ENGLAND 



2919 



ENGLAND 



obtaining the formal approval of 

 the Great Council for the measures 

 upon which the king had decided, 

 the idea developed that the Council 

 had a right to be consulted. In the 

 course of the reign a Norman 

 baronage was planted in Ireland, 

 and, through the formal homage of 

 the Irish chiefs, the island was an- 

 nexed to the English crown. 



Henry's elder son, Richard I, left 

 the governance of the kingdom to 

 justiciars, while he himself was 

 engaged on crusade or in his French 

 dominions. Public spirit and re- 

 spect for law developed, so that in 

 the reign of Richard's brother, 

 John, who repeatedly overrode the 

 law for his own ends, the barons 

 combined to wring from him 

 Magna Carta. Incidentally, also, 

 John's reign brought about the 

 severance of Normandy and most 

 of the Plantagenet possessions in 

 France from the English crown, 

 making the baronage of England 

 an English baronage with exclu- 

 sively English interests. 



In spite of Magna Carta, John's 

 son, Henry III, in the course of a 

 reign of 56 years, persistently 

 attempted arbitrary and illegal 

 methods of government, choosing 

 for his ministers his own or his 

 wife's foreign kinsmen in place of 

 the English nobles, who regarded 

 such offices as due to themselves of 

 right. At length the baronial party 

 combined under the leadership of 

 Simon de Montfort, in effect to 

 transfer the supreme control from 

 the hands of the king to baronial 

 committees. Faction among the 

 barons led to the fall of Montfort 

 in 1265. 



Henry III and Parliament 



But he had championed two 

 great principles first, that the 

 sanctity of the law was to be main- 

 tained as sternly on behalf of the 

 commons as on behalf of the barons ; 

 and, secondly, that the government 

 should rest upon the assent of the 

 realm expressed through the com- 

 mon council of the realm, which 

 was now acquiring the name of 

 Parliament. The practice of sum- 

 moning thereto elected represen- 

 tatives of the freeholders had been 

 developing all through the cen- 

 tury ; Montfort in 1265 estab- 

 lished the principle of calling also 

 representatives elected by the 

 boroughs. Montfort himself failed, 

 but his cause had triumphed. 

 Acting as champion of the law, he, 

 like Cromwell four centuries after 

 him, found himself compelled to 

 ride roughshod over the law, to 

 adopt unconstitutional methods of 

 asserting constitutional principles. 

 His mantle fell upon the man who 

 had overthrown him, who, as 

 Edward I, made the law supreme. 



The reign of Edward I is a 

 crucial epoch in the history of 

 England. In it the English nation, 

 finally consolidated and unified, 

 realized that the common interests 

 of all classes were of more im- 

 portance to each than the antagon- 

 istic interests of individual classes 

 and groups ; that the law which 

 should be directed to the good of 

 all should be uniform and fixed. 

 It was the great era of definition, 

 regulation, systematisation. It de- 

 'clared, though not finally, the 

 powers of the crown for raising 

 revenue, the jurisdictions of the 

 baronage, the rights of the national 

 assembly to consultation. It estab- 

 lished the law of inheritance, and 

 the subjection of the clergy to the 

 civil law. Above all, it defined for 

 500 years the constitution of the 

 national assembly itself ; this being 

 in the Model Parliament of 1295. 

 Yeomen and Serfs 



But while Edward succeeded in 

 unifying England and shaping the 

 structure of the constitution upon 

 foundations which had already 

 been laid, he was not equally suc- 

 cessful in accomplishing his desire 

 of extending the unification to 

 the whole island. Hard fought 

 campaigns in Wales brought her 

 into the English system ; the at- 

 tempt to absorb Scotland upon 

 pretexts of feudal law forced her 

 into temporary and incomplete 

 subjection tempered by persistent 

 insurrection, and finally issued in 

 complete failure during the reign of 

 his son and successor, Edward II. 



During the 13th century Eng- 

 land had become definitely the 

 Merrie England of the ballads. 

 The old hostility of Norman and 

 Englishman had disappeared. 

 The rural population had fallen 

 into the two divisions of those who 

 had succeeded in preserving their 

 legal freedom, the yeomanry, and 

 those who had been thrust into 

 serfdom or villeinage which bound 

 them to the soil on which they 

 were born. 



But already the practice of com- 

 muting services for payment, and 

 correspondingly of hiring service 

 for wages was becoming wide- 

 spread ; the lot even of the villein 

 was not generally a very hard one. 

 The larger towns were flourishing 

 commercial centres, although being 

 still to a great extent agricultural 

 communities which had purchased 

 rights of self-government and 

 immunity from the jurisdiction of 

 overlords from the king. These 

 rights were conveyed to them by 

 charter. There was already an 

 extensive foreign trade ; cloths, 

 wines, and many other European 

 products being imported, while 

 the leading English exports were 



wool and hides, and rural pro- 

 ducts of all kinds. 



An incompetent king, Ed- 

 ward II, succeeded Edward I. 

 There was a recrudescence of the 

 struggle between the crown and 

 nobles, who looked upon them- 

 selves as the champions of con- 

 stitutionalism, but were in fact 

 endeavouring to concentrate poli- 

 tical power in the hands of a nar- 

 row oligarchy. The civil strife, 

 whether latent or active, caused 

 that complete neglect of the 

 Scottish question which enabled 

 Robert Bruce gradually to clear 

 Scotland of the English garrison, 

 and to recover an unqualified in- 

 dependence by inflicting upon 

 the English the decisive defeat 

 of Bannockburn in 1314. 



In 1327 Edward II was de- 

 posed and murdered by his 

 French wife, Isabella, and her 

 paramour, Roger Mortimer, while 

 the crown was set on the head of 

 Edward III. Three years later 

 the king, then eighteen years of 

 age, effected a coup d'etat which 

 ended the intolerable government 

 of the regency, and executed Mor- 

 timer. All this time Plantagenets 

 had retained possession in France 

 of their hereditary fiefs of Guienne 

 and Gascony, which successive 

 French kings on various pretexts 

 had sought to filch from them. 

 This process was continued by 

 Philip VI. On his accession, a 

 fairly tenable claim to France had 

 been put forward on behalf of 

 Edward of England through his 

 mother, the sister of the last king 

 of France; but France had de- 

 cided in favour of the Valois suc- 

 cession, and of the principle that 

 there was no right of inheritance 

 to the French crown by or through 

 a female. 



The Hundred Years' War 



The strife over Guienne and 

 Gascony was a standing cause 

 of quarrel ; the claim to the 

 French throne provided another 

 pretext ; while a serious subject of 

 contention was the attempt to 

 restrict the valuable trade be- 

 tween England and Flanders which 

 was a fief of the French crown. 

 On account of this the Flemings 

 were ready to take part with 

 Edward if he assumed the char- 

 acter of their lawful suzerain by 

 asserting his claim to the French 

 crown, and on this combination of 

 pretexts the Hundred Years' War 

 between France and England was 

 embarked upon in 1337. 



The English longbow and the 

 clothyard shaft had first been 

 brought into effective play by 

 Edward I in his Scottish wars. 

 The Scots and Flemings had 

 recently proved the power of 



