formally recognized and enrolled in the mayor's court, and distinctive liveries assumed to which they owed the name of "Livery Companies" which they still retain. The wealthier citizens, who found their old power broken, regained influence by enrolling themselves as members of the trade-gilds, and Edward the Third himself humored the current of civic feeling by becoming a member of the gild of armorers. This event marks the time when the government of our towns had become more really popular than it ever again became till the Municipal Reform Act of our own days. It had passed from the hands of an oligarchy into those of the middle classes, and there was nothing as yet to foretell the reactionary revolution by which the trade-gilds themselves became an oligarchy as narrow as that which they had deposed.

Section V.-The King and the Baronage, 1290-1327.*

If we turn again to the constitutional history of England from the accession of Edward the First we find a progress not less real but checkered with darker vicissitudes than the progress of our towns. A great transfer of power had been brought about by the long struggle for the Charter, by the reforms of Earl Simon, and by the earlier legislation of Edward himself. His conception of kingship indeed was that of a just and religious Henry the Second, but his England was as different from the England of Henry as the Parliament of the one was different from the Great Council of the other. In the rough rimes of Robert of Gloucester we read the simple political creed of the people at large.

"When the land through God's grace to good peace was brought
For to have the old laws the high men turned their thought:
For to have, as we said erst, the good old Law,

The King made his charter and granted it with sawe."

But the power which the Charter had wrested from the Crown fell not to the people but to the Baronage. The farmer

*Authorities.-For Edward I. as before. For Edward II. we have three important contemporaries: on the King's side, Thomas de la More (in Camden," Anglica, Brittanica, etc."); on that of the Barons, Trokelowe's Annals (published by the Master of the Rolls), and the Life by a monk of Malmesbury, printed by Hearne. The short Chronicle by Murimuth is also contemporary in date. Hallam ("Middle Ages") has illustrated the constitutional aspect of the time.

and the artisan, though they could fight in some great crisis for freedom, had as yet no wish to interfere in the common task of government. The vast industrial change in both town and country, which had begun during the reign of Henry the Third, and which continued with increasing force during that of his son, absorbed the energy and attention of the trading classes. In agriculture, the inclosure of common lands and the introduction of the system of leases on the part of the great proprietors, coupled with the subdivision of estates which was facilitated by Edward's legislation, was gradually creating out of the masses of rural bondsmen a new class of tenant farmers, whose whole energy was absorbed in their own great rise to social freedom. The very causes which rendered the growth of municipal liberty so difficult, increased the wealth of the towns. To the trade with Norway and the Hanse towns of North Germany, the wool trade with Flanders, and the wine trade with Gascony, was now added a fast increasing commerce with Italy and Spain. The great Venetian merchant galleys appeared on the English coast, Florentine traders settled in the southern ports, the bankers of Florence and Lucca followed those of Cahors, who had already dealt a death blow to the usury of the Jews. But the wealth and industrial energy of the country was shown, not only in the rise of a capitalist class, but in a crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which distinguished this period. Christian architecture reached its highest beauty in the opening of Edward's reign, a period marked by the completion of the abbey church of Westminster and the exquisite cathedral church at Salisbury. An English noble was proud to be styled "an incomparable builder," while some traces of the art which was rising across the Alps perhaps flowed in with the Italian ecclesiastics whom the Papacy was forcing on the English Church. In the abbey of Westminster the shrine of the Confessor, the mosaic pavement, and the paintings on the walls of minster and chapter-house, remind us of the schools which were springing up under Giotto and the Pisans.

But even had this industrial distraction been wanting the trading classes had no mind to claim any direct part in the actual work of government. It was a work which, in default of the Crown, fell naturally, according to the ideas of the

