Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/56

42 constituents would never have tolerated the enormous speeches of modern Members of Parliament. The numbers of representatives constituting the Commons of England about this period would seem to be about 254, being 180 from 90 boroughs, and 74 knights of shires.

There were other stimulants to hasten the Parliaments of those times. The country was generally so unsettled that numbers, both of the Peers and Commons, were naturally anxious not to be absent from their own neighbourhoods and their estates longer than was absolutely needful. The peers and gentry were, moreover, still passionately attached to their field sports. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the legislators of this century made about fifty systems, or bodies, of laws, some of them containing only a few, and others as many as twenty or thirty statutes, on a great variety of subjects. Amongst the most important of these statutes, were the confirmation of the great charter and the charter of the forests, by Henry IV. and Henry V.; the enactments of the same monarchs against the Wycliffites, condemning them, at the demand of the clergy, to the flames. The powers of justices of peace were augmented, and their qualifications and duties better defined. The laws relating to commerce and foreign merchants were still very impolitic and harsh towards strangers who settled in England, especially to the Welsh and Irish, till the reign of Edward IV., who himself being addicted to commerce, soon perceived the folly and injustice of many of the old regulations, and abolished them.



One of the most influential legal measures during this century was that which confirmed, in the reign of Edward IV., the practice of cutting off entails by the process of a "common recovery." The better to enable the estates of the party which happened to be foiled at arms to pass under forfeiture to the crown, this legal fiction of "recovery" was adopted. The person to whom the crown granted such entailed estates by private agreement brought an action against the grantor for unjustly claiming such hereditary right, which was permitted to go by default, and then the entail was declared lost. The fee simple of the property thus recurring to the possessor, the property could be divided and disposed of at option. And this practice still continues, by which the possessor and the next heir can, in conjunction, destroy entails at pleasure.

Simultaneously came into general practice the device of uses. This legal fiction was introduced by the clergy towards the end of the reign of Edward III., to evade the operation of the statutes of mortmain. As no lands could be left to the religious houses, the donors were now instructed to grant the property in trust for the use of the religious houses; and this form of bequest not only