and a furious fight begins which ends
+in a victory that leaves Edward "King of the Seas."
+
+But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, busy diplomatist.
+None of our kings was so restless a negotiator. From the first hour of
+Edward's rule the threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost
+inextricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he was equally false
+and tricky. Emperor was played off against Pope and Pope against Emperor,
+the friendship of the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on
+their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of the Roman See was
+employed to bridle the French sympathies of the court of Avignon, and when
+the statutes which it produced had served their purpose they were set aside
+for a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder of the Church
+between them. His temper was as false in his dealings with his people as in
+his dealings with the European powers. Edward aired to country and
+parliament his English patriotism. "Above all other lands and realms," he
+made his chancellor say, "the King had most tenderly at heart his land of
+England, a land more full of delight and honour and profit to him than any
+other." His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the livery of a
+city gild; he dined with a London merchant. His perpetual parliaments, his
+appeals to them and to the country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to
+promise a ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he ruled.
+But when once Edward passed from sheer carelessness and gratification at
+the new source of wealth which the Parliament opened to a sense of what its
+power really was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any
+king that had gone before him. He sold his assent to its demands for heavy
+subsidies, and when he had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes
+he had sanctioned null and void. The constitutional progress which was made
+during his reign was due to his absorption in showy schemes of foreign
+ambition, to his preference for war and diplomatic intrigue over the sober
+business of civil administration. The same shallowness of temper, the same
+showiness and falsehood, ran through his personal character. The king who
+was a model of chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble showed
+himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even the courtesy to
+his Queen which throws its halo over the story of their deliverance went
+hand in hand with a constant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead
+his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mistress as Queen of
+Beauty through the streets of London, and set her in pomp over tournaments
+as the Lady of the Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord's
+example. "In those days," writes a chronicler of the time, "arose a rumour
+and clamour among the people that wherever there was a tournament there
+came a great concourse of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not
+of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in number, as if they
+were a part of the tournament, ladies clad in diverse and wonderful male
+apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound
+cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and
+daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers
+to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed
+their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people
+sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste
+voice of the people."
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Black Death]
+
+The "chaste voice of the people" was soon to grow into the stern moral
+protest of the Lollards, but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by the
+king's success. The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a
+mere rest in the career of victories which opened before Edward. England
+was drunk with her glory and with the hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen
+had been brought after the sack of that town to London. "There was no
+woman," says Walsingham, "who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and
+utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign cities." The court
+revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment
+in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle
+that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious
+"Chivalry" of the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole
+colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague the
+world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating
+Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the
+close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and the
+panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been
+amply justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then
+formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its
+repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where
+filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and
+fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased
+for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the
+Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been
+interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the
+living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the
+villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the
+priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich
+two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization
+of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands produced by the
+terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to perform the services
+due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by
+the landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to refrain from the
+abandonment of their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. "The
+sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary,
+"and there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst
+of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous
+diminution in the supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding
+rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial
+employments. Harvests rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled
+not merely from scarcity of hands but from the strife which now for the
+first time revealed itself between capital and labour.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Social Results]
+
+Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly felt as in its bearing
+on the social revolution which had been steadily going on for a century
+past throughout the country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a
+manor had been reduced over a large part of England to the position of a
+modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants and supplying
+their place in the cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers. He
+was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely for the purposes of
+cultivation on the supply of hired labour, and hitherto this supply had
+been abundant and cheap. But with the ravages of the Black Death and the
+decrease of population labour at once became scarce and dear. There was a
+general rise of wages, and the farmers of the country as well as the
+wealthier craftsmen of the town saw themselves threatened with ruin by what
+seemed to their age the extravagant demands of the labour class. Meanwhile
+the country was torn with riot and disorder. An outbreak of lawless
+self-indulgence which followed everywhere in the wake of the plague told
+especially upon the "landless men," workers wandering in search of work who
+found themselves for the first time masters of the labour market; and the
+wandering labourer or artizan turned easily into the "sturdy beggar," or
+the bandit of the woods. A summary redress for these evils was at once
+provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation. "Because a great part of the
+people," runs this ordinance, "and principally of labourers and servants,
+is dead of the plague, some, seeing the need of their lords and the
+scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive
+wages, and others are rather begging in idleness than supporting themselves
+by labour, we have ordained that any able-bodied man or woman, of
+whatsoever condition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of
+merchandise nor following a trade nor having of his own wherewithal to
+live, either his own land with the culture of which he could occupy
+himself, and not serving another, shall if so required serve another for
+such wages as was the custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or
+six years before."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Statute of Labourers]
+
+It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends which brought about
+at the close of 1349 the passing of the Statute of Labourers. "Every man or
+woman," runs this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond,
+able in body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of
+his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which
+he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve
+the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages
+which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood where he is bound to
+serve" two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by
+imprisonment. But sterner measures were soon found to be necessary. Not
+only was the price of labour fixed by the Parliament of 1351 but the labour
+class was once more tied to the soil. The labourer was forbidden to quit
+the parish where he lived in search of better paid employment; if he
+disobeyed he became a "fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the hands
+of justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally must have been
+impossible, for corn rose to so high a price that a day's labour at the old
+wages would not have purchased wheat enough for a man's support. But the
+landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The repeated re-enactment of
+the law shows the difficulty of applying it and the stubbornness of the
+struggle which it brought about. The fines and forfeitures which were
+levied for infractions of its provisions formed a large source of royal
+revenue, but so ineffectual were the original penalties that the runaway
+labourer was at last ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead,
+while the harbouring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. Nor was it
+merely the existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this
+reactionary movement. The increase of their numbers by a commutation of
+labour services for money payments was suddenly checked, and the ingenuity
+of the lawyers who were employed as stewards of each manor was exercised in
+striving to restore to the landowners that customary labour whose loss was
+now severely felt. Manumissions and exemptions which had passed without
+question were cancelled on grounds of informality, and labour services from
+which they held themselves freed by redemption were again demanded from the
+villeins. The attempt was the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded
+in the manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer whose
+interest it was to give judgement in favour of his lord. We can see the
+growth of a fierce spirit of resistance through the statutes which strove
+in vain to repress it. In the towns, where the system of forced labour was
+applied with even more rigour than in the country, strikes and combinations
+became frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the country the free
+labourers found allies in the villeins whose freedom from manorial service
+was questioned. These were often men of position and substance, and
+throughout the eastern counties the gatherings of "fugitive serfs" were
+supported by an organized resistance and by large contributions of money on
+the part of the wealthier tenantry.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Renewal of the War]
+
+With plague, famine, and social strife in the land, it was no time for
+reaping the fruits even of such a victory as Crecy. Luckily for England the
+pestilence had fallen as heavily on her foe as on herself. A common
+suffering and exhaustion forced both countries to a truce, and though
+desultory fighting went on along the Breton and Aquitanian borders, the
+peace which was thus secured lasted with brief intervals of fighting for
+seven years. It was not till 1355 that the failure of a last effort to turn
+the truce into a final peace again drove Edward into war. The campaign
+opened with a brilliant prospect of success. Charles the Bad, King of
+Navarre, held as a prince of descent from the house of Valois large fiefs
+in Normandy; and a quarrel springing suddenly up between him and John, who
+had now succeeded his father Philip on the throne of France, Charles
+offered to put his fortresses into Edward's hands. Master of Cherbourg,
+Avranches, Pontaudemer, Evreux and Meulan, Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise,
+Charles held in his hands the keys of France; and Edward grasped at the
+opportunity of delivering a crushing blow. Three armies were prepared to
+act in Normandy, Britanny, and Guienne. But the first two, with Edward and
+Henry of Derby, who had been raised to the dukedom of Lancaster, at their
+head, were detained by contrary winds, and Charles, despairing of their
+arrival, made peace with John. Edward made his way to Calais to meet the
+tidings of this desertion and to be called back to England by news of a
+recapture of Berwick by the Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation
+were revived in 1356. The treachery of John, his seizure of the King of
+Navarre, and his execution of the Count of Harcourt who was looked upon as
+the adviser of Charles in his policy of intrigue, stirred a general rising
+throughout Normandy. Edward at once despatched troops under the Duke of
+Lancaster to its support. But the insurgents were soon forced to fall back.
+Conscious of the danger to which an English occupation of Normandy would
+expose him, John hastened with a large army to the west, drove Lancaster to
+Cherbourg, took Evreux, and besieged Breteuil.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Black Prince]
+
+Here however his progress was suddenly checked by news from the south. The
+Black Prince, as the hero of Crecy was called, had landed in Guienne during
+the preceding year and won a disgraceful success. Unable to pay his troops,
+he staved off their demands by a campaign of sheer pillage. While plague
+and war and the anarchy which sprang up under the weak government of John
+were bringing ruin on the northern and central provinces of France, the
+south remained prosperous and at peace. The young prince led his army of
+freebooters up the Garonne into "what was before one of the fat countries
+of the world, the people good and simple, who did not know what war was;
+indeed no war had been waged against them till the Prince came. The English
+and Gascons found the country full and gay, the rooms adorned with carpets
+and draperies, the caskets and chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was
+safe from these robbers. They, and especially the Gascons, who are very
+greedy, carried off everything." Glutted by the sack of Carcassonne and
+Narbonne the plunderers fell back to Bordeaux, "their horses so laden with
+spoil that they could hardly move." Worthier work awaited the Black Prince
+in the following year. In the plan of campaign for 1356 it had been
+arranged that he should march upon the Loire, and there unite with a force
+under the Duke of Lancaster which was to land in Britanny and push rapidly
+into the heart of France. Delays however hindered the Prince from starting
+from Bordeaux till July, and when his march brought him to the Loire the
+plan of campaign had already broken down. The outbreak in Normandy had
+tempted the English Council to divert the force under Lancaster from
+Britanny to that province; and the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed
+by the French army under John. But if its original purpose was foiled, the
+march of the Black Prince on the Loire served still more effectively the
+English cause. His advance pointed straight upon Paris, and again as in the
+Crecy campaign John was forced to leave all for the protection of the
+capital. Hasty marches brought the king to the Loire while Prince Edward
+still lay at Vierzon on the Cher. Unconscious of John's designs, he wasted
+some days in the capture of Romorantin while the French troops were
+crossing the Loire along its course from Orleans to Tours and John with the
+advance was hurrying through Loches upon Poitiers in pursuit, as he
+supposed, of the retreating Englishmen. But the movement of the French
+army, near as it was, was unknown in the English camp; and when the news of
+it forced the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy was already far
+ahead of him. Edward reached the fields north of Poitiers to find his line
+of retreat cut off and a French army of sixty thousand men interposed
+between his forces and Bordeaux.
+
+If the Prince had shown little ability in his management of the campaign,
+he showed tactical skill in the fight which was now forced on him. On the
+nineteenth of September he took a strong position in the fields of
+Maupertuis, where his front was covered by thick hedges and approachable
+only by a deep and narrow lane which ran between vineyards. The vineyards
+and hedges he lined with bowmen, and drew up his small body of men-at-arms
+at the point where the lane opened upon the higher plain on which he was
+himself encamped. Edward's force numbered only eight thousand men, and the
+danger was great enough to force him to offer in exchange for a free
+retreat the surrender of his prisoners and of the places he had taken, with
+an oath not to fight against France for seven years to come. His offers
+however were rejected, and the battle opened with a charge of three hundred
+French knights up the narrow lane. But the lane was soon choked with men
+and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing army fell back before a
+galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In this moment of confusion a
+body of English horsemen, posted unseen by their opponents on a hill to the
+right, charged suddenly on the French flank, and the Prince watching the
+disorder which was caused by the repulse and surprise fell boldly on their
+front. The steady shot of the English archers completed the panic produced
+by this sudden attack. The first French line was driven in, and on its rout
+the second, a force of sixteen thousand men, at once broke in wild terror
+and fled from the field. John still held his ground with the knights of the
+reserve, whom he had unwisely ordered to dismount from their horses, till a
+charge of the Black Prince with two thousand lances threw this last body
+into confusion. The French king was taken, desperately fighting; and when
+his army poured back at noon in utter rout to the gates of Poitiers eight
+thousand of their number had fallen on the field, three thousand in the
+flight, and two thousand men-at-arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken
+prisoners. The royal captive entered London in triumph, mounted on a big
+white charger, while the Prince rode by his side on a little black hackney
+to the palace of the Savoy, which was chosen as John's dwelling, and a
+truce for two years seemed to give healing-time to France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Scots]
+
+With the Scots Edward the Third had less good fortune. Recalled from Calais
+by their seizure of Berwick, the king induced Balliol to resign into his
+hands his shadowy sovereignty, and in the spring of 1356 marched upon
+Edinburgh with an overpowering army, harrying and burning as he marched.
+But the Scots refused an engagement, a fleet sent with provisions was
+beaten off by a storm, and the famine-stricken army was forced to fall
+rapidly back on the border in a disastrous retreat. The trial convinced
+Edward that the conquest of Scotland was impossible, and by a rapid change
+of policy which marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship of the
+country he had wasted so long. David Bruce was released on promise of
+ransom, a truce concluded for ten years, and the prohibition of trade
+between the two kingdoms put an end to. But the fulness of this
+reconciliation screened a dexterous intrigue. David was childless, and
+Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the young king experienced
+in finding means of providing the sum demanded for his ransom to bring him
+over to a proposal which would have united the two countries for ever. The
+scheme however was carefully concealed; and it was not till 1363 that David
+proposed to his Parliament to set aside on his death the claims of the
+Steward of Scotland to his crown, and to choose Edward's third son, Lionel,
+Duke of Clarence, as his successor. Though the proposal was scornfully
+rejected, negotiations were still carried on between the two kings for the
+realization of this project, and were probably only put an end to by the
+calamities of Edward's later years.
+
+[Illustration: France at the Treaty of Bretigny (v2-map-2t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Peace of Bretigny]
+
+In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be doing Edward's work more
+effectively than arms. The miserable country found no rest in itself. Its
+routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the lords
+captured at Crecy or Poitiers procured the sums needed for their ransom by
+extortion from the peasantry. The reforms demanded by the States-General
+which met in this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery of the
+Regent, John's eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till Paris, impatient
+of his weakness and misrule, rose in arms against the Crown. The peasants
+too, driven mad by oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection,
+butchering their lords and firing their castles over the whole face of
+France. Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising was called, were at
+last crushed by treachery and the sword: and, exhausted as it was, France
+still backed the Regent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which John in
+1359 proposed to buy his release. By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and
+Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west
+were ceded to the English king. On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured
+ravaging over the wasted land. Famine however proved its best defence. "I
+could not believe," said Petrarch of this time, "that this was the same
+France which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself
+to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated,
+houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of
+desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown
+with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude." The utter desolation forced
+Edward to carry with him an immense train of provisions, and thousands of
+baggage waggons with mills, ovens, forges, and fishing-boats, formed a long
+train which streamed for six miles behind his army. After a fruitless
+attempt upon Reims he forced the Duke of Burgundy to conclude a treaty with
+him by pushing forward to Tonnerre, and then descending the Seine appeared
+with his army before Paris. But the wasted country forbade a siege, and
+Edward after summoning the town in vain was forced to fall back for
+subsistence on the Loire. It was during this march that the Duke of
+Normandy's envoys overtook him with proposals of peace. The misery of the
+land had at last bent Charles to submission, and in May a treaty was
+concluded at Bretigny, a small place to the eastward of Chartres. By this
+treaty the English king waived his claims on the crown of France and on the
+Duchy of Normandy. On the other hand, his Duchy of Aquitaine, which
+included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, the Limousin and the
+Angoumois, Perigord and the counties of Bigorre and Rouergue, was not only
+restored but freed from its obligations as a French fief and granted in
+full sovereignty with Ponthieu, Edward's heritage from the second wife of
+Edward the First, as well as with Guisnes and his new conquest of Calais.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Misery of England]
+
+The Peace of Bretigny set its seal upon Edward's glory. But within England
+itself the misery of the people was deepening every hour. Men believed the
+world to be ending, and the judgement day to be near. A few months after
+the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death, carrying off the Duke of
+Lancaster. The repressive measures of Parliament and the landowners only
+widened the social chasm which parted employer from employed. We can see
+the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both to the reactionary efforts
+which were being made to bring back labour services and to the enactments
+which again bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to
+repress the strikes and combinations which became frequent in the towns and
+the more formidable gatherings of villeins and "fugitive serfs" in the
+country at large. A statute of later date throws light on the nature of the
+resistance of the last. It tells us that "villeins and holders of land in
+villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their lords, having
+attached themselves to other persons who maintained and abetted them, and
+who under colour of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and
+villages where they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services
+either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or
+other course of justice to be taken against them; the villeins aiding their
+maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to life
+and limb as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each
+other." It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the
+reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service
+but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder
+was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be
+recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John Ball]
+
+A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was seen in a new revolt
+against the whole system of social inequality which had till then passed
+unquestioned as the divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly signed
+when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the words of "a mad
+priest of Kent" as the courtly Froissart calls him, who for twenty years to
+come found audience for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment
+in the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the churchyards of Kent.