time, to the Baronage. Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had now become established. A King could no longer make laws or levy taxes or even make war without their assent. And in the Baronage the nation reposed an unwavering trust. The nobles of England were no more the brutal foreigners from whose violence the strong hand of a Norman ruler had been needed to protect his subjects; they were as English as the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound them to look on themselves as its natural guardians. At the close of the Barons' war, the problem which had so long troubled the realm, the problem of how to ensure its government in accordance with the Charter, was solved by the transfer of the business of administration into the hands of a standing committee of the greater prelates and barons, acting as chief officers of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers of the Crown. The body thus composed was known as the Continual Council; and the quiet government of the kingdom by the Council in the long interval between the death of Henry the Third and his son's return shows how effective this rule of the nobles was. It is significant of the new relation which they were to strive to establish between themselves and the Crown that in the brief which announced Edward's accession the Council asserted that the new monarch mounted his throne "by the will of the peers." The very form indeed of the new Parliament, in which the barons were backed by the knights of the shire, elected for the most part under their influence, and by the representatives of the towns, still true to the traditions of the Barons' war; the increased frequency of these Parliamentary assemblies which gave opportunity for counsel, for party organization, and a distinct political base of action; above all, the new financial power which their control over taxation enabled them to exert on the throne, ultimately placed the rule of the nobles on a basis too strong to be shaken by the utmost efforts of even Edward himself.

From the first the King struggled fruitlessly against this overpowering influence; and his sympathies must have been stirred by the revolution on the other side of the Channel, where the French kings were crushing the power of the feudal baronage, and erecting a royal despotism on its ruins.

Edward watched jealously over the ground which the Crown had already gained against the nobles. Following the policy of Henry II., at the very outset of his reign he instituted a commission of inquiry into the judicial franchises still existing, and on its report itinerant justices were sent to discover by what right these franchises were held. The writs of " quo warranto" were roughly met here and there. Earl Warenne bared a rusty sword, and flung it on the justice's table. "This, sirs," he said, "is my warrant. By the sword our fathers won their lands when they came over with the Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep them." But the King was far from limiting himself to the plans of Henry II.; he aimed further at neutralizing the power of the nobles by raising the whole body of landowners to the same level; and a royal writ ordered all freeholders who held land of the value of twenty pounds to receive knighthood at the King's hands. While the political influence of the baronage as a leading element in the nation mounted, in fact, the personal and purely feudal power of each individual on his estates as steadily fell. The hold which the Crown had gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage, the circuits of the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds within which baronial justice was circumscribed, the blow dealt by scutage at their military power, the prompt intervention of the Council in their feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to the level of their fellow subjects. Much yet remained to be done. Different as the English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a feudal noblesse like that of Germany or France, there is in every military class a natural drift towards violence and lawlessness, which even the stern justice of Edward found it difficult to repress. Throughout his reign his strong hand was needed to enforce order on warring nobles. Great earls, such as those of Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in Shropshire the Earl of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and poorer nobles the wealth of the trader, the long wain of goods as it passed along the highway, was a tempting prey. Once, under cover of a mock tournament of monks against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded in introducing themselves into the great merchant fair at Boston; at nightfall every booth was on fire, the merchants robbed and slaughtered, and the booty carried

off to ships which lay ready at the quay. Streams of gold and silver, ran the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down the gutters to the sea; "all the money in England could hardly make good the loss." Even at the close of Edward's reign lawless bands of "trail-bastons," or club-men, maintained themselves by general outrage, aided the country nobles in their feuds, and wrested money and goods by threats from the great tradesmen. The King was strong enough to fine and imprison the Earls, to hang the chief of the Boston marauders, and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous commissions. During Edward's absence of three years from the realm, the judges, who were themselves drawn from the lesser baronage, were charged with violence and corruption. After a careful investigation the judicial abuses were recognized and amended; two of the chief justices were banished from the country, and their colleagues imprisoned and fined.

The next years saw a step which remains the great blot upon Edward's reign. Under the Angevins the popular hatred of the Jews had grown rapidly in intensity. But the royal protection had never wavered. Henry the Second had granted them the right of burial outside of every city where they dwelt. Richard had punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration of their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself, though he once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater than even the royal greed could reap; the Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates, and only a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would have enabled them to own freeholds. Their pride and contempt of the superstitions around them broke out in the taunts they levelled at processions as they passed their Jewries, sometimes at Oxford in actual attacks upon them. Wild stories floated about among the people of children carried off to Jewish houses, to be circumcised or crucified, and a boy of Lincoln who was found slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as St. Hugh." The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Hebrew quarters and attempt their conversion, but the tide of popular fury rose too fast for these gentler means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews

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