Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/349

A.D. 1307.] a certain number of their order in each county to represent their whole body; hence our knights of shires. Edward established this as a fixed and uniform practice, and he wont further. He had been obliged, for his expedition into Poitou and the repression of the Welsh, to levy no less than a sixth of all the movables from the laity, and a moiety of all ecclesiastical benefices. He saw clearly this necessity must often recur if he prosecuted his great designs of national aggrandisement, and he resolved to summon the representatives of all the boroughs to Parliament. Here, then, we have the origin of our House of Commons; and we come, in this fact, upon one of the greatest epochs in our national history. This great event took place in the year 1295, in the twenty-third year of Edwards I.'s reign, and is a date that should be for ever memorable.

The words of the preamble of the writ, by which this new power in the state was called into existence, are truly remarkable, and indicate a principle of liberal equity in the mind of the king worthy of a British monarch. "It is a most equitable rule," says this document, "that what concerns all should be approved of by all, and common dangers be repelled by united efforts."

But no party whatever had at the time the slightest idea of the unparalleled importance of this innovation; of what a tree lay in this small acorn of popular life; what a colossus in this constitutional embryo. The king, with all his sagacity, did not grasp it in its full Titanic bulk and multiplicity of bearing; he was looking rather at his own necessities. The barons certainly did not, or they would have opposed it with all their power. Least of all did the people themselves comprehend the act which was calling them from the borders of serfdom to become the ruling power in the nations, the artificers and foster-fathers of the world's civillisation. It was to them the new birth from slavery, degradation, and contempt, into life, liberty, and greatness. Yet they shrank from it as a burdensome imposition, a repulsive duty. The people who resided in the country under the great barons still were treated as a very inferior class, and with much of that haughty rudeness and injustice which marked the earlier ages of Norman feudality. Those who had escaped into towns, and devoted themselves to trade, had acquired many privileges in comparison with those who still tilled the soil. They were endowed with liberty to trade; boroughs wore erected by royal patent, in which they were empowered to farm their own tolls and customs, to elect their own magistrates, and were freed from any attendance on the sheriffs or county courts. But they still bore about with them the traces of the iron of serfdom, which for so many ages had entered into their souls. They were rude in dress, in manners, and little enlightened on matters beyond their own immediate sphere. The people of London, as was seen when Edward attempted to impose on them in regard to the charter, were much in advance of the inhabitants of other towns, who retained a deep sense of their own humility, and a dread of the feudal lords.

When, therefore, representatives were called for from their body to attend Parliament, every one shrank from the appointment. They heard with consternation of their election; and it was found necessary, says Brady, in his "History of Boroughs," for the aldermen and councils of the towns to take sureties from these deputies of the people for their due attendance. To them a journey to London at that day was a most formidable enterprise, both from the perils and toils of the way and the great expense. Their charges were therefore borne by the respective corporations. They had so little idea of the honour or benefit of appearing as legislators, that they regarded the function as destitute of both profit and repute. They knew that they should be looked on with scorn, if not direct insult, by the great lords with whom they had to assemble. And, in fact, these proud men, both barons and knights, disdained to mix with so mean a throng as they regarded them. They compelled them to sit apart; and these unhonoured legislators were glad to hasten away and get them home again the moment they had voted the necessary sums.

Little were these primeval commoners aware of what they were to grow into; that within 300 years they would rise to be virtually and avowedly the chief power of the state; that they would not only hold the purse-strings of the nation, but would have called before them, arraigned, condemned, and executed the very monarch of the realm on a charge of high treason against the people; that, having given a fresh trial to this monarch's family, they would, on finding it incurably despotic, have driven its representative from the throne, and issued a new national charter, under the title of a Bill of Rights, declaring that the people were the source of all power. The contempt of the aristocracy, compelling them to sit apart, was the deciding cause of their becoming a distinct house—the House of the Commons; and this House of Commons has risen, in about four centuries and a half—though still too neglectful of its great powers—to the noblest position of any senate which the world ever saw, its words listened to by the proudest kings as most potent for peace or war, and felt in every region of the earth as the hope of the enslaved, the terror of the despot, the central citadel of civilisation and freedom. Thus, the English House of Commons can point to a history as glorious as its origin was humble.

Yet even in the time of the first Edward the vigour inherent in the people began to manifest itself in these their representatives. As the royal necessities continued to increase, and the king's demands for money and men to become proportionably heavy, the Commons plucked up courage, and began, though not allowed to legislate, to present petitions of their grievances. To these petitions the king, from perceiving his dependence on the growing wealth and resources of this class, was obliged to listen with attention and at least external respect. With his growing difficulties these petitions became more frequent and more bold in tone. They wore referred to the judges, and, when sanctioned by them, were submitted to the king, and frequently to the barons, and eventually became laws. Here was the young lion beginning to feel his strength and to put it forth, had the upper classes and the court been able to see it; but it yet came forward in too modest a shape. This power was next greatly augmented by the knights of the shires being, as a representative and not an hereditary body, removed from the baronial assembly, and by the king appointed to moot with the other representative class—that from the boroughs. This common feature of