+"Mad" as the landowners held him to be, it was in the preaching of John
+Ball that England first listened to a declaration of the natural equality
+and rights of man. "Good people," cried the preacher, "things will never be
+well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
+villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater
+folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in
+serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how
+can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they
+make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
+clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are
+covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we
+oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses;
+we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is
+of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny
+of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism. A spirit
+fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime
+which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball:
+
+                      "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+                       Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+
+[Sidenote: William Langland]
+
+More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone,
+is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody
+with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time,
+its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the
+poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich. Nothing brings more
+vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed
+the rich from the poor than the contrast between his "Complaint of Piers
+the Ploughman" and the "Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and
+laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in
+a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the
+gaunt poet of the poor. Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put
+to school and received minor orders as a clerk, "Long Will," as Langland
+was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to
+London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing "placebos" and
+"diriges" in the stately funerals of his day. Men took the moody clerk for
+a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made him
+loth, as he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in
+silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a "God save you" with
+the law sergeants as he passed their new house in the Temple. His world is
+the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man's life, on his hunger and
+toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man
+who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of
+the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and
+there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his
+rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of
+Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of
+the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest
+contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous
+allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form
+the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of
+a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad
+Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of
+sadness: the world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently
+along the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Piers Ploughman]
+
+Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the
+great city to a May-morning in the Malvern Hills. "I was weary forwandered
+and went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and
+leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved
+(sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the
+world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a wide
+field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of
+minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen that "in
+setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims "with their
+wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and
+scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners "parting the
+silver" with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but
+to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the
+Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it is who bids the
+knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo with the poor. "Though
+he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set
+and with more bliss than thou.... For in charnel at church churles be evil
+to know, or a knight from a knave there." The gospel of equality is backed
+by the gospel of labour. The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make
+the world work with him. He warns the labourer as he warns the knight.
+Hunger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits
+to work her will on the idler and the waster. On the eve of the great
+struggle between wealth and labour, Langland stands alone in his fairness
+to both, in his shrewd political and religious common sense. In the face of
+the popular hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he paints the
+Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any
+rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.
+Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a righteous life to be
+better than a host of indulgences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when
+priests dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and
+without hope. It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady Mede,"
+brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In
+the waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is looked
+upon--he tells us bitterly--as a madman. There is a terrible despair in the
+close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only followed by
+the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst the revel of
+Death and Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses
+himself with a last effort, and seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the
+world to find Piers Ploughman.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Praemunire]
+
+The strife indeed which Langland would have averted raged only the fiercer
+as the dark years went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for
+their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in
+restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment,
+they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed,
+between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was
+opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William
+Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for
+such a revolution was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife
+between England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp protests from king
+and parliament the need for money at Avignon was too great to allow any
+relaxation in the Papal claims. Almost on the eve of Crecy Edward took the
+decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of any Papal bulls or
+documents interfering with the rights of presentation belonging to private
+patrons. But the tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this
+source of revenue for all Edward's protests. Crecy however gave a new
+boldness to the action of the State, and a Statute of Provisors was passed
+by the Parliament in 1351 which again asserted the rights of the English
+Church and enacted that all who infringed them by the introduction of Papal
+"provisors" should suffer imprisonment. But resistance to provisors only
+brought fresh vexations. The patrons who withstood a Papal nominee in the
+name of the law were summoned to defend themselves in the Papal Court. From
+that moment the supremacy of the Papal law over the law of the land became
+a great question in which the lesser question of provisors merged. The
+pretension of the Court of Avignon was met in 1353 by a statute which
+forbade any questioning of judgements rendered in the King's Courts or
+any prosecution of a suit in foreign courts under pain of outlawry,
+perpetual imprisonment, or banishment from the land. It was this act of
+Praemunire--as it came in after renewals to be called--which furnished so
+terrible a weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with Rome. But the
+Papacy paid little heed to these warnings, and its obstinacy in still
+receiving suits and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the pride
+of a conquering people. England was still fresh from her glory at Bretigny
+when Edward appealed to the Parliament of 1365. Complaints, he said, were
+constantly being made by his subjects to the Pope as to matters which were
+cognizable in the King's Courts. The practice of provisors was thus
+maintained in the teeth of the laws, and "the laws, usages, ancient
+customs, and franchises of his kingdom were thereby much hindered, the
+King's crown degraded, and his person defamed." The king's appeal was
+hotly met. "Biting words," which it was thought wise to suppress, were
+used in the debate which followed, and the statutes against provisors and
+appeals were solemnly confirmed.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wyclif]
+
+What gave point to this challenge was the assent of the prelates to the
+proceedings of the Parliament; and the pride of Urban V. at once met it by
+a counter-defiance. He demanded with threats the payment of the annual sum
+of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement of the
+suzerainty of the See of Rome. The insult roused the temper of the realm.
+The king laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that
+"neither King John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom, nor his
+people under subjection save with their accord or assent." John's
+submission had been made "without their assent and against his coronation
+oath" and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to enforce his
+claim, to resist him with all their power. Even Urban shrank from
+imperilling the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a Papal
+lordship over England was never again heard of. But the struggle had
+brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and
+significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing
+is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's
+earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during
+the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the
+fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed
+to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and
+recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic
+doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and most daring in
+philosophical speculation. A reckless audacity and love of novelty was the
+common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and
+more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas
+Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris during the English wars was
+transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif
+stood without a rival. From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a
+scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he published
+during this period, he inherited the tendency to a predestinarian
+Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.
+His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church
+reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunications of the Church,
+Ockham had supported the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle,
+and he had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking the
+foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the
+civil power. The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and
+asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the stormy work
+of Ockham; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an
+immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride. The
+personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only deepened the
+influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed
+even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his
+intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him which
+revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English
+prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous
+politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the
+unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of
+controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone,
+to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break
+through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the
+freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "De Dominio Divino."]
+
+At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however Wyclif was far from
+having advanced to such a position as this. As the most prominent of
+English scholars it was natural that he should come forward in defence of
+the independence and freedom of the English Church; and he published a
+formal refutation of the claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will
+with church property in the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates
+which we have described. As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of
+Rome but with its practices; and it was on the principles of Ockham that he
+defended the Parliament's refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by
+Urban. But his treatise on "The Kingdom of God," "De Dominio Divino," which
+can hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the breadth of the
+ground he was even now prepared to take up. In this, the most famous of his
+works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct ideal of society. All
+authority, to use his own expression, is "founded in grace." Dominion in
+the highest sense is in God alone; it is God who as the suzerain of the
+universe deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on
+tenure of their obedience to Himself. It was easy to object that in such a
+case "dominion" could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such a
+tenure and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely
+ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion and power,
+power which the wicked may have by God's permission, and to which the
+Christian must submit from motives of obedience to God. In his own
+scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth "God
+must obey the devil." But whether in the ideal or practical view of the
+matter all power and dominion was of God. It was granted by Him not to one
+person, His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The king was
+as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power was as sacred as the
+ecclesiastical, and as complete over temporal things, even over the
+temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church over spiritual things.
+So far as the question of Church and State therefore was concerned the
+distinction between the ideal and practical view of "dominion" was of
+little account. Wyclif's application of the theory to the individual
+conscience was of far higher and wider importance. Obedient as each
+Christian might be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of
+"dominion" held immediately of God. The throne of God Himself was the
+tribunal of personal appeal. What the Reformers of the sixteenth century
+attempted to do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted
+to do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establishing a direct
+relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a mediating
+priesthood, the very foundation on which the mediaeval church was built.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and Aquitaine]
+
+As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little seen. But the social
+and religious excitement which we have described was quickened by the
+renewal of the war, and the general suffering and discontent gathered
+bitterness when the success which had flushed England with a new and
+warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters in which men forgot
+the glories of Crecy and Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of
+Bretigny was really fatal to Edward's cause in the south of France. By the
+cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on
+which his strength rested lost its force. The people of the south had clung
+to their Duke, even though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had
+stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. While preserving
+however their traditional fealty to the descendants of Eleanor they still
+clung to the equally traditional suzerainty of the kings of France. But the
+treaty of Bretigny not only severed them from the realm of France, it
+subjected them to the realm of England. Edward ceased to be their
+hereditary Duke, he became simply an English king ruling Aquitaine as an
+English dominion. If the Southerners loved the North-French little, they
+loved the English less, and the treaty which thus changed their whole
+position was followed by a quick revulsion of feeling from the Garonne to
+the Pyrenees. The Gascon nobles declared that John had no right to transfer
+their fealty to another and to sever them from the realm of France. The
+city of Rochelle prayed the French king not to release it from its fealty
+to him. "We will obey the English with our lips," said its citizens, "but
+our hearts shall never be moved towards them." Edward strove to meet this
+passion for local independence, this hatred of being ruled from London, by
+sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing him in 1362 with the
+Duchy of Aquitaine. But the new Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the
+English king, and the grievance of the Southerners was left untouched.
+Charles V. who succeeded his father John in 1364 silently prepared to reap
+this harvest of discontent. Patient, wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly
+crowned before he put an end to the war which had gone on without a pause
+in Britanny by accepting homage from the claimant whom France had hitherto
+opposed. Through Bertrand du Guesclin, a fine soldier whom his sagacity had
+discovered, he forced the king of Navarre to a peace which closed the
+fighting in Normandy. A more formidable difficulty in the way of
+pacification and order lay in the Free Companies, a union of marauders whom
+the disbanding of both armies after the peace had set free to harry the
+wasted land and whom the king's military resources were insufficient to
+cope with. It was the stroke by which Charles cleared his realm of these
+scourges which forced on a new struggle with the English in the south.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Pedro the Cruel]
+
+In the judgement of the English court the friendship of Castille was of the
+first importance for the security of Aquitaine. Spain was the strongest
+naval power of the western world, and not only would the ports of Guienne
+be closed but its communication with England would be at once cut off by
+the appearance of a joint French and Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was
+with satisfaction therefore that Edward saw the growth of a bitter
+hostility between Charles and the Castilian king, Pedro the Cruel, through
+the murder of his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, the French king's
+sister-in-law. Henry of Trastamara, a bastard son of Pedro's father Alfonso
+the Eleventh, had long been a refugee at the French court, and soon after
+the treaty of Bretigny Charles in his desire to revenge this murder on
+Pedro gave Henry aid in an attempt on the Castilian throne. It was
+impossible for England to look on with indifference while a dependant of
+the French king became master of Castille; and in 1362 a treaty offensive
+and defensive was concluded between Pedro and Edward the Third. The time
+was not come for open war; but the subtle policy of Charles saw in this
+strife across the Pyrenees an opportunity both of detaching Castille from
+the English cause and of ridding himself of the Free Companies. With
+characteristic caution he dexterously held himself in the background while
+he made use of the Pope, who had been threatened by the Free Companies in
+his palace at Avignon and was as anxious to get rid of them as himself.
+Pedro's cruelty, misgovernment, and alliance with the Moslem of Cordova
+served as grounds for a crusade which was proclaimed by Pope Urban; and Du
+Guesclin, who was placed at the head of the expedition, found in the Papal
+treasury and in the hope of booty from an unravaged land means of gathering
+the marauders round his standard. As soon as these Crusaders crossed the
+Ebro Pedro was deserted by his subjects, and in 1366 Henry of Trastamara
+saw himself crowned without a struggle at Burgos as king of Castille. Pedro
+with his two daughters fled for shelter to Bordeaux and claimed the aid
+promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine shrank from fighting for
+such a cause, but in spite of their protests and the reluctance of the
+English council to embark in so distant a struggle Edward held that he had
+no choice save to replace his ally, for to leave Henry seated on the throne
+was to leave Aquitaine to be crushed between France and Castille.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Charles the Fifth]
+
+The after course of the war proved that in his anticipations of the fatal
+result of a combination of the two powers Edward was right, but his policy
+jarred not only against the universal craving for rest, but against the
+moral sense of the world. The Black Prince however proceeded to carry out
+his father's design in the teeth of the general opposition. His call to
+arms robbed Henry of the aid of those English Companies who had marched
+till now with the rest of the crusaders, but who returned at once to the
+standard of the Prince; the passes of Navarre were opened with gold, and in
+the beginning of 1367 the English army crossed the Pyrenees. Advancing to
+the Ebro the Prince offered battle at Navarete with an army already reduced
+by famine and disease in its terrible winter march, and Henry with double
+his numbers at once attacked him. But in spite of the obstinate courage of
+the Castilian troops the discipline and skill of the English soldiers once
+more turned the wavering day into a victory. Du Guesclin was taken, Henry
+fled across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was again seated on his throne. The pay
+however which he had promised was delayed; and the Prince, whose army had
+been thinned by disease to a fifth of its numbers and whose strength never
+recovered from the hardships of this campaign, fell back sick and beggared
+to Aquitaine. He had hardly returned when his work was undone. In 1368
+Henry reentered Castille; its towns threw open their gates; a general
+rising chased Pedro from the throne, and a final battle in the spring of
+1369 saw his utter overthrow. His murder by Henry's hand left the bastard
+undisputed master of Castille. Meanwhile the Black Prince, sick and
+disheartened, was hampered at Bordeaux by the expenses of the campaign
+which Pedro had left unpaid. To defray his debt he was driven in 1368 to
+lay a hearth-tax on Aquitaine, and the tax served as a pretext for an
+outbreak of the long-hoarded discontent. Charles was now ready for open
+action. He had won over the most powerful among the Gascon nobles, and
+their influence secured the rejection of the tax in a Parliament of the
+province which met at Bordeaux. The Prince, pressed by debt, persisted
+against the counsel of his wisest advisers in exacting it; and the lords of
+Aquitaine at once appealed to the king of France. Such an appeal was a
+breach of the treaty of Bretigny in which the French king had renounced his
+sovereignty over the south; but Charles had craftily delayed year after
+year the formal execution of the renunciations stipulated in the treaty,
+and he was still able to treat it as not binding on him. The success of
+Henry of Trastamara decided him to take immediate action, and in 1369 he
+summoned the Black Prince as Duke of Aquitaine to meet the appeal of the
+Gascon lords in his court.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Renewal of the War]
+
+The Prince was maddened by the summons. "I will come," he replied, "but
+with helmet on head, and with sixty thousand men at my back." War however
+had hardly been declared when the ability with which Charles had laid his
+plans was seen in his seizure of Ponthieu and in a rising of the whole
+country south of the Garonne. Du Gueselin returned in 1370 from Spain to
+throw life into the French attack. Two armies entered Guienne from the
+east; and a hundred castles with La Reole and Limoges threw open their
+gates to Du Guesclin. But the march of an English army from Calais upon
+Paris recalled him from the south to guard the capital at a moment when the
+English leader advanced to recover Limoges, and the Black Prince borne in a
+litter to its walls stormed the town and sullied by a merciless massacre of
+its inhabitants the fame of his earlier exploits. Sickness however recalled
+him home in the spring of 1371; and the war, protracted by the caution of
+Charles who forbade his armies to engage, did little but exhaust the energy
+and treasure of England. As yet indeed the French attack had made small
+impression on the south, where the English troops stoutly held their ground
+against Du Guesclin's inroads. But the protracted war drained Edward's
+resources, while the diplomacy of Charles was busy in rousing fresh dangers
+from Scotland and Castille. It was in vain that Edward looked for allies to
+the Flemish towns. The male line of the Counts of Flanders ended in Count
+Louis le Male; and the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Philip, Duke
+of Burgundy, a younger brother of the French king, secured Charles from
+attack along his northern border. In Scotland the death of David Bruce put
+an end to Edward's schemes for a reunion of the two kingdoms; and his
+successor, Robert the Steward, renewed in 1371 the alliance with France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Loss of Aquitaine]
+
+Castille was a yet more serious danger; and an effort which Edward made to
+neutralize its attack only forced Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole
+weight into the struggle. The two daughters of Pedro had remained since
+their father's flight at Bordeaux. The elder of these was now wedded to
+John of Gaunt, Edward's fourth son, whom he had created Duke of Lancaster
+on his previous marriage with Blanche, a daughter of Henry of Lancaster and
+the heiress of that house, while the younger was wedded to Edward's fifth
+son, the Earl of Cambridge. Edward's aim was that of raising again the
+party of King Pedro and giving Henry of Trastamara work to do at home which
+would hinder his interposition in the war of Guienne. It was with this view
+that John of Gaunt on his marriage took the title of king of Castille. But
+no adherent of Pedro's cause stirred in Spain, and Henry replied to the
+challenge by sending a Spanish fleet to the Channel. A decisive victory
+which this fleet won over an English convoy off Rochelle proved a fatal
+blow to the English cause. It wrested from Edward the mastery of the seas,
+and cut off all communication between England and Guienne. Charles was at
+once roused to new exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded
+to his general Du Guesclin; and Rochelle was surrendered by its citizens in
+1372. The next year saw a desperate attempt to restore the fortune of the
+English arms. A great army under John of Gaunt penetrated into the heart of
+France. But it found no foe to engage. Charles had forbidden any fighting.
