Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/534

 484 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE both townsmen and knights of the shire to his legislative p .. assemblies, and these two groups of men came completely to make up the House of Commons, composed of developed representatives of the localities, while the House of Lords included only the prelates and great nobles who received a special summons from the king. We first hear of the two houses sitting apart in 1332 early in the reign of Edward III. Historians have often called an assembly sum- moned by Edward I in 1295 the Model Parliament, on the ground that it was the first body legally summoned by the king which represented all classes fully. It contained two representatives from each of one hundred and ten boroughs instead of from only twenty-one towns as in the case of De Montfort's Parliament. There were two knights from each of thirty-seven shires, ninety bishops and abbots, and forty- one barons. But there were also various representatives of the lower clergy, — deans, archdeacons, and delegates chosen by the parish priests. These lower clergy had not been summoned by De Montfort and they soon disappeared from subsequent Parliaments, so that in its inclusion of them the Parliament of 1295 was scarcely a true model. Edward was a great legislator and issued many statutes during his reign. Some of them reformed or amended the Statut police and judicial systems; others restricted feudal tendencies, the jurisdiction of ecclesi- astical courts, and the passing of landed property into the hands of the clergy. The term "statute" came to indicate a law promulgated by the king to which both houses of Parliament had agreed. In the following reign of Edward II, after a period of civil war between the Crown and the barons and another unsuccessful attempt by the latter to manage the government themselves, the principle was reaffirmed that all royal and national matters "shall be treated, ac- corded, and established in parliament by the king and the council of the prelates, earls, barons, and the commonalty of the realm." Edward's wars with the Welsh and Scots, of which we shall speak at the end of this chapter, and his frequent