Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/334

Rh 316 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Legisla tion of Edward I. C onfir- matio Cartel- rum. Parlia mentary power of taxation. Uso of French in public acts. On the other hand, the reign of Edward I., like the reign of Henry II., is emphatically a time of legislation strictly so called, as well as of constitutional progress. At no time were so many memorable statutes passed. Edward s first great act, the first Statute of Westminster, in 1275, has been described as &quot;almost a code by itself.&quot; But it was followed almost yearly by enactment upon enactment. The statute de religiosis in 1279 forbade the alienation of lands in mortmain without the consent of the superior lord. Ten years later, after a mass of legislation in intermediate years, came the statute quia emptores, which forbade subinfeuda- tion. The holder of land could no longer grant it to be held of himself ; he could alienate it only so as to be held of the higher lord by the tenure by which he held it him self. Other statutes regulated the local administration, the range of the ecclesiastical courts, almost every detail of English law. At last, in 1297, the famous Confir matio Cartarum was wrung from the king ; the power of arbitrary taxation was surrendered ; no tax is any longer to b3 levied by the king without parliamentary sanction. That is to say, those clauses of the Great Charter which were left out in the confirmations under Henry III. were now restored and put in force. As in all other things in these ages, we must allow for what seems to us amazing irregularity of practice. It does not follow that, because a certain course was ordained by law, therefore the law was always carried out. But the principle was established, and it could always be appealed to in case of any breach of the law. By the end of Edward s reign, a national assembly, composed of much the same elements of which it is composed still, was acknowledged to possess what is practically the greatest of parliamentary powers. The extreme legislative activity of this reign is one of many, signs that the immediate effects of the Norman Con quest had now quite passed away. A thoroughly united nation, which had forgotten the foreign origin of certain classes of the nation, could bear to have new laws enacted, to have old institutions put into new forms. But the particular form which the great constitutional triumph of this reign took looks both forward and backward. It looks forward, as showing that we have reached what is really modern history. The parliamentary power of the purse is the ruling principle of all later constitutional struggles. But it also looks backward. An ancient Witenagem6t possessed the power of the purse, like all other powers. But in those days the power of the purse was a power of secondary importance. In early times taxation never holds the same prominent place in politics which it does after wards. But the rule of a series of kings in whose eyes kingship was rather a possession than an office, in whose eyes the kingdom was an estate out of which they had to squeeze the greatest possible income, had made it the most needful thing of all to check the king s power of taking his subjects muney. From this time each parliamentary struggle takes the form of a bargain. The king will re dress such and such a grievance, if he receives such and such a grant. By constantly pressing this new power, par liament, and above all that house of parliament in which the power of the purse came to be specially lodged, has gradually won back the powers of the older assemblies. It no longer in form makes war and peace, or elects and de poses kings. It does not even in form elect or depose their ministers. But the body which can grant or refuse the means of carrying on the machinery of government has gradually corne to have, in an indirect way, the powers of government once more in its own hands. Another sign that the remembrance of old wrongs and old distinctions of race had passed away is supplied by a feature of these times which at first sight might seem to prove the contrary. The reigns of the first two Edwards are exactly the time when the French language was most universally in use as the language of public acts. From this time the laws of England begin to be written in French. The truth is that the predominance of French at this period is no direct tradition of the days of the Norman Con quest. It is simply a sign of the fashion which made French to be looked on as the most polite, as it certainly was the most widely spoken, of Western languages. It was merely a fashion; Edward and his nobles knew and spoke English thoroughly well. 1 But the fact that such a fashion could take root showed that the use of the French language had ceased to call up any memories of the conquest of England by men whose tongue was French. If the use of French called forth any hostile feelings on the part of Englishmen, it was now, not as the speech of a forgotten conquest in their own land, but as the speech of a rival nation beyond the sea. And when French had come to be used simply as a matter of fashion, its supremacy was doomed; in the course of the fourteenth century, English, modified as it was by the indirect effects of the Conquest, gradually won back its old place as the dominant speech of England. This age, so great in our political history, is of equal Patrio importance in the intellectual and religious development of cnurd England. It was an age when difference as to theological Inen&amp;gt; dogmas was still unknown in England, but when a strong national opposition was growing to the exactions and oppressions of the see of Rome. In the thirteenth century there is no sign of any revolt against the national Church : the nation and the national Church are one in opposition to the foreign enemy. The most remarkable feature of the reign of Henry III. is the union of all classes, barons, clergy, and commons, in the common struggle against pope and king. The series of patriot prelates which begins with Stephen Langton is carried on in Archbishop Edmund the saint in Robert Grosseteste, saint, scholar, and philoso pher in Walter of Cantelupe, a statesman of a Norman baronial house. The first signs of any jealousy felt towards the national clergy do not begin till the great national strife is over, and till some at least of the English prelates had given in to the new-fangled teaching at Rome. When, at the papal bidding, the English clergy refused for a moment to contribute to the needs of the English state, the great Edward found the means to put them beyond the pale of English law. The intellectual activity of the thirteenth century, the great creative and destructive century throughout all Europe and civilized Asia, was not small in England. It was the age of the friars. As in the twelfth century the The Cistercians had appeared as a reform on the Benedictines, friars so now the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the other mendicant orders, began a far more thorough reform of the monastic system. The Cistercians in their Arildernesses might practise an ascetic discipline for the good of their own souls; but they did little for other men. The rest of the nation knew them chiefly as diligent growers of wool. But the friars, carrying the vow of poverty to the extremest point, rejecting corporate as well as personal property, fixed themselves by choice in the most squalid quarters of the towns. They were confessors and preachers ; presently 1 When Walter of Hemingburgh (i. 337) records that Edward I. spoke to the Turkish ambassadors in English, it must not be taken, as it has sometimes bean misunderstood, as if it meant that Edward s speaking of English was something exceptional. It would have had this meaning, if Edward had been speaking to an English man of low degree who was not likely to understand French. But when Edward speaks English to Turks, and has his words interpreted to them by some one who could translate from English into Turkish or Arabic, it shows how familiarly English was spoken by Edward himself and by those about him. So again, in the famous dialogue between Edward and Roger earl of Norfolk, the play on the earl s name JJiyod, which is found both there and elsewhere, has no force in any language but English.