+"If a storm rages over the land," said the king coolly, "it disperses of
+itself; and so will it be with the English." Winter in fact overtook the
+Duke of Lancaster in the mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of his
+host reached Bordeaux. The failure of this attack was the signal for a
+general defection, and ere the summer of 1374 had closed the two towns of
+Bordeaux and Bayonne were all that remained of the English possessions in
+Southern France. Even these were only saved by the exhaustion of the
+conquerors. The treasury of Charles was as utterly drained as the treasury
+of Edward; and the kings were forced to a truce.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Social Strife]
+
+Only fourteen years had gone by since the Treaty of Bretigny raised England
+to a height of glory such as it had never known before. But the years had
+been years of a shame and suffering which stung the people to madness.
+Never had England fallen so low. Her conquests were lost, her shores
+insulted, her commerce swept from the seas. Within she was drained by the
+taxation and bloodshed of the war. Its popularity had wholly died away.
+When the Commons were asked in 1354 whether they would assent to a treaty
+of perpetual peace if they might have it, "the said Commons responded all,
+and all together, 'Yes, yes!'" The population was thinned by the ravages of
+pestilence, for till 1369, which saw its last visitation, the Black Death
+returned again and again. The social strife too gathered bitterness with
+every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parliament after Parliament
+increased the severity of its laws. The demands of the Parliament of 1376
+show how inoperative the previous Statutes of Labourers had proved. They
+prayed that constables be directed to arrest all who infringed the Statute,
+that no labourer should be allowed to take refuge in a town and become an
+artizan if there were need of his service in the county from which he came,
+and that the king would protect lords and employers against the threats of
+death uttered by serfs who refused to serve. The reply of the Royal Council
+shows that statesmen at any rate were beginning to feel that repression
+might be pushed too far. The king refused to interfere by any further and
+harsher provisions between employers and employed, and left cases of breach
+of law to be dealt with in his ordinary courts of justice. On the one side
+he forbade the threatening gatherings which were already common in the
+country, but on the other he forbade the illegal exactions of the
+employers. With such a reply however the proprietary class were hardly
+likely to be content. Two years later the Parliament of Gloucester called
+for a Fugitive-slave Law, which would have enabled lords to seize their
+serfs in whatever county or town they found refuge, and in 1379 they prayed
+that judges might be sent five times a year into every shire to enforce the
+Statute of Labourers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Edward and the Parliament]
+
+But the strife between employers and employed was not the only rift which
+was opening in the social structure. Suffering and defeat had stripped off
+the veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward
+the Third. His profligacy was now bringing him to a premature old age. He
+was sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mistresses. The glitter
+and profusion of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Table
+Round, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose
+frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep
+which crowned the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour round
+a king who tricked his Parliament and swindled his creditors. Edward paid
+no debts. He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of
+bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested payment from him by
+holding his royal person as their security. His own subjects fared no
+better than foreigners. The prerogative of "purveyance" by which the king
+in his progresses through the country had the right of first purchase of
+all that he needed at fair market price became a galling oppression in the
+hands of a bankrupt king who was always moving from place to place. "When
+men hear of your coming," Archbishop Islip wrote to Edward, "everybody at
+once for sheer fear sets about hiding or eating or getting rid of their
+geese and chickens or other possessions that they may not utterly lose them
+through your arrival. The purveyors and servants of your court seize on men
+and horses in the midst of their field work. They seize on the very
+bullocks that are at plough or at sowing, and force them to work for two or
+three days at a time without a penny of payment. It is no wonder that men
+make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as the truth is in God, I
+myself, whenever I hear a rumour of it, be I at home or in chapter or in
+church or at study, nay if I am saying mass, even I in my own person
+tremble in every limb." But these irregular exactions were little beside
+the steady pressure of taxation. Even in the years of peace fifteenths and
+tenths, subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were demanded and
+obtained from Parliament; and with the outbreak of war the royal demands
+became heavier and more frequent. As failure followed failure the expenses
+of each campaign increased an ineffectual attempt to relieve Rochelle cost
+nearly a million; the march of John of Gaunt through France utterly drained
+the royal treasury. Nor were these legal supplies all that the king drew
+from the nation. He had repudiated his pledge to abstain from arbitrary
+taxation of imports and exports. He sold monopolies to the merchants in
+exchange for increased customs. He wrested supplies from the clergy by
+arrangements with the bishops or the Pope. There were signs that Edward was
+longing to rid himself of the control of Parliament altogether. The power
+of the Houses seemed indeed as high as ever; great statutes were passed.
+Those of Provisors and Praemunire settled the relations of England to the
+Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and its penalties.
+That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and
+the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted it. But side by side
+with these exertions of influence we note a series of steady encroachments
+by the Crown on the power of the Houses. If their petitions were granted,
+they were often altered in the royal ordinance which professed to embody
+them. A plan of demanding supplies for three years at once rendered the
+annual assembly of Parliament less necessary. Its very existence was
+threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of occasional councils with
+but a single knight from every shire and a single burgess from a small
+number of the greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted
+subsidies.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Baronage and the Church]
+
+What aided Edward above all in eluding or defying the constitutional
+restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as well as in these more insidious
+attempts to displace the Parliament, was the lessening of the check which
+the Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The same causes which
+had long been reducing the number of the greater lords who formed the upper
+house went steadily on. Under Edward the Second little more than seventy
+were commonly summoned to Parliament; little more than forty were summoned
+under Edward the Third, and of these the bulk were now bound to the Crown,
+partly by their employment on its service, partly by their interest in the
+continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage too were members of the
+royal family. Edward had carried out on a far wider scale than before the
+policy which had been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the
+Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house all the greater
+heritages of the land. The Black Prince was married to Joan of Kent, the
+heiress of Edward the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock. His
+marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster brought to the king's
+second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a great part of the possessions of
+the de Burghs. Later on the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by
+like matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and to his grandson,
+Henry of Lancaster. But the greatest English heritage fell to Edward's
+third living son, John of Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent
+during his father's Flemish campaign. Originally created Earl of Richmond,
+the death of his father-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest
+daughter, raised John in his wife's right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and
+the Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the baronage were
+thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more and more into an hostility with
+the Church which in time disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it.
+What rent the ruling classes in twain was the growing pressure of the war.
+The nobles and knighthood of the country, already half ruined by the rise
+in the labour market and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder
+than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for by the
+continuance of the struggle. In the hour of their distress they cast their
+eyes greedily--as in the Norman and Angevin days--on the riches of the
+Church. Never had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of some
+three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty
+thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated about the country. They were
+said to own in landed property alone more than a third of the soil, while
+their "spiritualities" in dues and offerings amounted to twice the king's
+revenue. Exaggerated as such statements were, the wealth of the Church was
+really great; but even more galling to the nobles was its influence in the
+royal councils. The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride by its
+victories at Crecy and Poitiers, looked with envy and wrath at the throng
+of bishops around the council-board, and attributed to their love of peace
+the errors and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the disasters
+of the war. To rob the Church of wealth and of power became the aim of a
+great baronial party.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Weakness of the Church]
+
+The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been fruitless had the
+spiritual power of the Church remained as of old. But the clergy were rent
+by their own dissensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares of
+political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous
+inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the
+"poor parson" of the country. A bitter hatred divided the secular clergy
+from the regular; and this strife went fiercely on in the Universities.
+Fitz-Ralf, the Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline
+which was already being felt in the number of academical students, and the
+University checked by statute their practice of admitting mere children
+into their order. The clergy too at large shared in the discredit and
+unpopularity of the Papacy. Though they suffered more than any other class
+from the exactions of Avignon, they were bound more and more to the Papal
+cause. The very statutes which would have protected them were practically
+set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crown. At home and abroad the
+Roman See was too useful for the king to come to any actual breach with it.
+However much Edward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he shrank
+from an open contest which would have added the Papacy to his many foes,
+and which would at the same time have robbed him of his most effective
+means of wresting aids from the English clergy by private arrangement with
+the Roman court. Rome indeed was brought to waive its alleged right of
+appointing foreigners to English livings. But a compromise was arranged
+between the Pope and the Crown in which both united in the spoliation and
+enslavement of the Church. The voice of chapters, of monks, of
+ecclesiastical patrons, went henceforth for nothing in the election of
+bishops or abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift of churchmen.
+The Crown recommended those whom it chose to the Pope, and the Pope
+nominated them to see or cure of souls. The treasuries of both King and
+Pope profited by the arrangement; but we can hardly wonder that after a
+betrayal such as this the clergy placed little trust in statutes or royal
+protection, and bowed humbly before the claims of Rome.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Its Worldliness]
+
+But what weakened the clergy most was their severance from the general
+sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, and the worldliness of their
+temper. Immense as their wealth was, they bore as little as they could of
+the common burthens of the realm. They were still resolute to assert their
+exemption from the common justice of the land, though the mild punishments
+of the bishops' courts carried as little dismay as ever into the mass of
+disorderly clerks. But privileged as they thus held themselves against all
+interference from the lay world without them, they carried on a ceaseless
+interference with the affairs of this lay world through their control over
+wills, contracts and divorces. No figure was better known or more hated
+than the summoner who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of
+their courts. By their directly religious offices they penetrated into the
+very heart of the social life about them. But powerful as they were, their
+moral authority was fast passing away. The wealthier churchmen with their
+curled hair and hanging sleeves aped the costume of the knightly society
+from which they were drawn and to which they still really belonged. We see
+the general impression of their worldliness in Chaucer's pictures of the
+hunting monk and the courtly prioress with her love-motto on her brooch.
+The older religious orders in fact had sunk into mere landowners, while the
+enthusiasm of the friars had in great part died away and left a crowd of
+impudent mendicants behind it. Wyclif could soon with general applause
+denounce them as sturdy beggars, and declare that "the man who gives alms
+to a begging friar is _ipso facto_ excommunicate."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Advance of the Commons]
+
+It was this weakness of the Baronage and the Church, and the consequent
+withdrawal of both as represented in the temporal and spiritual Estates of
+the Upper House from the active part which they had taken till now in
+checking the Crown that brought the Lower House to the front. The Knight of
+the Shire was now finally joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the
+Third Estate of the realm: and this union of the trader and the country
+gentleman gave a vigour and weight to the action of the Commons which their
+House could never have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere
+gathering of burgesses. But it was only slowly and under the pressure of
+one necessity after another that the Commons took a growing part in public
+affairs. Their primary business was with taxation, and here they stood firm
+against the evasions by which the king still managed to baffle their
+exclusive right of granting supplies by voluntary agreements with the
+merchants of the Staple. Their steady pressure at last obtained in 1362 an
+enactment that no subsidy should henceforth be set upon wool without assent
+of Parliament, while Purveyance was restricted by a provision that payments
+should be made for all things taken for the king's use in ready money. A
+hardly less important advance was made by the change of Ordinances into
+Statutes. Till this time, even when a petition of the Houses was granted,
+the royal Council had reserved to itself the right of modifying its form in
+the Ordinance which professed to embody it. It was under colour of this
+right that so many of the provisions made in Parliament had hitherto been
+evaded or set aside. But the Commons now met this abuse by a demand that on
+the royal assent being given their petitions should be turned without
+change into Statutes of the Realm and derive force of law from their entry
+on the Rolls of Parliament. The same practical sense was seen in their
+dealings with Edward's attempt to introduce occasional smaller councils
+with parliamentary powers. Such an assembly in 1353 granted a subsidy on
+wool. The Parliament which met in the following year might have challenged
+its proceedings as null and void, but the Commons more wisely contented
+themselves with a demand that the ordinances passed in the preceding
+assembly should receive the sanction of the Three Estates. A precedent for
+evil was thus turned into a precedent for good, and though irregular
+gatherings of a like sort were for a while occasionally held they were soon
+seen to be fruitless and discontinued. But the Commons long shrank from
+meddling with purely administrative matters. When Edward in his anxiety to
+shift from himself the responsibility of the war referred to them in 1354
+for advice on one of the numerous propositions of peace, they referred him
+to the lords of his Council. "Most dreaded lord," they replied, "as to this
+war and the equipment needful for it we are so ignorant and simple that we
+know not how nor have the power to devise. Wherefore we pray your Grace to
+excuse us in this matter, and that it please you with the advice of the
+great and wise persons of your Council to ordain what seems best for you
+for the honour and profit of yourself and of your kingdom. And whatsoever
+shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement on the part of you and your
+Lords we readily assent to and will hold it firmly established."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Baronage attacks the Church]
+
+But humble as was their tone the growing power of the Commons showed itself
+in significant changes. In 1363 the Chancellor opened Parliament with a
+speech in English, no doubt as a tongue intelligible to the members of the
+Lower House. From a petition in 1376 that knights of the shire may be
+chosen by common election of the better folk of the shire and not merely
+nominated by the sheriff without due election, as well as from an earlier
+demand that the sheriffs themselves should be disqualified from serving in
+Parliament during their term of office, we see that the Crown had already
+begun not only to feel the pressure of the Commons but to meet it by
+foisting royal nominees on the constituencies. Such an attempt at packing
+the House would hardly have been resorted to had it not already proved too
+strong for direct control. A further proof of its influence was seen in a
+prayer of the Parliament that lawyers practising in the King's Courts might
+no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The petition marks the rise
+of a consciousness that the House was now no mere gathering of local
+representatives, but a national assembly, and that a seat in it could no
+longer be confined to dwellers within the bounds of this county or that.
+But it showed also a pressure for seats, a passing away of the old dread of
+being returned as a representative and a new ambition to gain a place among
+the members of the Commons. Whether they would or no indeed the Commons
+were driven forward to a more direct interference with public affairs. From
+the memorable statute of 1322 their right to take equal part in all matters
+brought before Parliament had been incontestable, and their waiver of much
+of this right faded away before the stress of time. Their assent was needed
+to the great ecclesiastical statutes which regulated the relation of the
+See of Rome to the realm. They naturally took a chief part in the enactment
+and re-enactment of the Statute of Labourers. The Statute of the Staple,
+with a host of smaller commercial and economical measures, was of their
+origination. But it was not till an open breach took place between the
+baronage and the prelates that their full weight was felt. In the
+Parliament of 1371, on the resumption of the war, a noble taunted the
+Church as an owl protected by the feathers which other birds had
+contributed, and which they had a right to resume when a hawk's approach
+threatened them. The worldly goods of the Church, the metaphor hinted, had
+been bestowed on it for the common weal, and could be taken from it on the
+coming of a common danger. The threat was followed by a prayer that the
+chief offices of state, which had till now been held by the leading
+bishops, might be placed in lay hands. The prayer was at once granted:
+William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, resigned the Chancellorship,
+another prelate the Treasury, to lay dependants of the great nobles; and
+the panic of the clergy was seen in large grants which were voted by both
+Convocations.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John of Gaunt]
+
+At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the Church found a leader
+in John of Gaunt. The Duke of Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the
+Crown. Edward himself was sinking into dotage. Of his sons the Black
+Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships of his Spanish campaign,
+was fast drawing to the grave; he had lost a second son by death in
+childhood; the third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368. It was his
+fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the royal power mainly fell.
+By his marriage with the heiress of the house of Lancaster the Duke had
+acquired lands and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the
+Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons in any
+constitutional resistance to the Crown. His pride, already quickened by the
+second match with Constance to which he owed his shadowy kingship of
+Castille, drew him to the throne; and the fortune which placed the royal
+power practically in his hands bound him only the more firmly to its cause.
