Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/463

TO A.D. 1399.] or with his consent. All clergymen guilty of civil offences were to be tried in the civil courts. Suits between a clergyman and layman wore to be tried in those courts. No clergyman was to leave the kingdom without the king's permission; a measure which precluded the common practice of clergymen going to Rome, and there getting causes determined in defiance of the king. Appeals from the archbishop were to be made not to the Pope, but to the king. All prelates who held baronies were to do service like the lay barons, and all vacant sees and abbeys were to belong to the king.

Out of these famous laws arose the great struggle with Thomas à Becket and the clergy. Had Henry maintained these ordinances, the English Church would have become as independent of the papal chair as it did under Henry VIII. But the time was not come, and Henry was compelled to succumb in the contest. The provisions of the charter now repealed the Constitutions of Clarendon; the Church was declared to be free; the clergy were at liberty to go out of the realm when they pleased; they and their benefices were removed from the civil jurisdiction, and they were not to be amerced according to their ecclesiastical benefices, but their secular estates.

The conditions of the feudal tenure were determined in favour of the barons, and their rates of payment fixed. The relief were sums paid when a baron, on coming at age, took up his right and paid his fee to the king. These reliefs had before been arbitrary, and had been in many cases monstrous. The king was the guardian of all his minor vassals, male and female, and had the management of their estates during their minority—a very profitable prerogative, and often farmed out to greedy and unprincipled men.

By the charter no waste was to be made on the estates, and no relief was to be paid on coming at age. The female wards had been compelled to marry whoever the king pleased, or to purchase exemption at a heavy cost. This was also a monstrous condition of things. Women were compelled to marry men that they loathed; they were, in fact, sold, for the crown made great profit of these marriages. Widows as well as maids were compelled to marry, whether they would or not. In King John's reign the Countess of Warwick had been compelled to pay £1,000, equal at least to £15,000 of our money, that she might not be forced to marry till she pleased. These cases were constantly occuring. The charter put a restraint on this hideous abuse. No woman was to be married without the approbation of her relatives; no widow obliged to marry, or pay anything for her inheritance or property, nor to leave her husband's house for forty days after his death, within which time her dowry must be assigned.

Before the charter—for the conditions of the former charters had grown to be quite disregarded—the kings levied as much as they pleased for aids; that is, money to marry the king's eldest son or daughter, or ransom himself; for soutages, moneys paid in lieu of serving personally in the king's wars; and tallages, or subsidies levied at will. No man could call anything he had his own. The charter limited these exactions, and also those made by the great vassals on their tenants in turn.

Cities and towns were to enjoy all their charters and privileges. All weights and measures were to be regulated by those of London. To restrain the abuses of purveyance three clauses were introduced. The cruelties and abuses of purveyance were amongst the most crying abominations of the feudal ages. Eadmer, who lived in the reign of Rufus, describes the atrocities of this practice; and that description would have held good for ages afterwards:—"Those who attended the court plundered and destroyed the whole country through which the king passed, without any control. Some of them were so intoxicated with malice that, when they could not consume all the provisions in the houses which they invaded, they either sold or burnt them. After having washed their horses' feet with the liquors they could not drink, they let them run out on the ground, or destroyed them in some other way. But the cruelties they committed on the masters of families, and the indecencies offered to their wives and daughters, were too shocking to be described."

These abominations the charter prohibited. No man's goods were to be taken without instant payment. His horses, carts, or wood were not to be taken at all without his consent.

No sheriff or bailiff of the crown was to hold pleas of the crown; that is, try for capital crimes, or inflict capital punishments—a great defence against arbitrary acts of officials in local posts. No freeman was to be seized or imprisoned, much less condemned and punished, except by judgment of his peers; and justice was neither to be withheld nor delayed—the last concession amounting to a writ of habeas corpus, and upon which that celebrated instrument of justice was founded.

Foreign merchants were to come and go at pleasure without molestation or fear, which they could not do before, being only allowed to remain in the country forty days, and to exhibit their goods at certain fairs. No judges were to be appointed except those learned in the law. The Court of Common Pleas was to be made stationary, and not to follow the king. The forest laws were ameliorated, and amercements, or penalties for legal offences, were limited. They were not to extend to a freeholder's freeholds, a merchant's merchandise, or a husbandman's implements of husbandry.

Such were the chief provisions of Magna Charta; and the various constitutional struggles and enactments which we shall have to notice from that time to our own were to expound and establish its principles in judicial forms.

One of the first effects of the charter was to regulate the courts of law. These, however, were by no means greatly improved till the reign of Edward I. In speaking of the transactions of his reign, we noted the groat constitutional acts of that wise monarch. Though the Court of Common Pleas, in conformity with Magna Charta, had been fixed at Westminster, where it still continues, yet it was not completely severed from the Court of Exchequer till 1300, when Edward I. enacted that "No common pleas shall be henceforth holden in the Exchequer, contrary to the form of the Great Charter."

About the same time the Court of King's Bench was also separated from the Exchequer; and although those who were summoned to attend the court were commanded to appear "coram ipso rege," before the king himself, and notwithstanding this was strengthened by a special statute passed in 1300, that this court should always follow the king, yet the obvious necessities of its business soon fixed it, with some temporary exceptions, at Westminster. The