Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/466

452 to promote woollen manufactures; and foreign merchants were allowed trial by jury, the jury consisting half of foreigners: and they had a justiciary in London for their protection, evidently the or gin of consuls.

In all that related to his own prerogative, however, Edward was very arbitrary, continually breaking the charter, exercising purveyances, and exacting taxes without consent of Parliament; and one of the worst evils of his reign was his empowering the nobles to entail their estates by a direct statute which has given the aristocracy of to-day its overwhelming and dangerous influence.

King and Armour-bearer. 13th Century.—Meyrick.

He passed the famous statute De tallagio cum concidendo, prohibiting the levy of tallages, or arbitrary imposition; but nobody paid less attention to the statute than himself.

The unsettled reign of Edward II. left the constitution pretty much as it found it; but in the following reign great progress was made. Edward III. had incessant demands for money to carry on his wars in Scotland and France; and, therefore, he was in the constant habit of calling together his Parliament. There remain no fewer than seventy writs of summons to Parliament and great councils issued during his reign. The difference between Parliaments and great councils at that time seems to be that in Parliament he required the Commons to grant taxes; in groat councils only the barons and great officers to consult on matters in which money-raising was not concerned.

In Edward III.'s reign Parliament resolved itself into three great elements—the Lords, the Commons, and the Clergy. In the Parliament which met in Westminster in 1339, the barons voted a tenth sheaf, fleece, and lamb; the knights objected to so large a contribution till they had consulted their constituents. This led to the knights of shires, who were representatives, meeting also with the Commons, who were representatives, and thus the representative house became separated from the hereditary house. It required time to amalgamate the two classes of knights and citizens in one house; the knights, as belonging to the aristocracy, looking down on the citizens, and they in their turn having a very humble idea of themselves; but we shall see that all that gradually corrected itself. The clergy now regularly voted their funds in Convocation, and no longer sat in the Commons by their proxies. It does not appear exactly when the judges ceased to sit ex-officio in Parliament, but they had ceased to do so in Richard II.'s time. In the forty-sixth of Edward III., practising lawyers were excluded by statute from Parliament, a position which they have since regained.

The knowledge of political economy possessed by Parliament in this famous reign was lamentably low. The topographical knowledge of the Commons was ludicrous. They granted the king, in 1371, £50,000, by a tax of 22s. 3d. on each parish, supposing the number of parishes to be about 45,000; but finding they were not one-fifth of that number, they had to alter the rate to £5 10s. per parish. But this was not a more amazing mistake than that of the English ambassador at Rome six years afterwards, who, finding that the Pope had created Lewis of Spain prince of the Fortunate Islands, meaning the Canary Isles, immediately hurried homo with all his suite to convey the alarming news that the Pope had given the British Isles to the King of Spain! The statute books of this famous king show the most absurd endeavours to disturb the freedom of trade, betraying as little knowledge of the principles of political economy as our own legislators on the corn laws. Wishing to raise a manufacturing system, it was forbidden to import woollen cloths before we could supply the people with home-made goods. Money was prohibited from being carried out of the country. They were obliged to let in foreign cloth, or the people would soon have been naked; yet after awhile they prohibited it again. A famine having taken place, they passed an act to keep down the price of all articles of food; the consequence of which was, nobody would bring any such articles to market; and they were compelled to abolish that. Then they did the same thing by labour, fixing the rate of wages; and yet when Wat Tyler's party in the following reign wanted to regulate the price of land, the attempt was pronounced barbarous.

In this reign an act was passed ordering all pleas to be conducted in English and enrolled in Latin, they having been hitherto, since the Norman Conquest, chiefly conducted and enrolled in Norman-French, which was quite an unknown tongue to the bulk of the common people. The statutes, however, had been recorded in Latin till 1206, when they began to be written in French. This took place at Winchester in some statutes concerning the exchequer, and not in the statute of Westminster in 1675, as asserted by some historians. The practice of pleading