+Men held that his ambition looked to the Crown itself, for the approaching
+death of Edward and the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of
+the Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl, the daughter
+of the Duke of Clarence, between John and the throne. But the Duke's
+success fell short of his pride. In the campaign of 1373 he traversed
+France without finding a foe and brought back nothing save a ruined army to
+English shores. The peremptory tone in which money was demanded for the
+cost of this fruitless march while the petitions of the Parliament were set
+aside till it was granted roused the temper of the Commons. They
+requested--it is the first instance of such a practice--a conference with
+the lords, and while granting fresh subsidies prayed that the grant should
+be spent only on the war. The resentment of the government at this advance
+towards a control over the actual management of public affairs was seen in
+the calling of no Parliament through the next two years. But the years were
+disastrous both at home and abroad. The war went steadily against the
+English arms. The long negotiations with the Pope which went on at Bruges
+through 1375, and in which Wyclif took part as one of the royal
+commissioners, ended in a compromise by which Rome yielded nothing. The
+strife over the Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, and a return
+of the plague heightened the public distress. Edward was now wholly swayed
+by Alice Perrers, and the Duke shared his power with the royal mistress.
+But if we gather its tenor from the complaints of the succeeding Parliament
+his administration was as weak as it was corrupt. The new lay ministers
+lent themselves to gigantic frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought
+up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue. With Richard Lyons, a
+merchant through whom the king negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he
+reaped enormous profits by raising the price of imports and by lending to
+the Crown at usurious rates of interest. When the empty treasury forced
+them to call a Parliament the ministers tampered with the elections through
+the sheriffs.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Good Parliament]
+
+But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, and which gained from
+after times the name of the Good Parliament, shows that these precautions
+had utterly failed. Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to
+win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser gentry or the
+wealthier burgesses who together formed the Commons. Projects of wide
+constitutional and social change, of the humiliation and impoverishment of
+an estate of the realm, were profoundly distasteful to men already
+struggling with a social revolution on their own estates and in their own
+workshops. But it was not merely its opposition to the projects of
+Lancaster and his party among the baronage which won for this assembly the
+name of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new period in our
+Parliamentary history, as it marked a new stage in the character of the
+national opposition to the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of
+resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out through
+risings of its feudal tenantry. But the misgovernment was now that of the
+baronage or of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction
+with the Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any adequate means of
+peaceful redress. The old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with
+matters of State was roughly swept away therefore by the pressure of the
+time. The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's succession by the
+removal of John of Gaunt, the prelates with William of Wykeham at their
+head, resolute again to take their place in the royal councils and to check
+the projects of ecclesiastical spoliation put forward by their opponents,
+alike found in it a body to oppose to the Duke's administration. Backed by
+powers such as these, the action of the Commons showed none of their old
+timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of a hundred and forty
+petitions of grievances preluded a bold attack on the royal Council.
+"Trusting in God, and standing with his followers before the nobles,
+whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings were ever
+contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the
+mis-management of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded an account
+of the expenditure. "What do these base and ignoble knights attempt?" cried
+John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be kings or princes of the land?" But
+the movement was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced by the
+charges brought against the ministers. After a strict enquiry Latimer and
+Lyons were alike thrown into prison, Alice Perrers was banished, and
+several of the royal servants were driven from the Court. At this moment
+the death of the Black Prince shook the power of the Parliament. But it
+only heightened its resolve to secure the succession. His son, Richard of
+Bordeaux, as he was called from the place of his birth, was now a child of
+but ten years old; and it was known that doubts were whispered on the
+legitimacy of his birth and claim. An early marriage of his mother Joan of
+Kent, a granddaughter of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury had
+been annulled; but the Lancastrian party used this first match to throw
+doubts on the validity of her subsequent union with the Black Prince and on
+the right of Richard to the throne. The dread of Lancaster's ambition is
+the first indication of the approach of what was from this time to grow
+into the great difficulty of the realm, the question of the succession to
+the Crown. From the death of Edward the Third to the death of Charles the
+First no English sovereign felt himself secure from rival claimants of his
+throne. As yet however the dread was a baseless one; the people were
+heartily with the Prince and his child. The Duke's proposal that the
+succession should be settled in case of Richard's death was rejected; and
+the boy himself was brought into Parliament and acknowledged as heir of the
+Crown.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wyclif and John of Gaunt]
+
+To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining the addition of nine
+lords with William of Wykeham and two other prelates among them to the
+royal Council. But the Parliament was no sooner dismissed than the Duke at
+once resumed his power. His anger at the blow which had been dealt at his
+projects was no doubt quickened by resentment at the sudden advance of the
+Lower House. From the Commons who shrank even from giving counsel on
+matters of state to the Commons who dealt with such matters as their
+special business, who investigated royal accounts, who impeached royal
+ministers, who dictated changes in the royal advisers, was an immense step.
+But it was a step which the Duke believed could be retraced. His haughty
+will flung aside all restraints of law. He dismissed the new lords and
+prelates from the Council. He called back Alice Perrers and the disgraced
+ministers. He declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and did not
+suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter de la
+Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham. His attack on
+this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, and the attack became
+significant when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations of
+Church property which formed the favourite theme of John Wyclif. To Wyclif
+such a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which held down the Church.
+His administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and the
+colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise before
+his death, were all equally hateful. It was this wealth, this intermeddling
+with worldly business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse
+that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which could
+alone meet the vice and suffering of the time. Whatever baser motives might
+spur Lancaster and his party, their projects of spoliation must have seemed
+to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the Church. Poor and powerless in
+worldly matters, he held that she would have the wealth and might of heaven
+at her command. Wyclif's theory of Church and State had led him long since
+to contend that the property of the clergy might be seized and employed
+like other property for national purposes. Such a theory might have been
+left, as other daring theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the
+disputation of the schools. But the clergy were bitterly galled when the
+first among English teachers threw himself hotly on the side of the party
+which threatened them with spoliation, and argued in favour of their
+voluntary abandonment of all Church property and of a return to their
+original poverty. They were roused to action when Wyclif came forward as
+the theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party at a moment when the
+clergy were freshly outraged by the overthrow of the bishops and the
+plunder of Wykeham. They forced the king to cancel the sentence of
+banishment from the precincts of the Court which had been directed against
+the Bishop of Winchester by refusing any grant of supply in Convocation
+till William of Wykeham took his seat in it. But in the prosecution of
+Wyclif they resolved to return blow for blow. In February 1377 he was
+summoned before Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his heretical
+propositions concerning the wealth of the Church.
+
+The Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge as really given to himself,
+and stood by Wyclif's side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But no
+trial took place. Fierce words passed between the nobles and the prelate:
+the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag Courtenay out of the
+church by the hair of his head; at last the London populace, to whom John
+of Gaunt was hateful, burst in to their Bishop's rescue, and Wyclif's life
+was saved with difficulty by the aid of the soldiery. But his boldness only
+grew with the danger. A Papal bull which was procured by the bishops,
+directing the University to condemn and arrest him, extorted from him a
+bold defiance. In a defence circulated widely through the kingdom and laid
+before Parliament, Wyclif broadly asserted that no man could be
+excommunicated by the Pope "unless he were first excommunicated by
+himself." He denied the right of the Church to exact or defend temporal
+privileges by spiritual censures, declared that a Church might justly be
+deprived by the king or lay lords of its property for defect of duty, and
+defended the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. It marks the
+temper of the time and the growing severance between the Church and the
+nation that, bold as the defiance was, it won the support of the people as
+of the Crown. When Wyclif appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth
+Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons a message from the Court forbade
+the primate to proceed and the Londoners broke in and dissolved the
+session.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Edward the Third]
+
+Meanwhile the Duke's unscrupulous tampering with elections had packed the
+Parliament of 1377 with his adherents. The work of the Good Parliament was
+undone, and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who had been
+impeached by their predecessors. The needs of the treasury were met by a
+novel form of taxation. To the earlier land-tax, to the tax on personality
+which dated from the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which had grown
+into importance in the last two reigns, was now added a tax which reached
+every person in the realm, a poll-tax of a groat a head. In this tax were
+sown the seeds of future trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in March
+the Duke's power seemed completely secured. Hardly three months later it
+was wholly undone. In June Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age,
+robbed on his death-bed even of his rings by the mistress to whom he clung,
+and the accession of his grandson, Richard the Second, changed the whole
+face of affairs. The Duke withdrew from Court, and sought a reconciliation
+with the party opposed to him. The men of the Good Parliament surrounded
+the new king, and a Parliament which assembled in October took vigorously
+up its work. Peter de la Mare was released from prison and replaced in the
+chair of the House of Commons. The action of the Lower House indeed was as
+trenchant and comprehensive as that of the Good Parliament itself. In
+petition after petition the Commons demanded the confirmation of older
+rights and the removal of modern abuses. They complained of administrative
+wrongs such as the practice of purveyance, of abuses of justice, of the
+oppressions of officers of the exchequer and of the forest, of the ill
+state of prisons, of the customs of "maintenance" and "livery" by which
+lords extended their protection to shoals of disorderly persons and
+overawed the courts by means of them. Amid ecclesiastical abuses they noted
+the state of the Church courts, and the neglect of the laws of Provisors.
+They demanded that the annual assembly of Parliament, which had now become
+customary, should be defined by law, and that bills once sanctioned by the
+Crown should be forthwith turned into statutes without further amendment or
+change on the part of the royal Council. With even greater boldness they
+laid hands on the administration itself. They not only demanded that the
+evil counsellors of the last reign should be removed, and that the
+treasurer of the subsidy on wool should account for its expenditure to the
+lords, but that the royal Council should be named in Parliament, and chosen
+from members of either estate of the realm. Though a similar request for
+the nomination of the officers of the royal household was refused, their
+main demand was granted. It was agreed that the great officers of state,
+the chancellor, treasurer, and barons of exchequer should be named by the
+lords in Parliament, and removed from their offices during the king's
+"tender years" only on the advice of the lords. The pressure of the war,
+which rendered the existing taxes insufficient, gave the House a fresh hold
+on the Crown. While granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and
+property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the war, and assigned
+two of their members, William Walworth and John Philpot, as a standing
+committee to regulate its expenditure. The successor of this Parliament in
+the following year demanded and obtained an account of the way in which the
+subsidy had been spent.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Discontent of the people]
+
+The minority of the king, who was but eleven years old at his accession,
+the weakness of the royal council amidst the strife of the baronial
+factions, above all the disasters of the war without and the growing
+anarchy within the realm itself, alone made possible this startling
+assumption of the executive power by the Houses. The shame of defeat abroad
+was being added to the misery and discomfort at home. The French war ran
+its disastrous course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a
+second sunk by a storm; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like
+its predecessors, in disappointment and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between
+employers and employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament, drawn
+as it was wholly from the proprietary classes, struggled as fiercely for
+the mastery of the labourers as it struggled for the mastery of the Crown.
+The Good Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the enforcement of
+the Statute of Labourers as any of its predecessors. In spite of statutes,
+however, the market remained in the labourers' hands. The comfort of the
+worker rose with his wages. Men who had "no land to live on but their hands
+disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, and called for fresh flesh or
+fish, fried or bake, and that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw."
+But there were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour class.
+There were seasons of the year during which employment for the floating
+mass of labour was hard to find. In the long interval between harvest-tide
+and harvest-tide work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the
+time. Some lines of William Langland give us the picture of a farm of the
+day. "I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but
+two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves
+of beans and bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no cooked
+meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage
+plants, and eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare to draw afield my dung
+while the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till
+Lammas-tide [August], and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft." But
+it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn bade "Hunger
+go to sleep," and during the long spring and summer the free labourer and
+the "waster that will not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but
+the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale," was a source
+of social and political danger. "He grieveth him against God and grudgeth
+against Reason, and then curseth he the King and all his council after such
+law to allow labourers to grieve." Such a smouldering mass of discontent as
+this needed but a spark to burst into flame; and the spark was found in the
+imposition of fresh taxation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Poll-Tax]
+
+If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he was still the leading
+noble in the realm, and it is possible that dread of the encroachments of
+the last Parliament on the executive power drew after a time even the new
+advisers of the Crown closer to him. Whatever was the cause, he again came
+to the front. But the supplies voted in the past year were wasted in his
+hands. A fresh expedition against France under the Duke himself ended in
+failure before the walls of St. Malo, while at home his brutal household
+was outraging public order by the murder of a knight who had incurred
+John's anger in the precincts of Westminster. So great was the resentment
+of the Londoners at this act that it became needful to summon Parliament
+elsewhere than to the capital; and in 1378 the Houses met at Gloucester.
+The Duke succeeded in bringing the Lords to refuse those conferences with
+the Commons which had given unity to the action of the late Parliament, but
+he was foiled in an attack on the clerical privilege of sanctuary and in
+the threats which his party still directed against Church property, while
+the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before them the accounts of the
+last subsidy and to appoint a commission to examine into the revenue of the
+Crown. Unhappily the financial policy of the preceding year was persisted
+in. The check before St. Malo had been somewhat redeemed by treaties with
+Charles of Evreux and the Duke of Britanny which secured to England the
+right of holding Cherbourg and Brest; but the cost of these treaties only
+swelled the expenses of the war. The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester
+proved insufficient for their purpose, and a Parliament in the spring of
+1379 renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form. But the proceeds of the tax
+proved miserably inadequate, and when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a
+return was again made to the old system of subsidies. But these failed in
+their turn; and at the close of the year the Parliament again fell back on
+a severer Poll-tax. One of the attractions of the new mode of taxation
+seems to have been that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves, paid in
+this way a larger share of the burthens of the state; but the chief ground
+for its adoption lay, no doubt, in its bringing within the net of the
+tax-gatherer a class which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free
+labourer, the village smith, the village tiler. But few courses could have
+been more dangerous. The Poll-tax not only brought the pressure of the war
+home to every household; it goaded into action precisely the class which
+was already seething with discontent. The strife between labour and capital
+was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in town. The landlords were
+claiming new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves as free to
+prove they were no villeins by law. The free labourer was struggling
+against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages. The wandering
+workman was being seized and branded as a vagrant. The abbey towns were
+struggling for freedom against the abbeys. The craftsmen within boroughs
+were carrying on the same strife against employer and craft-gild. And all
+this mass of discontent was being heightened and organized by agencies with
+which the Government could not cope. The poorer villeins and the free
+labourers had long since banded together in secret conspiracies which the
+wealthier villeins supported with money. The return of soldiers from the
+war threw over the land a host of broken men, skilled in arms, and ready to
+take part in any rising. The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from
+village to village and street to street, shared the passions of the class
+from which they sprang. Priests like Ball openly preached the doctrines of
+communism. And to these had been recently added a fresh agency, which could
+hardly fail to stir a new excitement. With the practical ability which
+marked his character, Wyclif set on foot about this time a body of poor
+preachers to supply, as he held, the place of those wealthier clergy who
+had lost their hold on the land. The coarse sermons, bare feet, and russet
+dress of these "Simple Priests" moved the laughter of rector and canon, but
+they proved a rapid and effective means of diffusing Wyclif's protests
+against the wealth and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can hardly doubt
+that in the general turmoil their denunciation of ecclesiastical wealth
+passed often into more general denunciations of the proprietary classes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John Ball]
+
+As the spring went by quaint rimes passed through the country, and served
+as a summons to revolt. "John Ball," ran one, "greeteth you all, and doth
+for to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, will and
+skill, God speed every dele." "Help truth," ran another, "and truth shall
+help you! Now reigneth pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and
+lechery withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy reigneth with
+treason, and sloth is take in great season. God do bote, for now is tyme!"
+We recognize Ball's hand in the yet more stirring missives of "Jack the
+Miller" and "Jack the Carter." "Jack Miller asketh help to turn his mill
+aright. He hath grounden small, small: the King's Son of Heaven he shall
+pay for all. Look thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the post
+stand with steadfastness. With right and with might, with skill and with
+will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before
+might, so goeth our mill aright." "Jack Carter," ran the companion missive,
+"prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well,
+and aye better and better: for at the even men heareth the day." "Falseness
+and guile," sang Jack Trewman, "have reigned too long, and truth hath been
+set under a lock, and falseness and guile reigneth in every stock. No man
+may come truth to, but if he sing 'si dedero.' True love is away that was
+so good, and clerks for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is
+time." In the rude jingle of these lines began for England the literature
+of political controversy: they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets
+of Milton and of Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the
+mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants: their longing for
+a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality
+of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the
+perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Peasant Rising]
+
+From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness spread to all
+England south of the Thames. But the grounds of discontent varied with
+every district. The actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford,
+where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in vengeance for
+a brutal outrage on his daughter. The county at once rose in arms.
