Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/170

 156 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S may be a Mayor, but if the city is in the King's hand there will be, instead, a Warden nominated by the King, who will care little for the views of the citizens. Taverns are only to be kept by fully qualified citizens, and are to be closed rigidly at curfew. No one is to teach fencing within the limits of the J city. Each alderman is to hold frequent enquiries as to the presence of malefactors within his ward, and to send all whom he may discover, in safe custody, to the " Warden or Mayor." No roysterer or other serious disturber of the peace is to be let out on bail, without the express warrant of the " Warden or Mayor ; " and no broker is to carry on business until he has been presented and sworn before the " Warden or / Mayor " to exercise his craft honestly. Incidentally, the or- dinance is of interest, as revealing the fact that London, even in 1285, was already a cosmopolitan city, which attracted wanderers from all lands, some of whom " nothing do but run up and down through the streets, more by night than by day, and are well attired in clothing and array, and have their food of delicate meats and costly." The three glorious years, 1283-85, have only twice been rivalled for honourable activity in the annals of English statesmanship. Once in the sixteenth century, when the Reformation Parliament of Henry VIII. set itself, under the guidance of the King and his ministers, to the reconstruction of the national Church, and once in the nineteenth, when a spontaneous outburst of epoch-making legislation followed on the assembly of the first reformed Parliament, has the history of English law a parallel to offer. Had those three years been the utmost limits of Edward's reign, he must have come down to us as one of the greatest and wisest of rulers, who surveyed the body politic in all its members, and laid his healing hand on every sore. But when we reflect that those years were but a fraction of a long reign of thirty-five years, and of a public life which covered at least half a century ; when we call to mind, that the man who put forth Second, and Winchester, was the hero of the Barons' War, the Crusader, the framer of the Hundred Rolls and the guide of the Quo Warranto enquiry, the conqueror of Wales,
 * t<rtLthe Statutes of A^cton Biixiu;l» Rhuddlan, Westminster the