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History of the English People, Volume II

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Title: History of the English People, Volume II

Author: John Richard Green


        
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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 a

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