+Canterbury, where "the whole town was of their mind," threw open its gates
+to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop's palace and dragged John
+Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter
+Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Malling to march upon London. Their
+grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was unknown in Kent. As
+the peasants poured towards Blackheath indeed every lawyer who fell into
+their hands was put to death; "not till all these were killed would the
+land enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the
+houses of the stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the
+flames. But this action can hardly have been due to anything more than
+sympathy with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the same
+men when pilgrims from the north brought news that John of Gaunt was
+setting free his bondmen to send to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and
+King of England. Nor was their grievance a religious one. Lollardry can
+have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of
+Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent
+was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll-tax and
+better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy,
+to take the king into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good
+to the Commons of the realm. The whole population joined the Kentishmen as
+they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear. The young
+king--he was but a boy of sixteen--addressed them from a boat on the river;
+but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to
+allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason"
+the great mass rushed on London. On the 13th of June its gates were flung
+open by the poorer artizans within the city, and the stately palace of John
+of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses
+of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the insurgents, as they
+proudly boasted, were "seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or
+robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off a silver vessel from the sack
+of the Savoy was flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of
+insurgents encamped at the same time to the east of the city. In Essex and
+the eastern counties the popular discontent was more social than political.
+The demands of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, that
+tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with, that "no acre of land
+which is held in bondage or villeinage be held at higher rate than
+fourpence a year," in other words for a money commutation of all villein
+services. Their rising had been even earlier than that of the Kentishmen.
+Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the poll-tax gathered crowds of
+peasants together, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal
+commissioners who were sent to repress the tumult were driven from the
+field, and the Essex men marched upon London on one side of the river as
+the Kentishmen marched on the other. The evening of the thirteenth, the day
+on which Tyler entered the city, saw them encamped without its walls at
+Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury and the northern heights were
+occupied by the men of Hertfordshire and the villeins of St. Albans, where
+a strife between abbot and town had been going on since the days of Edward
+the Second.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard the Second]
+
+The royal Council with the young king had taken refuge in the Tower, and
+their aim seems to have been to divide the forces of the insurgents. On the
+morning of the fourteenth therefore Richard rode from the Tower to Mile-end
+to meet the Essex men. "I am your King and Lord, good people," the boy
+began with a fearlessness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis,
+"what will you?" "We will that you free us for ever," shouted the peasants,
+"us and our lands; and that we be never named nor held for serfs!" "I grant
+it," replied Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at once to
+issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy welcomed the promise.
+Throughout the day more than thirty clerks were busied writing letters of
+pardon and emancipation, and with these the mass of the Essex men and the
+men of Hertfordshire withdrew quietly to their homes. But while the king
+was successful at Mile-end a terrible doom had fallen on the councillors he
+left behind him. Richard had hardly quitted the Tower when the Kentishmen
+who had spent the night within the city appeared at its gates. The general
+terror was shown ludicrously enough when they burst in and taking the
+panic-stricken knights of the royal household in rough horse-play by the
+beard promised to be their equals and good comrades in the days to come.
+But the horse-play changed into dreadful earnest when they found that
+Richard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery of Archbishop Sudbury
+and other ministers in the chapel changed their fury into a cry for blood.
+The Primate was dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded. The same vengeance
+was wreaked on the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner for the levy of the
+hated poll-tax, the merchant Richard Lyons who had been impeached by the
+Good Parliament. Richard meanwhile had ridden round the northern wall of
+the city to the Wardrobe near Blackfriars, and from this new refuge he
+opened his negotiations with the Kentish insurgents. Many of these
+dispersed at the news of the king's pledge to the men of Essex, but a body
+of thirty thousand still surrounded Wat Tyler when Richard on the morning
+of the fifteenth encountered that leader by a mere chance at Smithfield.
+Hot words passed between his train and the peasant chieftain who advanced
+to confer with the king, and a threat from Tyler brought on a brief
+struggle in which the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck him with
+his dagger to the ground. "Kill! kill!" shouted the crowd: "they have slain
+our captain!" But Richard faced the Kentishmen with the same cool courage
+with which he faced the men of Essex. "What need ye, my masters?" cried the
+boy-king as he rode boldly up to the front of the bowmen. "I am your
+Captain and your King; follow me!" The hopes of the peasants centred in the
+young sovereign; one aim of their rising had been to free him from the evil
+counsellors who, as they believed, abused his youth; and at his word they
+followed him with a touching loyalty and trust till he entered the Tower.
+His mother welcomed him within its walls with tears of joy. "Rejoice and
+praise God," Richard answered, "for I have recovered to-day my heritage
+which was lost and the realm of England!" But he was compelled to give the
+same pledge of freedom to the Kentishmen as at Mile-end, and it was only
+after receiving his letters of pardon and emancipation that the yeomen
+dispersed to their homes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The general revolt]
+
+The revolt indeed was far from being at an end. As the news of the rising
+ran through the country the discontent almost everywhere broke into flame.
+There were outbreaks in every shire south of the Thames as far westward as
+Devonshire. In the north tumults broke out at Beverley and Scarborough, and
+Yorkshire and Lancashire made ready to rise. The eastern counties were in
+one wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen burned the charters
+of the University and attacked the colleges. A body of peasants occupied
+St. Albans. In Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called John the Litster or Dyer,
+took the title of King of the Commons, and marching through the country at
+the head of a mass of peasants compelled the nobles whom he captured to act
+as his meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast. The
+story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what was going on in Suffolk. Ever since
+the accession of Edward the Third the townsmen and the villeins of their
+lands around had been at war with the abbot and his monks. The old and more
+oppressive servitude had long passed away, but the later abbots had set
+themselves against the policy of concession and conciliation which had
+brought about this advance towards freedom. The gates of the town were
+still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the
+wardship of all orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these
+the town could never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from
+Pope or King, interpreted cunningly by the wit of the new lawyer class, lay
+stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained other and hardly
+less formidable documents than these. Untroubled by the waste of war, the
+religious houses profited more than any other landowners by the general
+growth of wealth. They had become great proprietors, money-lenders to their
+tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had banished from their land.
+There were few townsmen of St. Edmund's who had not some bonds laid up in
+the abbey registry. In 1327 one band of debtors had a covenant lying there
+for the payment of five hundred marks and fifty casks of wine. Another
+company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors on a bond for ten
+thousand pounds. The new spirit of commercial activity joined with the
+troubles of the time to throw the whole community into the abbot's hands.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Saint Edmundsbury]
+
+We can hardly wonder that riots, lawsuits, and royal commissions marked the
+relation of the town and abbey under the first two Edwards. Under the third
+came an open conflict. In 1327 the townsmen burst into the great house,
+drove the monks into the choir, and dragged them thence to the town prison.
+The abbey itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
+frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
+kitchen, all disappeared. The monks estimated their losses at ten thousand
+pounds. But the townsmen aimed at higher booty than this. The monks were
+brought back from prison to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of their
+registry, papal bulls and royal charters, deeds and bonds and mortgages,
+were laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob they were forced
+to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a gild to the town as well as
+of free release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
+house. But all control over town or land was gone. Through spring and
+summer no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the
+abbey did not dare to show their faces in the streets. News came at last
+that the abbot was in London, appealing for redress to the court, and the
+whole county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the
+thought of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law, poured
+into the streets of the town. From thirty-two of the neighbouring villages
+the priests marched at the head of their flocks as on a new crusade. The
+wild mass of men, women, and children, twenty thousand in all, as men
+guessed, rushed again on the abbey, and for four November days the work of
+destruction went on unhindered. When gate, stables, granaries, kitchen,
+infirmary, hostelry had gone up in flames, the multitude swept away to the
+granges and barns of the abbey farms. Their plunder shows what vast
+agricultural proprietors the monks had become. A thousand horses, a hundred
+and twenty plough-oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three
+hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges and barns
+burned to the ground. It was judged afterwards that sixty thousand pounds
+would hardly cover the loss.
+
+Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, the appeal of the
+abbot against this outrage was promptly heeded. A royal force quelled the
+riot, thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich;
+twenty-four of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village priests
+were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack on the abbey, and
+twenty were summarily hanged. Nearly two hundred persons remained under
+sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the
+King's Courts. At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage. Irritated by
+repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses
+seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and
+carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street lest
+his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity offered for shipping
+him off to Brabant. The Primate and the Pope levelled their
+excommunications against the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at
+last discovered and brought home it was probably with some pledge of the
+arrangement which followed in 1332. The enormous damages assessed by the
+royal justices were remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed,
+the prisoners were released. On the other hand the deeds which had been
+stolen were again replaced in the archives of the abbey, and the charters
+which had been extorted from the monks were formally cancelled.
+
+
+[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury in 1381]
+
+The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed by their failure, and
+throughout the reign of Edward the Third the oppression against which they
+had risen went on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow of sheer
+force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless tyranny of the law. At
+Richard's accession Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was
+in charge of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his
+day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
+pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more
+illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton
+Belgabred. John was "industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry
+found their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers around
+him. "Faithfully he strove," says the monastic chronicler, "with the
+villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he owned
+specially as his "adversaries," but it was the rustics who were to show
+what a hate he had won. On the fifteenth of June, the day of Wat Tyler's
+fall, the howl of a great multitude round his manor-house at Mildenhall
+broke roughly on the chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly, but he was
+betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery of the law by villein
+and bondsman, condemned and killed. The corpse lay naked in the open field
+while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's head on a
+lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng at last reached
+the gallows where the head of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish,
+was already impaled; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery of
+their friendship set them side by side. Another head soon joined them. The
+abbey gates were burst open, and the cloister filled with a maddened crowd,
+howling for a new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of the barony. Few
+knew him as he stood among the group of trembling monks, but he courted
+death with a contemptuous courage. "I am the man you seek," he said,
+stepping forward; and in a minute, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son!
+Monk! Traitor!" he was swept to the gallows, and his head hacked from his
+shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back again to the abbey gate, and summoned
+the monks before them. They told them that now for a long time they had
+oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that
+in the sight of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and
+charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many which
+were demanded they swore they could not find. A compromise was at last
+patched up; and it was agreed that the charters should be surrendered till
+the future abbot should confirm the liberties of the town. Then, unable to
+do more, the crowd ebbed away.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Close of the rising]
+
+A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went on the same day at
+St. Albans. William Grindecobbe, the leader of its townsmen, returned with
+one of the charters of emancipation which Richard had granted after his
+interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and Hertfordshire, and breaking
+into the abbey precincts at the head of the burghers, forced the abbot to
+deliver up the charters which bound the town in bondage to his house. But a
+more striking proof of servitude than any charters could give remained in
+the millstones which after a long suit at law had been adjudged to the
+abbey and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness that no
+townsman might grind corn within the domain of the abbey save at the
+abbot's mill. Bursting into the cloister, the burghers now tore the
+mill-stones from the floor, and broke them into small pieces, "like blessed
+bread in church," which each might carry off to show something of the day
+when their freedom was won again. But it was hardly won when it was lost
+anew. The quiet withdrawal and dispersion of the peasant armies with their
+charters of emancipation gave courage to the nobles. Their panic passed
+away. The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on Litster's camp,
+and scattered the peasants of Norfolk at the first shock. Richard with an
+army of forty thousand men marched in triumph through Kent and Essex, and
+spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions. At Waltham he was met
+by the display of his own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men
+that "they were so far as freedom went the peers of their lords." But they
+were to learn the worth of a king's word. "Villeins you were," answered
+Richard, "and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide, and that not
+your old bondage, but a worse!" The stubborn resistance which he met showed
+that the temper of the people was not easily broken. The villagers of
+Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought two hard fights
+before they were reduced to submission. It was only by threats of death
+that verdicts of guilty could be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders
+of the revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if
+he would persuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they
+had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade
+them take no thought for his trouble. "If I die," he said, "I shall die for
+the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life
+by such a martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have done had I been
+killed yesterday." But repression went pitilessly on, and through the
+summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said to have perished on the
+gallows or the field.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+RICHARD THE SECOND
+1381-1400
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Results of the Peasant Revolt]
+
+Terrible as were the measures of repression which followed the Peasant
+Revolt, and violent as was the passion of reaction which raged among the
+proprietary classes at its close, the end of the rising was in fact
+secured. The words of Grindecobbe ere his death were a prophecy which time
+fulfilled. Cancel charters of manumission as the council might, serfage was
+henceforth a doomed and perishing thing. The dread of another outbreak hung
+round the employer. The attempts to bring back obsolete services quietly
+died away. The old process of enfranchisement went quietly on. During the
+century and a half which followed the Peasant Revolt villeinage died out so
+rapidly that it became a rare and antiquated thing. The class of small
+freeholders sprang fast out of the wreck of it into numbers and importance.
+In twenty years more they were in fact recognized as the basis of our
+electoral system in every English county. The Labour Statutes proved as
+ineffective as of old in enchaining labour or reducing its price. A hundred
+years after the Black Death the wages of an English labourer was sufficient
+to purchase twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have
+been obtained for the wages paid under Edward the Third. The incidental
+descriptions of the life of the working classes which we find in Piers
+Ploughman show that this increase of social comfort had been going on even
+during the troubled period which preceded the outbreak of the peasants, and
+it went on faster after the revolt was over. But inevitable as such a
+progress was, every step of it was taken in the teeth of the wealthier
+classes. Their temper indeed at the close of the rising was that of men
+frenzied by panic and the taste of blood. They scouted all notion of
+concession. The stubborn will of the conquered was met by as stubborn a
+will in their conquerors. The royal Council showed its sense of the danger
+of a mere policy of resistance by submitting the question of
+enfranchisement to the Parliament which assembled in November 1381 with
+words which suggested a compromise. "If you desire to enfranchise and set
+at liberty the said serfs," ran the royal message, "by your common assent,
+as the King has been informed that some of you desire, he will consent to
+your prayer." But no thoughts of compromise influenced the landowners in
+their reply. The king's grant and letters, the Parliament answered with
+perfect truth, were legally null and void: their serfs were their goods,
+and the king could not take their goods from them but by their own consent.
+"And this consent," they ended, "we have never given and never will give,
+were we all to die in one day." Their temper indeed expressed itself in
+legislation which was a fit sequel to the Statutes of Labourers. They
+forbade the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town.
+They prayed the king to ordain "that no bondman nor bondwoman shall place
+their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance their children
+in the world by their going into the church." The new colleges which were
+being founded at the Universities at this moment closed their gates upon
+villeins.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Religious reaction]
+
+The panic which produced this frenzied reaction against all projects of
+social reform produced inevitably as frenzied a panic of reaction against
+all plans for religious reform. Wyclif had been supported by the
+Lancastrian party till the very eve of the Peasant Revolt. But with the
+rising his whole work seemed suddenly undone. The quarrel between the
+baronage and the Church on which his political action had as yet been
+grounded was hushed in the presence of a common danger. His "poor
+preachers" were looked upon as missionaries of socialism. The friars
+charged Wyclif with being a "sower of strife, who by his serpentlike
+instigation had set the serf against his lord," and though he tossed back
+the charge with disdain he had to bear a suspicion which was justified by
+the conduct of some of his followers. John Ball, who had figured in the
+front rank of the revolt, was falsely-named as one of his adherents, and
+was alleged to have denounced in his last hour the conspiracy of the
+"Wyclifites." Wyclif's most prominent scholar, Nicholas Herford, was said
+to have openly approved the brutal murder of Archbishop Sudbury. Whatever
+belief such charges might gain, it is certain that from this moment all
+plans for the reorganization of the Church were confounded in the general
+odium which attached to the projects of the peasant leaders, and that any
+hope of ecclesiastical reform at the hands of the baronage and the
+Parliament was at an end. But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived
+Wyclif of the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto
+cooperated, their alliance must have been dissolved by the new theological
+position which he had already taken up. Some months before the outbreak of
+the insurrection he had by one memorable step passed from the position of a
+reformer of the discipline and political relations of the Church to that of
+a protester against its cardinal beliefs. If there was one doctrine upon
+which the supremacy of the Mediaeval Church rested, it was the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation. It was by his exclusive right to the performance of the
+miracle which was wrought in the mass that the lowliest priest was raised
+high above princes. With the formal denial of the doctrine of
+Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued in the spring of 1381 began that
+great movement of religious revolt which ended more than a century after in
+the establishment of religious freedom by severing the mass of the Teutonic
+peoples from the general body of the Catholic Church. The act was the
+bolder that he stood utterly alone. The University of Oxford, in which his
+influence had been hitherto all-powerful, at once condemned him. John of
+Gaunt enjoined him to be silent. Wyclif was presiding as Doctor of Divinity
+over some disputations in the schools of the Augustinian Canons when his
+academical condemnation was publicly read, but though startled for the
+moment he at once challenged Chancellor or doctor to disprove the
+conclusions at which he had arrived. The prohibition of the Duke of
+Lancaster he met by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession which
+closes proudly with the quiet words, "I believe that in the end the truth
+will conquer."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Rise of Lollardry]
+
+For the moment his courage dispelled the panic around him. The University
+responded to his appeal, and by displacing his opponents from office
+tacitly adopted his cause. But Wyclif no longer looked for support to the
+learned or wealthier classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He appealed,
+and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to
+England at large. With an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in
+the tongue of the people itself. The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse
+and involved argument which the great doctor had addressed to his academic
+hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which marks the
+wonderful genius of the man the schoolman was transformed into the
+pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif
+is the father of our later English prose. The rough, clear, homely English
+of his tracts, the speech of the ploughman and the trader of the day though
+coloured with the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary
+use as distinctly a creation of his own as the style in which he embodied
+it, the terse vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard
+antitheses which roused the dullest mind like a whip. Once fairly freed
+from the trammels of unquestioning belief, Wyclif's mind worked fast in its
+career of scepticism. Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the
+shrines of the saints, worship of their images, worship of the saints
+themselves, were successively denied. A formal appeal to the Bible as the
+one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of every
+instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the very
+groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. Nor were these daring denials
+confined to the small circle of scholars who still clung to him. The
+"Simple Priests" were active in the diffusion of their master's doctrines,
+and how rapid their progress must have been we may see from the
+panic-struck exaggerations of their opponents. A few years later they
+complained that the followers of Wyclif abounded everywhere and in all
+classes, among the baronage, in the cities, among the peasantry of the
+countryside, even in the monastic cell itself. "Every second man one meets
+is a Lollard."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Lollardry at Oxford]
+
+"Lollard," a word which probably means "idle babbler," was the nickname of
+scorn with which the orthodox Churchmen chose to insult their assailants.
+But this rapid increase changed their scorn into vigorous action. In 1382
+Courtenay, who had now become Archbishop, summoned a council at Blackfriars
+and formally submitted twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif's works.
+An earthquake in the midst of the proceedings terrified every prelate but
+the resolute Primate; the expulsion of ill humours from the earth, he said,
+was of good omen for the expulsion of ill humours from the Church; and the
+condemnation was pronounced. Then the Archbishop turned fiercely upon
+Oxford as the fount and centre of the new heresies. In an English sermon at
+St. Frideswide's Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of Wyclif's
+doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the Chancellor to silence him and his
+adherents on pain of being himself treated as a heretic. The Chancellor
+fell back on the liberties of the University, and appointed as preacher
+another Wyclifite, Repyngdon, who did not hesitate to style the Lollards
+"holy priests," and to affirm that they were protected by John of Gaunt.
+Party spirit meanwhile ran high among the students. The bulk of them sided
+with the Lollard leaders, and a Carmelite, Peter Stokes, who had procured
+the Archbishop's letters, cowered panic stricken in his chamber while the
+Chancellor, protected by an escort of a hundred townsmen, listened
+approvingly to Repyngdon's defiance. "I dare go no further," wrote the poor
+Friar to the Archbishop, "for fear of death"; but he mustered courage at
+last to descend into the schools where Repyngdon was now maintaining that
+the clerical order was "better when it was but nine years old than now that
+it has grown to a thousand years and more." The appearance however of
+scholars in arms again drove Stokes to fly in despair to Lambeth, while a
+new heretic in open Congregation maintained Wyclif's denial of
+Transubstantiation. "There is no idolatry," cried William James, "save in
+the Sacrament of the Altar." "You speak like a wise man," replied the
+Chancellor, Robert Rygge. Courtenay however was not the man to bear
+defiance tamely, and his summons to Lambeth wrested a submission from Rygge
+which was only accepted on his pledge to suppress the Lollardism of the
+University. "I dare not publish them, on fear of death," exclaimed the
+Chancellor when Courtenay handed him his letters of condemnation. "Then is
+your University an open _fautor_ of heretics," retorted the Primate, "if it
+suffers not the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within its bounds." The
+royal Council supported the Archbishop's injunction, but the publication of
+the decrees at once set Oxford on fire. The scholars threatened death
+against the friars, "crying that they wished to destroy the University."
+The masters suspended Henry Crump from teaching as a troubler of the public
+peace for calling the Lollards "heretics." The Crown however at last
+stepped in to Courtenay's aid, and a royal writ ordered the instant
+banishment of all favourers of Wyclif with the seizure and destruction of
+all Lollard books on pain of forfeiture of the University's privileges. The
+threat produced its effect. Herford and Repyngdon appealed in vain to John
+of Gaunt for protection; the Duke himself denounced them as heretics
+against the Sacrament of the Altar, and after much evasion they were forced
+to make a formal submission. Within Oxford itself the suppression of
+Lollardism was complete, but with the death of religious freedom all trace
+of intellectual life suddenly disappears. The century which followed the
+triumph of Courtenay is the most barren in its annals, nor was the sleep of
+the University broken till the advent of the New Learning restored to it
+some of the life and liberty which the Primate had so roughly trodden out.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wyclif's Bible]
+
+Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclif's position as the last
+of the great schoolmen than the reluctance of so bold a man as Courtenay
+even after his triumph over Oxford to take extreme measures against the
+head of Lollardry. Wyclif, though summoned, had made no appearance before
+the "Council of the Earthquake." "Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends
+to-day," was his bitter comment on the new union which proved to have
+sprung up between the prelates and the monastic orders who had so long been
+at variance with each other; "since they have made a heretic of Christ, it
+is an easy inference for them to count simple Christians heretics." He
+seems indeed to have been sick at the moment, but the announcement of the
+final sentence roused him to life again. He petitioned the king and
+Parliament that he might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines he had
+put forth, and turning with characteristic energy to the attack of his
+assailants, he asked that all religious vows might be suppressed, that
+tithes might be diverted to the maintenance of the poor and the clergy
+maintained by the free alms of their flocks, that the Statutes of
+Provisors and Praemunire might be enforced against the Papacy, that
+Churchmen might be declared incapable of secular offices, and imprisonment
+for excommunication cease. Finally in the teeth of the council's
+condemnation he demanded that the doctrine of the Eucharist which he
+advocated might be freely taught. If he appeared in the following year
+before the convocation at Oxford it was to perplex his opponents by a
+display of scholastic logic which permitted him to retire without any
+retractation of his sacramental heresy. For the time his opponents seemed
+satisfied with his expulsion from the University, but in his retirement at
+Lutterworth he was forging during these troubled years the great weapon
+which, wielded by other hands than his own, was to produce so terrible an
+effect on the triumphant hierarchy. An earlier translation of the
+Scriptures, in part of which he was aided by his scholar Herford, was
+being revised and brought to the second form which is better known as
+"Wyclif's Bible" when death drew near. The appeal of the prelates to Rome
+was answered at last by a Brief ordering him to appear at the Papal Court.
+His failing strength exhausted itself in a sarcastic reply which explained
+that his refusal to comply with the summons simply sprang from broken
+health. "I am always glad," ran the ironical answer, "to explain my faith
+to any one, and above all to the Bishop of Rome; for I take it for granted
+that if it be orthodox he will confirm it, if it be erroneous he will
+correct it. I assume too that as chief Vicar of Christ upon earth the
+Bishop of Rome is of all mortal men most bound to the law of Christ's
+Gospel, for among the disciples of Christ a majority is not reckoned by
+simply counting heads in the fashion of this world, but according to the
+imitation of Christ on either side. Now Christ during His life upon earth
+was of all men the poorest, casting from Him all worldly authority. I
+deduce from these premisses as a simple counsel of my own that the Pope
+should surrender all temporal authority to the civil power and advise his
+clergy to do the same." The boldness of his words sprang perhaps from a
+knowledge that his end was near. The terrible strain on energies enfeebled
+by age and study had at last brought its inevitable result, and a stroke
+of paralysis while Wyclif was hearing mass in his parish church of
+Lutterworth was followed on the next day by his death.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Lollard movement]
+
+The persecution of Courtenay deprived the religious reform of its more
+learned adherents and of the support of the Universities. Wyclif's death
+robbed it of its head at a moment when little had been done save a work of
+destruction. From that moment Lollardism ceased to be in any sense an
+organized movement and crumbled into a general spirit of revolt. All the
+religious and social discontent of the times floated instinctively to this
+new centre. The socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener
+spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the
+great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming zealot
+were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common
+resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical
+system. But it was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity
+of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society.
+Women as well as men became the preachers of the new sect. Lollardry had
+its own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from
+hand to hand; scurrilous ballads which revived the old attacks of "Golias"
+in the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy were sung at
+every corner. Nobles like the Earl of Salisbury and at a later time Sir
+John Oldcastle placed themselves openly at the head of the cause and threw
+open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred of
+the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard preacher who
+ventured to advocate the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul's. One
+of its mayors, John of Northampton, showed the influence of the new
+morality by the Puritan spirit in which he dealt with the morals of the
+city. Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of the clergy who
+connived for money at every kind of debauchery, he arrested the loose
+women, cut off their hair, and carted them through the streets as objects
+of public scorn. But the moral spirit of the new movement, though
+infinitely its grander side, was less dangerous to the Church than its open
+repudiation of the older doctrines and systems of Christendom. Out of the
+floating mass of opinion which bore the name of Lollardry one faith
+gradually evolved itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a
+source of religious truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work.
+Scripture, complains a canon of Leicester, "became a vulgar thing, and more
+open to lay folk and women that knew how to read than it is wont to be to
+clerks themselves." Consequences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from
+drawing were boldly drawn by his disciples. The Church was declared to have
+become apostate, its priesthood was denounced as no priesthood, its
+sacraments as idolatry.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Lollardry and the Church]
+
+It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by
+their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage
+and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its
+efforts to make persecution effective. At the moment of the Peasant Revolt
+Courtenay procured the enactment of a statute which commissioned the
+sheriffs to seize all persons convicted before the bishops of preaching
+heresy. But the statute was repealed in the next session, and the Commons
+added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest that they considered
+it "in nowise their interest to be more under the jurisdiction of the
+prelates or more bound by them than their ancestors had been in times
+past." Heresy indeed was still a felony by the common law, and if as yet we
+meet with no instances of the punishment of heretics by the fire it was
+because the threat of such a death was commonly followed by the recantation
+of the Lollard. But the restriction of each bishop's jurisdiction within
+the limits of his own diocese made it impossible to arrest the wandering
+preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil punishment--even if it had
+been sanctioned by public opinion--seems to have long fallen into
+desuetude. Experience proved to the prelates that few sheriffs would arrest
+on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no royal court
+would issue the writ "for the burning of a heretic" on a bishop's
+requisition. But powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purposes
+of repression, they were effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards
+into a bitter fanaticism. The heretics delighted in outraging the religious
+sense of their day. One Lollard gentleman took home the sacramental wafer
+and lunched on it with wine and oysters. Another flung some images of the
+saints into his cellar. The Lollard preachers stirred up riots by the
+virulence of their preaching against the friars. But they directed even
+fiercer invectives against the wealth and secularity of the great
+Churchmen. In a formal petition which was laid before Parliament in 1395
+they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open
+profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and
+image-worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of
+opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be
+declared unchristian and that trades such as those of the goldsmith or the
+armourer, which were contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished
+from the realm. They contended (and it is remarkable that a Parliament of
+the next reign adopted the statement) that from the superfluous revenues of
+the Church, if once they were applied to purposes of general utility, the
+king might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six
+thousand squires, besides endowing a hundred hospitals for the relief of
+the poor.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Disasters of the War]
+
+The distress of the landowners, the general disorganization of the country,
+in every part of which bands of marauders were openly defying the law, the
+panic of the Church and of society at large as the projects of the Lollards
+shaped themselves into more daring and revolutionary forms, added a fresh
+keenness to the national discontent at the languid and inefficient
+prosecution of the war. The junction of the French and Spanish fleets had
+made them masters of the seas, and what fragments were left of Guienne lay
+at their mercy. The royal Council strove to detach the House of Luxemburg
+from, the French alliance by winning for Richard the hand of Anne, a
+daughter of the late Emperor Charles the Fourth who had fled at Crecy, and
+sister of King Wenzel of Bohemia who was now king of the Romans. But the
+marriage remained without political result, save that the Lollard books
+which were sent into their native country by the Bohemian servants of the
+new queen stirred the preaching of John Huss and the Hussite wars. Nor was
+English policy more successful in Flanders. Under Philip van Arteveldt, the
+son of the leader of 1345, the Flemish towns again sought the friendship of
+England against France, but at the close of 1382 the towns were defeated
+and their leader slain in the great French victory of Rosbecque. An
+expedition to Flanders in the following year under the warlike Bishop of
+Norwich turned out a mere plunder-raid and ended in utter failure. A short
+truce only gave France the leisure to prepare a counter-blow by the
+despatch of a small but well-equipped force under John de Vienne to
+Scotland in 1385. Thirty thousand Scots joined in the advance of this force
+over the border: and though northern England rose with a desperate effort
+and an English army penetrated as far as Edinburgh in the hope of bringing
+the foe to battle, it was forced to fall back without an encounter.
+Meanwhile France dealt a more terrible blow in the reduction of Ghent. The
+one remaining market for English commerce was thus closed up, while the
+forces which should have been employed in saving Ghent and in the
+protection of the English shores against the threat of invasion were
+squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone the
+Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary crown which he claimed in his
+wife's right. The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned the
+hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a new sphere of activity
+abroad. To drive him from the realm had been from the close of the Peasant
+Revolt the steady purpose of the councillors who now surrounded the young
+king, of his favourite Robert de Vere and his Chancellor Michael de la
+Pole, who was raised in 1385 to the Earldom of Suffolk. The Duke's friends
+were expelled from office; John of Northampton, the head of his adherents
+among the Commons, was thrown into prison; the Duke himself was charged
+with treason and threatened with arrest. In 1386 John of Gaunt abandoned
+the struggle and sailed for Spain.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Temper of the Court]
+
+Richard himself took part in these measures against the Duke. He was now
+twenty, handsome and golden-haired, with a temper capable of great actions
+and sudden bursts of energy but indolent and unequal. The conception of
+kingship in which he had been reared made him regard the constitutional
+advance which had gone on during the war as an invasion of the rights of
+his Crown. He looked on the nomination of the royal Council and the great
+officers of state by the two Houses or the supervision of the royal
+expenditure by the Commons as Infringements on the prerogative which only
+the pressure of the war and the weakness of a minority had forced the Crown
+to bow to. The judgement of his councillors was one with that of the king.
+Vere was no mere royal favourite; he was a great noble and of ancient
+lineage. Michael de la Pole was a man of large fortune and an old servant
+of the Crown; he had taken part in the war for thirty years, and had been
+admiral and captain of Calais. But neither were men to counsel the young
+king wisely in his effort to obtain independence at once of Parliament and
+of the great nobles. His first aim had been to break the pressure of the
+royal house itself, and in his encounter with John of Gaunt he had proved
+successful. But the departure of the Duke of Lancaster only called to the
+front his brother and his son. Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester,
+had inherited much of the lands and the influence of the old house of
+Bohun. Round Henry, Earl of Derby, the son of John of Gaunt by Blanche of
+Lancaster, the old Lancastrian party of constitutional opposition was once
+more forming itself. The favour shown to the followers of Wyclif at the
+Court threw on the side of this new opposition the bulk of the bishops and
+Churchmen. Richard himself showed no sympathy with the Lollards, but the
+action of her Bohemian servants shows the tendencies of his queen. Three
+members of the royal Council were patrons of the Lollards, and the Earl of
+Salisbury, a favourite with the king, was their avowed head. The Commons
+displayed no hostility to the Lollards nor any zeal for the Church; but the
+lukewarm prosecution of the war, the profuse expenditure of the Court, and
+above all the manifest will of the king to free himself from Parliamentary
+control, estranged the Lower House. Richard's haughty words told their own
+tale. When the Parliament of 1385 called for an enquiry every year into the
+royal household, the king replied he would enquire when he pleased. When it
+prayed to know the names of the officers of state, he answered that he
+would change them at his will.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Lords Appellant]
+
+The burthen of such answers and of the policy they revealed fell on the
+royal councillors, and the departure of John of Gaunt forced the new
+opposition into vigorous action. The Parliament of 1386 called for the
+removal of Suffolk. Richard replied that he would not for such a prayer
+dismiss a turnspit of his kitchen. The Duke of Gloucester and Bishop
+Arundel of Ely were sent by the Houses as their envoys, and warned the king
+that should a ruler refuse to govern with the advice of his lords and by
+mad counsels work out his private purposes it was lawful to depose him. The
+threat secured Suffolk's removal; he was impeached for corruption and
+maladministration, and condemned to forfeiture and imprisonment. It was
+only by submitting to the nomination of a Continual Council, with the Duke
+of Gloucester at its head, that Richard could obtain a grant of subsidies.
+But the Houses were no sooner broken up than Suffolk was released, and in
+1387 the young king rode through the country calling on the sheriffs to
+raise men against the barons, and bidding them suffer no knight of the
+shire to be returned for the next Parliament "save one whom the King and
+his Council chose." The general ill-will foiled both his efforts: and he
+was forced to take refuge in an opinion of five of the judges that the
+Continual Council was unlawful, the sentence on Suffolk erroneous, and that
+the Lords and Commons had no power to remove a king's servant. Gloucester
+answered the challenge by taking up arms, and a general refusal to fight
+for the king forced Richard once more to yield. A terrible vengeance was
+taken on his supporters in the recent schemes. In the Parliament of 1388
+Gloucester, with the four Earls of Derby, Arundel, Warwick, and Nottingham,
+appealed on a charge of high treason Suffolk and De Vere, the Archbishop of
+York, the Chief Justice Tresilian, and Sir Nicholas Bramber. The first two
+fled, Suffolk to France, De Vere after a skirmish at Radcot Bridge to
+Ireland; but the Archbishop was deprived of his see, Bramber beheaded, and
+Tresilian hanged. The five judges were banished, and Sir Simon Burley with
+three other members of the royal household sent to the block.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's Rule]
+
+At the prayer of the "Wonderful Parliament," as some called this assembly,
+or as others with more justice "The Merciless Parliament," it was provided
+that all officers of state should henceforth be named in Parliament or by
+the Continual Council. Gloucester remained at the head of the latter body,
+but his power lasted hardly a year. In May 1389 Richard found himself
+strong enough to break down the government by a word. Entering the Council
+he suddenly asked his uncle how old he was. "Your highness," answered
+Gloucester, "is in your twenty-fourth year!" "Then I am old enough to
+manage my own affairs," said Richard coolly; "I have been longer under
+guardianship than any ward in my realm. I thank you for your past services,
+my lords, but I need them no more." The resolution was welcomed by the
+whole country; and Richard justified the country's hopes by wielding his
+new power with singular wisdom and success. He refused to recall De Vere or
+the five judges. The intercession of John of Gaunt on his return from Spain
+brought about a full reconciliation with the Lords Appellant. A truce was
+concluded with France, and its renewal year after year enabled the king to
+lighten the burthen of taxation. Richard announced his purpose to govern by
+advice of Parliament; he soon restored the Lords Appellant to his Council,
+and committed the chief offices of state to great Churchmen like Wykeham
+and Arundel. A series of statutes showed the activity of the Houses. A
+Statute of Provisors which re-enacted those of Edward the Third was passed
+in 1390; the Statute of Praemunire, which punished the obtaining of bulls
+or other instruments from Rome with forfeiture, in 1393. The lords were
+bridled anew by a Statute of Maintenance, which forbade their violently
+supporting other men's causes in courts of justice, and giving "livery" to
+a host of retainers. The Statute of Uses in 1391, which rendered illegal
+the devices which had been invented to frustrate that of Mortmain, showed
+the same resolve to deal firmly with the Church. A reform of the staple and
+other mercantile enactments proved the king's care for trade. Throughout
+the legislation of these eight years we see the same tone of coolness and
+moderation. Eager as he was to win the good-will of the Parliament and the
+Church, Richard refused to bow to the panic of the landowners or to second
+the persecution of the priesthood. The demands of the Parliament that
+education should be denied to the sons of villeins was refused. Lollardry
+as a social danger was held firmly at bay, and in 1387 the king ordered
+Lollard books to be seized and brought before the Council. But the royal
+officers showed little zeal in aiding the bishops to seize or punish the
+heretical teachers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: French and English]
+
+It was in the period of peace which was won for the country by the wisdom
+and decision of its young king that England listened to the voice of her
+first great singer. The work of Chaucer marks the final settlement of the
+English tongue. The close of the great movement towards national unity
+which had been going on ever since the Conquest was shown in the middle of
+the fourteenth century by the disuse, even amongst the nobler classes, of
+the French tongue. In spite of the efforts of the grammar schools and of
+the strength of fashion English won its way throughout the reign of Edward
+the Third to its final triumph in that of his grandson. It was ordered to
+be used in courts of law in 1362 "because the French tongue is much
+unknown," and in the following year it was employed by the Chancellor in
+opening Parliament. Bishops began to preach in English, and the English
+tracts of Wyclif made it once more a literary tongue. We see the general
+advance in two passages from writers of Edward's and Richard's reigns.
+"Children in school," says Higden, a writer of the first period, "against
+the usage and manner of all other nations be compelled for to leave their
+own language and for to construe their lessons and their things in French,
+and so they have since the Normans first came into England. Also
+gentlemen's children be taught for to speak French from the time that they
+be rocked in their cradle, and know how to speak and play with a child's
+toy; and uplandish (or country) men will liken themselves to gentlemen, and
+strive with, great busyness to speak French for to be more told of." "This
+manner," adds John of Trevisa, Higden's translator in Richard's time, "was
+much used before the first murrain (the Black Death of 1349), and is since
+somewhat changed. For John Cornwal, a master of grammar, changed the lore
+in grammar school and construing of French into English; and Richard
+Pencrych learned this manner of teaching of him, as other men did of
+Pencrych. So that now, the year of our Lord 1385 and of the second King
+Richard after the Conquest nine, in all the grammar schools of England
+children leaveth French, and construeth and learneth in English. Also
+gentlemen have now much left for to teach their children French."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Chaucer]
+
+This drift towards a general use of the national tongue told powerfully on
+literature. The influence of the French romances everywhere tended to make
+French the one literary language at the opening of the fourteenth century,
+and in England this influence had been backed by the French tone of the
+court of Henry the Third and the three Edwards. But at the close of the
+reign of Edward the Third the long French romances needed to be translated
+even for knightly hearers. "Let clerks indite in Latin," says the author of
+the "Testament of Love," "and let Frenchmen in their French also indite
+their quaint terms, for it is kindly to their mouths; and let us show our
+fantasies in such wordes as we learned of our mother's tongue." But the new
+national life afforded nobler materials than "fantasies" now for English
+literature. With the completion of the work of national unity had come the
+completion of the work of national freedom. The vigour of English life
+showed itself in the wide extension of commerce, in the progress of the
+towns, and the upgrowth of a free yeomanry. It gave even nobler signs of
+its activity in the spirit of national independence and moral earnestness
+which awoke at the call of Wyclif. New forces of thought and feeling which
+were destined to tell on every age of our later history broke their way
+through the crust of feudalism in the socialist revolt of the Lollards, and
+a sudden burst of military glory threw its glamour over the age of Crecy
+and Poitiers. It is this new gladness of a great people which utters itself
+in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was born about 1340, the son of a
+London vintner who lived in Thames Street; and it was in London that the
+bulk of his life was spent. His family, though not noble, seems to have
+been of some importance, for from the opening of his career we find Chaucer
+in close connexion with the Court. At sixteen he was made page to the wife
+of Lionel of Clarence; at nineteen he first bore arms in the campaign of
+1359. But he was luckless enough to be made prisoner; and from the time of
+his release after the treaty of Bretigny he took no further share in the
+military enterprises of his time. He seems again to have returned to
+service about the Court, and it was now that his first poems made their
+appearance, the "Compleynte to Pity" in 1368, and in 1369 the "Death of
+Blanch the Duchesse," the wife of John of Gaunt who from this time at least
+may be looked upon as his patron. It may have been to John's influence that
+he owed his employment in seven diplomatic missions which were probably
+connected with the financial straits of the Crown. Three of these, in 1372,
+1374, and 1378, carried him to Italy. He visited Genoa and the brilliant
+court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the memory of Dante, the
+"great master" whom he commemorates so reverently in his verse, was still
+living, he may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of
+Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from the lips of
+Petrarca.
+
+
+[Sidenote: His Early Poems]
+
+It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer whom we know. From
+that hour his work stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic literature
+from the heart of which it sprang. The long French romances were the
+product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent curiosity, of a fanciful
+and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the great passions which gave life to the
+Middle Ages, that of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into the conceits
+of Mariolatry, that of war into the extravagances of Chivalry. Love indeed
+remained; it was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a
+love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of
+sensuous enjoyment--a plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to
+reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved
+through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the
+lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay
+avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life: life
+was too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of
+interest and gaiety and chat. It was an age of talk: "mirth is none," says
+Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur
+aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances,
+his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and
+fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about
+their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the
+vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world.
+
+It was with this literature that Chaucer had till now been familiar, and it
+was this which he followed in his earlier work. But from the time of his
+visits to Milan and Genoa his sympathies drew him not to the dying verse of
+France but to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry in Italy. Dante's eagle
+looks at him from the sun. "Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him
+one "whose rethorique sweete enlumyned al Itail of poetrie." The "Troilus"
+which he produced about 1382 is an enlarged English version of Boccaccio's
+"Filostrato"; the Knight's Tale, whose first draft is of the same period,
+bears slight traces of his Teseide. It was indeed the "Decameron" which
+suggested the very form of the "Canterbury Tales," the earliest of which,
+such as those of the Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress, the
+Franklin, and the Squire, may probably be referred like the Parliament of
+Foules and the House of Fame to this time of Chaucer's life. But even while
+changing, as it were, the front of English poetry Chaucer preserves his own
+distinct personality. If he quizzes in the rime of Sir Thopaz the wearisome
+idleness of the French romance he retains all that was worth retaining of
+the French temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its lightness and
+brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its gaiety and good humour, its
+critical coolness and self-control. The French wit quickens in him more
+than in any English writer the sturdy sense and shrewdness of our national
+disposition, corrects its extravagance, and relieves its somewhat ponderous
+morality. If on the other hand he echoes the joyous carelessness of the
+Italian tale, he tempers it with the English seriousness. As he follows
+Boccaccio all his changes are on the side of purity; and when the Troilus
+of the Florentine ends with the old sneer at the changeableness of woman
+Chaucer bids us "look Godward," and dwells on the unchangeableness of
+Heaven.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Canterbury Tales]
+
+The genius of Chaucer however was neither French nor Italian, whatever
+element it might borrow from either literature, but English to the core;
+and from the year 1384 all trace of foreign influence dies away. Chaucer
+had now reached the climax of his poetic power. He was a busy, practical
+worker, Comptroller of the Customs in 1374, of the Petty Customs in 1382, a
+member of the Commons in the Parliament of 1386. The fall of the Duke of
+Lancaster from power may have deprived him of employment for a time, but
+from 1389 to 1391 he was Clerk of the Royal Works, busy with repairs and
+building at Westminster, Windsor, and the Tower. His air indeed was that of
+a student rather than of a man of the world. A single portrait has
+preserved for us his forked beard, his dark-coloured dress, the knife and
+pen-case at his girdle, and we may supplement this portrait by a few vivid
+touches of his own. The sly, elvish face, the quick walk, the plump figure
+and portly waist were those of a genial and humorous man; but men jested at
+his silence, his abstraction, his love of study. "Thou lookest as thou
+wouldest find an hare," laughs the host, "and ever on the ground I see thee
+stare." He heard little of his neighbours' talk when office work in Thames
+Street was over. "Thou goest home to thy own house anon, and also dumb as
+any stone thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy look, and
+livest thus as an heremite, although," he adds slyly, "thy abstinence is
+lite," or little. But of this seeming abstraction from the world about him
+there is not a trace in Chaucer's verse. We see there how keen his
+observation was, how vivid and intense his sympathy with nature and the men
+among whom he moved. "Farewell, my book," he cried as spring came after
+winter and the lark's song roused him at dawn to spend hours gazing alone
+on the daisy whose beauty he sang. But field and stream and flower and
+bird, much as he loved them, were less to him than man. No poetry was over
+more human than Chaucer's, none ever came more frankly and genially home to
+men than his "Canterbury Tales."
+
+It was the continuation and revision of this work which mainly occupied him
+during the years from 1384 to 1391. Its best stories, those of the Miller,
+the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun,
+the Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as well as the
+Prologue. The framework which Chaucer chose--that of a pilgrimage from
+London to Canterbury--not only enabled him to string these tales together,
+but lent itself admirably to the peculiar characteristics of his poetic
+temper, his dramatic versatility and the universality of his sympathy. His
+tales cover the whole field of mediaeval poetry; the legend of the priest,
+the knightly romance, the wonder-tale of the traveller, the broad humour of
+the fabliau, allegory and apologue, all are there. He finds a yet wider
+scope for his genius in the persons who tell these stories, the thirty
+pilgrims who start in the May morning from the Tabard in Southwark--thirty
+distinct figures, representatives of every class of English society from
+the noble to the ploughman. We see the "verray perfight gentil knight" in
+cassock and coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as
+the May morning, and behind them the brown-faced yeoman in his coat and
+hood of green with a mighty bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics light
+up for us the mediaeval church--the brawny hunt-loving monk, whose bridle
+jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-bell--the wanton friar, first among
+the beggars and harpers of the country-side--the poor parson, threadbare,
+learned, and devout, ("Christ's lore and his apostles twelve he taught, and
+first he followed it himself")--the summoner with his fiery face--the
+pardoner with his wallet "bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"--the
+lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth,
+and "Amor vincit omnia" graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the
+portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the
+pestilence--the busy serjeant-of-law, "that ever seemed busier than he
+was"--the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his love of books and short
+sharp sentences that disguise a latent tenderness which breaks out at last
+in the story of Griseldis. Around them crowd types of English industry: the
+merchant; the franklin in whose house "it snowed of meat and drink"; the
+sailor fresh from frays in the Channel; the buxom wife of Bath; the
+broad-shouldered miller; the haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer,
+tapestry-maker, each in the livery of his craft; and last the honest
+ploughman who would dyke and delve for the poor without hire. It is the
+first time in English poetry that we are brought face to face not with
+characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, but with living and
+breathing men, men distinct in temper and sentiment as in face or costume
+or mode of speech; and with this distinctness of each maintained throughout
+the story by a thousand shades of expression and action. It is the first
+time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each
+character but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each
+tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it but fuses all into a
+poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity,
+which surrounds us in the "Canterbury Tales." In some of the stories
+indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the
+tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a
+whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action.
+Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel--a
+training not of books but of life. And it is life that he loves--the
+delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its
+tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of
+the miller and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart, this wide
+tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as none but Shakspere
+has ever reflected him, and to do this with a pathos, a shrewd sense and
+kindly humour, a freshness and joyousness of feeling, that even Shakspere
+has not surpassed.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The French Marriage]
+
+The last ten years of Chaucer's life saw a few more tales added to the
+Pilgrimage and a few poems to his work; but his power was lessening, and in
+1400 he rested from his labours in his last home, a house in the garden of
+St. Mary's Chapel at Westminster. His body rests within the Abbey church.
+It was strange that such a voice should have awakened no echo in the
+singers that follow, but the first burst of English song died as suddenly
+in Chaucer as the hope and glory of his age. He died indeed at the moment
+of a revolution which was the prelude to years of national discord and
+national suffering. Whatever may have been the grounds of his action, the
+rule of Richard the Second after his assumption of power had shown his
+capacity for self-restraint. Parted by his own will from the counsellors of
+his youth, calling to his service the Lords Appellant, reconciled alike
+with the baronage and the Parliament, the young king promised to be among
+the noblest and wisest rulers that England had seen. But the violent and
+haughty temper which underlay this self-command showed itself from time to
+time. The Earl of Arundel and his brother the bishop stood in the front
+rank of the party which had coerced Richard in his early days; their
+influence was great in the new government. But a strife between the Earl
+and John of Gaunt revived the king's resentment at the past action of this
+house; and at the funeral of Anne of Bohemia in 1394 a fancied slight
+roused Richard to a burst of passion. He struck the Earl so violently that
+the blow drew blood. But the quarrel was patched up, and the reconciliation
+was followed by the elevation of Bishop Arundel to the vacant Primacy in
+1396. In the preceding year Richard had crossed to Ireland and in a short
+autumn campaign reduced its native chiefs again to submission. Fears of
+Lollard disturbances soon recalled him, but these died at the king's
+presence, and Richard was able to devote himself to the negotiation of a
+marriage which was to be the turning-point of his reign. His policy
+throughout the recent years had been a policy of peace. It was war which
+rendered the Crown helpless before the Parliament, and peace was needful if
+the work of constant progress was not to be undone. But the short truces,
+renewed from time to time, which he had as yet secured were insufficient
+for this purpose, for so long as war might break out in the coming year the
+king hands were tied. The impossibility of renouncing the claim to the
+French crown indeed made a formal peace impossible, but its ends might be
+secured by a lengthened truce, and it was with a view to this that Richard
+in 1396 wedded Isabella, the daughter of Charles the Sixth of France. The
+bride was a mere child, but she brought with her a renewal of the truce for
+five-and-twenty years.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Change of Richard's temper]
+
+The match was hardly concluded when the veil under which Richard had
+shrouded his real temper began to be dropped. His craving for absolute
+power, such as he witnessed in the Court of France, was probably
+intensified from this moment by a mental disturbance which gathered
+strength as the months went on. As if to preclude any revival of the war
+Richard had surrendered Cherbourg to the king of Navarre and now gave back
+Brest to the Duke of Britanny. He was said to have pledged himself at his
+wedding to restore Calais to the king of France. But once freed from all
+danger of such a struggle the whole character of his rule seemed to change.
+His court became as crowded and profuse as his grandfather's. Money was
+recklessly borrowed and as recklessly squandered. The king's pride became
+insane, and it was fed with dreams of winning the Imperial crown through
+the deposition of Wenzel of Bohemia. The councillors with whom he had acted
+since his resumption of authority saw themselves powerless. John of Gaunt
+indeed still retained influence over the king. It was the support of the
+Duke of Lancaster after his return from his Spanish campaign which had
+enabled Richard to hold in check the Duke of Gloucester and the party that
+he led; and the anxiety of the young king to retain this support was seen
+in his grant of Aquitaine to his uncle, and in the legitimation of the
+Beauforts, John's children by a mistress, Catherine Swinford, whom he
+married after the death of his second wife. The friendship of the Duke
+brought with it the adhesion of one even more important, his son Henry, the
+Earl of Derby. As heir through his mother, Blanche of Lancaster, to the
+estates and influence of the Lancastrian house, Henry was the natural head
+of a constitutional opposition, and his weight was increased by a marriage
+with the heiress of the house of Bohun. He had taken a prominent part in
+the overthrow of Suffolk and De Vere, and on the king's resumption of power
+he had prudently withdrawn from the realm on a vow of Crusade, had touched
+at Barbary, visited the Holy Sepulchre, and in 1390 sailed for Dantzig and
+taken part in a campaign against the heathen Prussians with the Teutonic
+Knights. Since his return he had silently followed in his father's track.
+But the counsels of John of Gaunt were hardly wiser than of old; Arundel
+had already denounced his influence as a hurtful one; and in the events
+which were now to hurry quickly on he seems to have gone hand in hand with
+the king.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's Tyranny]
+
+A new uneasiness was seen in the Parliament of 1397, and the Commons prayed
+for a redress of the profusion of the Court. Richard at once seized on the
+opportunity for a struggle. He declared himself grieved that his subjects
+should "take on themselves any ordinance or governance of the person of the
+King or his hostel or of any persons of estate whom he might be pleased to
+have in his company." The Commons were at once overawed; they owned that
+the cognizance of such matters belonged wholly to the king, and gave up to
+the Duke of Lancaster the name of the member, Sir Thomas Haxey, who had
+brought forward this article of their prayer. The lords pronounced him a
+traitor, and his life was only saved by the fact that he was a clergyman
+and by the interposition of Archbishop Arundel. The Earl of Arundel and the
+Duke of Gloucester at once withdrew from Court. They stood almost alone,
+for of the royal house the Dukes of Lancaster and York with their sons the
+Earls of Derby and Rutland were now with the king, and the old coadjutor of
+Gloucester, the Earl of Nottingham, was in high favour with him. The Earl
+of Warwick alone joined them, and he was included in a charge of conspiracy
+which was followed by the arrest of the three. A fresh Parliament in
+September was packed with royal partizans, and Richard moved boldly to his
+end. The pardons of the Lords Appellant were revoked. Archbishop Arundel
+was impeached and banished from the realm, he was transferred by the Pope
+to the See of St. Andrews, and the Primacy given to Roger Walden. The Earl
+of Arundel, accused before the Peers under John of Gaunt as High Steward,
+was condemned and executed in a single day. Warwick, who owned the truth of
+the charge, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. The Duke of Gloucester
+was saved from a trial by a sudden death in his prison at Calais. A new
+Parliament at Shrewsbury in the opening of 1398 completed the king's work.
+In three days it declared null the proceedings of the Parliament of 1388,
+granted to the king a subsidy on wool and leather for his life, and
+delegated its authority to a standing committee of eighteen members from
+both Houses with power to continue their sittings even after the
+dissolution of the Parliament and to "examine and determine all matters and
+subjects which had been moved in the presence of the king with all the
+dependencies thereof."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry of Lancaster]
+
+In a single year the whole colour of Richard's government had changed. He
+had revenged himself on the men who had once held him down, and his revenge
+was hardly taken before he disclosed a plan of absolute government. He had
+used the Parliament to strike down the Primate as well as the greatest
+nobles of the realm and to give him a revenue for life which enabled him to
+get rid of Parliament itself, for the Permanent Committee which it named
+were men devoted, as Richard held, to his cause. John of Gaunt was at its
+head, and the rest of its lords were those who had backed the king in his
+blow at Gloucester and the Arundels. Two however were excluded. In the
+general distribution of rewards which followed Gloucester's overthrow the
+Earl of Derby had been made Duke of Hereford, the Earl of Nottingham Duke
+of Norfolk. But at the close of 1397 the two Dukes charged each other with
+treasonable talk as they rode between Brentford and London, and the
+Permanent Committee ordered the matter to be settled by a single combat. In
+September 1398 the Dukes entered the lists; but Richard forbade the duel,
+sentenced the Duke of Norfolk to banishment for life, and Henry of
+Lancaster to exile for ten years. As Henry left London the streets were
+crowded with people weeping for his fate; some followed him even to the
+coast. But his withdrawal removed the last check on Richard's despotism. He
+forced from every tenant of the Crown an oath to recognize the acts of his
+Committee as valid, and to oppose any attempts to alter or revoke them.
+Forced loans, the sale of charters of pardon to Gloucester's adherents, the
+outlawry of seven counties at once on the plea that they had supported his
+enemies and must purchase pardon, a reckless interference with the course
+of justice, roused into new life the old discontent. Even this might have
+been defied had not Richard set an able and unscrupulous leader at its
+head. Leave had been given to Henry of Lancaster to receive his father's
+inheritance on the death of John of Gaunt, in February 1399. But an
+ordinance of the Continual Committee annulled this permission and Richard
+seized the Lancastrian estates. Archbishop Arundel at once saw the chance
+of dealing blow for blow. He hastened to Paris and pressed the Duke to
+return to England, telling him how all men there looked for it, "especially
+the Londoners, who loved him a hundred times more than they did the king."
+For a while Henry remained buried in thought, "leaning on a window
+overlooking a garden"; but Arundel's pressure at last prevailed, he made
+his way secretly to Britanny, and with fifteen knights set sail from
+Vannes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Ireland and the Pale]
+
+What had really decided him was the opportunity offered by Richard's
+absence from the realm. From the opening of his reign the king's attention
+had been constantly drawn to his dependent lordship of Ireland. More than
+two hundred years had passed away since the troubles which followed the
+murder of Archbishop Thomas forced Henry the Second to leave his work of
+conquest unfinished, and the opportunity for a complete reduction of the
+island which had been lost then had never returned. When Henry quitted
+Ireland indeed Leinster was wholly in English hands, Connaught bowed to a
+nominal acknowledgement of the English overlordship, and for a while the
+work of conquest seemed to go steadily on. John de Courcy penetrated into
+Ulster and established himself at Downpatrick; and Henry planned the
+establishment of his youngest son, John, as Lord of Ireland. But the levity
+of the young prince, who mocked the rude dresses of the native chieftains
+and plucked them in insult by the beard, soon forced his father to recall
+him; and in the continental struggle which soon opened on the Angevin
+kings, as in the constitutional struggle within England itself which
+followed it, all serious purpose of completing the conquest of Ireland was
+forgotten. Nothing indeed but the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes
+enabled the adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford,
+Waterford, and Cork, which formed what was thenceforth known as "the
+English Pale." In all the history of Ireland no event has proved more
+disastrous than this half-finished conquest. Had the Irish driven their
+invaders into the sea, or the English succeeded in the complete reduction
+of the island, the misery of its after ages might have been avoided. A
+struggle such as that in which Scotland drove out its conquerors might have
+produced a spirit of patriotism and national union which would have formed
+a people out of the mass of warring clans. A conquest such as that in which
+the Normans made England their own would have spread at any rate the law,
+the order, the civilization of the conquering country over the length and
+breadth of the conquered. Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to effect its
+entire deliverance, was strong enough to hold its assailants partially at
+bay. The country was broken into two halves whose conflict has never
+ceased. So far from either giving elements of civilization or good
+government to the other, conqueror and conquered reaped only degradation
+from the ceaseless conflict. The native tribes lost whatever tendency to
+union or social progress had survived the invasion of the Danes. Their
+barbarism was intensified by their hatred of the more civilized intruders.
+But these intruders themselves, penned within the narrow limits of the
+Pale, brutalized by a merciless conflict, cut off from contact with the
+refining influences of a larger world, sank rapidly to the level of the
+barbarism about them: and the lawlessness, the ferocity, the narrowness of
+feudalism broke out unchecked in this horde of adventurers who held the
+land by their sword.
+
+
+[Sidenote: English and Irish]
+
+From the first the story of the English Pale was a story of degradation and
+anarchy. It needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army stormed its
+strongholds and drove its leading barons into exile, to preserve even their
+fealty to the English Crown. John divided the Pale into counties and
+ordered the observance of the English law; but the departure of his army
+was the signal for a return of the disorder he had trampled under foot.
+Between Englishmen and Irishmen went on a ceaseless and pitiless war. Every
+Irishman without the Pale was counted by the English settlers an enemy and
+a robber whose murder found no cognizance or punishment at the hands of the
+law. Half the subsistence of the English barons was drawn from forays
+across the border, and these forays were avenged by incursions of native
+marauders which carried havoc at times to the very walls of Dublin. Within
+the Pale itself the misery was hardly less. The English settlers were
+harried and oppressed by their own baronage as much as by the Irish
+marauders, while the feuds of the English lords wasted their strength and
+prevented any effective combination either for common conquest or common
+defence. So utter seemed their weakness that Robert Bruce saw in it an
+opportunity for a counter-blow at his English assailants, and his victory
+at Bannockburn was followed up by the despatch of a Scotch force to Ireland
+with his brother Edward at its head. A general rising of the Irish welcomed
+this deliverer; but the danger drove the barons of the Pale to a momentary
+union, and in 1316 their valour was proved on the bloody field of Athenree
+by the slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes and the almost complete
+annihilation of the sept of the O'Connors. But with victory returned the
+old anarchy and degradation. The barons of the Pale sank more and more into
+Irish chieftains. The Fitz-Maurices, who became Earls of Desmond and whose
+vast territory in Minister was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the
+dress and manners of the natives around them. The rapid growth of this evil
+was seen in the ruthless provisions by which Edward the Third strove to
+check it in his Statute of Kilkenny. The Statute forbade the adoption of
+the Irish language or name or dress by any man of English blood: it
+enforced within the Pale the exclusive use of English law, and made the use
+of the native or Brehon law, which was gaining ground, an act of treason;
+it made treasonable any marriage of the Englishry with persons of Irish
+race, or any adoption of English children by Irish foster-fathers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard in Ireland]
+
+But stern as they were these provisions proved fruitless to check the
+fusion of the two races, while the growing independence of the Lords of the
+Pale threw off all but the semblance of obedience to the English
+government. It was this which stirred Richard to a serious effort for the
+conquest and organization of the island. In 1386 he granted the "entire
+dominion" of Ireland with the title of its Duke to Robert de Vere on
+condition of his carrying out its utter reduction. But the troubles of the
+reign soon recalled De Vere, and it was not till the truce with France had
+freed his hands that the king again took up his projects of conquest. In
+1394 he landed with an army at Waterford, and received the general
+submission of the native chieftains. But the Lords of the Pale held
+sullenly aloof; and Richard had no sooner quitted the island than the Irish
+in turn refused to carry out their promise of quitting Leinster, and
+engaged in a fresh contest with the Earl of March, whom the king had
+proclaimed as his heir and left behind him as his lieutenant in Ireland. In
+the summer of 1398 March was beaten and slain in battle: and Richard
+resolved to avenge his cousin's death and complete the work he had begun by
+a fresh invasion. He felt no apprehension of danger. At home his triumph
+seemed complete. The death of Norfolk, the exile of Henry of Lancaster,
+left the baronage without heads for any rising. He ensured, as he believed,
+the loyalty of the great houses by the hostages of their blood whom he
+carried with him, at whose head was Henry of Lancaster's son, the future
+Henry the Fifth. The refusal of the Percies, the Earl of Northumberland and
+his son Henry Percy or Hotspur, to obey his summons might have warned him
+that danger was brewing in the north. Richard however took little heed. He
+banished the Percies, who withdrew into Scotland; and sailed for Ireland at
+the end of May, leaving his uncle the Duke of York regent in his stead.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Landing of Henry]
+
+The opening of his campaign was indecisive, and it was not till fresh
+reinforcements arrived at Dublin that the king could prepare for a march
+into the heart of the island. But while he planned the conquest of Ireland
+the news came that England was lost. Little more than a month had passed
+after his departure when Henry of Lancaster entered the Humber and landed
+at Ravenspur. He came, he said, to claim his heritage; and three of his
+Yorkshire castles at once threw open their gates. The two great houses of
+the north joined him at once. Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, had
+married his half-sister; the Percies came from their exile over the
+Scottish border. As he pushed quickly to the south all resistance broke
+down. The army which the Regent gathered refused to do hurt to the Duke;
+London called him to her gates; and the royal Council could only march
+hastily on Bristol in the hope of securing that port for the King's return.
+But the town at once yielded to Henry's summons, the Regent submitted to
+him, and with an army which grew at every step the Duke marched upon
+Cheshire, where Richard's adherents were gathering in arms to meet the
+king. Contrary winds had for a while kept Richard ignorant of his cousin's
+progress, and even when the news reached him he was in a web of treachery.
+The Duke of Albemarle, the son of the Regent Duke of York, was beside him,
+and at his persuasion the King abandoned his first purpose of returning at
+once, and sent the Earl of Salisbury to Conway while he himself waited to
+gather his army and fleet. The six days he proposed to gather them in
+became sixteen, and the delay proved fatal to his cause. As no news came of
+Richard the Welshmen who flocked to Salisbury's camp dispersed on Henry's
+advance to Chester. Henry was in fact master of the realm at the opening of
+August when Richard at last sailed from Waterford and landed at Milford
+Haven.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's capture]
+
+Every road was blocked, and the news that all was lost told on the thirty
+thousand men he brought with him. In a single day but six thousand
+remained, and even these dispersed when it was found that the King had
+ridden off disguised as a friar to join the force which he believed to be
+awaiting him in North Wales with Salisbury at its head. He reached
+Caernarvon only to find this force already disbanded, and throwing himself
+into the castle despatched his kinsmen, the Dukes of Exeter and Surrey, to
+Chester to negotiate with Henry of Lancaster. But they were detained there
+while the Earl of Northumberland pushed forward with a picked body of men,
+and securing the castles of the coast at last sought an interview with
+Richard at Conway. The King's confidence was still unbroken. He threatened
+to raise a force of Welshmen and to put Lancaster to death. Deserted as he
+was indeed, a King was in himself a power, and only the treacherous pledges
+of the Earl induced him to set aside his plans for a reconciliation to be
+brought about in Parliament and to move from Conway on the promise of a
+conference with Henry at Flint. But he had no sooner reached the town than
+he found himself surrounded by Lancaster's forces. "I am betrayed," he
+cried, as the view of his enemies burst on him from the hill; "there are
+pennons and banners in the valley." But it was too late for retreat.
+Richard was seized and brought before his cousin. "I am come before my
+time," said Lancaster, "but I will show you the reason. Your people, my
+lord, complain that for the space of twenty years you have ruled them
+harshly: however, if it please God, I will help you to rule them better."
+"Fair cousin," replied the King, "since it pleases you, it pleases me
+well." Then, breaking in private into passionate regrets that he had ever
+spared his cousin's life, he suffered himself to be carried a prisoner
+along the road to London.
+
+END OF VOL. II.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME II (OF 8)***
+
+
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