Part 3

The feast was a right royal one. We shall find, throughout Edward’s reign, that none ever practised a truer or a wiser economy. His habits were simple and plain, his household well regulated. A friend once expressed wonder at the plainness of his dress. His answer was, “And what good, think you, would fine clothes do me?” But he well understood his royal estate and office. When he had to come before the people as their king, his doings were always kingly. The coronation‐banquet was a noble one. New buildings were erected in the court‐yard of Westminster, to accommodate the guests; and the provision made shows how numerous these guests must have been. The details are still preserved, and we find that the principal items were—“380 oxen, 430 sheep, 450 pigs, 18 wild boars, 278 flitches, and nearly 20,000 fowls.” Such a prodigious supply was not provided for one day’s festival; the feast was prolonged through a whole fortnight. Edward’s friends and chief counsellors, such as Anthony Beck and Robert Burnel, were churchmen; and we find, in every part of his personal history, frequent reference to Old Testament precedents. In the present instance they seem to have followed a notable example—“At that time Solomon held a feast fourteen days.”—1 Kings viii. 65.

And now Edward was on his throne,—was dwelling in his palace, ruling over the people of England. The work before him was an arduous one; his chief advisers were men suited to the times; and his own strength of purpose, sagacity, and perseverance were precisely what the land needed at that peculiar juncture.

England had long been in a state of extreme disorder, and it required a clear head and a strong right arm, to bring it into a condition of health, and comfort, and security.

One change of vast moment, indeed, had been effected in the course of the protracted reign which had just ended. From the time of William until the end of the reign of John, during one hundred and fifty years, the people had felt that they were under the yoke of alien lords. The Normans, men of iron, people of another land, and who spoke another language, ruled over them; but the half‐century of Henry’s reign gradually lightened, and at last removed the weight of this oppression.

The two races, Saxon and Norman, began to know a real amalgamation. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “those Saxon swine” was the usual appellation employed by a Norman knight when speaking of the people of the land; and, “Do you take me for an Englishman?” his form of indignant disclaimer. In the thirteenth, we find both Normans and Saxons agreed in a league to expel “all foreigners.” And thus it was that, at last, “in the thirteenth century, the great English people was formed.”[19] A nation more warlike and more enterprising than the Saxons, and more fond of home life and of personal liberty than the Normans, gradually appeared. It was in Henry’s reign that the English tongue, and the English desire for laws suited for free men, began to be seen and heard: but that weak though well‐meaning sovereign was not a leader or a ruler who could direct his subjects in such a path as this.

The order and the governance of law scarcely existed in Henry’s reign. When the sovereign needed corn or wine, or any other commodity, his usual course was to seize it. On one occasion he angrily asked of his earl marshal, “Cannot I send and seize your corn, and thresh and sell it?” “And cannot I send you the heads of the threshers?” was the earl’s angry reply.

One of the judges, accused of corrupt practices, came to court to defend himself, attended by armed friends, one of whom offered wager of battle. The king, exceedingly enraged, publicly declared, that “if any one would kill Henry of Bath, (the judge,) he should have pardon for the crime!” When even the bench of justice was thus occupied by violent and corrupt men, it is no wonder that we hear that “the whole county of Hampshire swarmed with felons and murderers,” or to find that “the king himself was obliged to hold a court of justice at Winchester, trying and sentencing the offenders, many of whom were wealthy, and some of them his own servants.”

Several years after this, we find one of the greatest nobles in the land setting an example of disorder. Matthew Paris narrates how, “in consequence of some hasty words which passed between them, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, slew with his own hand, in Westminster Hall, Alan de la Zouch, the king’s justiciary.” Probably, had Henry been at that time without assistance, this outrage, committed by so potent a nobleman, would have escaped retribution; but the prince was now at his right hand. Collecting a sufficient force, Edward pursued the earl to Reigate, besieged his castle, brought him to London a prisoner, tried him, and only spared his life, after much deliberation, in consideration of an enormous fine, equal to £100,000 of our present money.

Nor was violence, even of the extremest kind, a privilege of the nobles only. In July, 1263, during the excitement of “the Barons’ war,” queen Eleanor desired to leave her residence in the Tower of London, and to remove to Windsor Castle; but as her barge approached London Bridge, she found that it was occupied by a crowd of earl Simon’s adherents, who assailed her with cries of the grossest abuse, among which, “Drown the witch!” was one of the mildest. Huge stones, as well as all kinds of filth, were hurled at the barge, and the queen was glad to accept of the protection of the mayor, who conveyed her to the house of the bishop of London. Not many months after, when a body of these Londoners took part in the battle of Lewes, prince Edward rejoiced to avenge these insults, and to drive them in confusion at the spear’s point off the field.

But more than ten years had passed since these calamitous times, and most of those years had been spent in peace. No voices but those of acclamation now greeted Edward and his queen in their progress through the metropolis; and we may easily believe, without any violent stretch of the imagination, that among the London citizens who partook of the coronation‐banquet in 1274, there were many who, in the rawness of their youth, had crowded London Bridge to cast stones at Edward’s mother, and had fled before his vehement charge on the downs at Lewes in 1264.

Such was the realm of England, and such was its state and condition, over which Edward was now called to rule. It needed such a regulator, such an organizer; and he, perhaps, could hardly have found anywhere a better raw material out of which to build up a nation.

To him, in some measure, we owe the production and the formation of the men who fought and conquered at Crécy, Poictiers, and Agincourt; but we should be lothe to indicate this as his chief glory. We deem the work performed in his reign in establishing law, and in giving England a free legislature, to have been far more noble, far more glorious, than the achievement of brilliant but barren victories on distant battle‐fields.

England needed, most of all, at that peculiar conjuncture, precisely what, in Edward, God gave to her, “a legislative mind.” The king seems to have entirely appreciated the necessities and the difficulties of his position; and to have applied himself to the great task, of bringing everything into order, and of establishing the dominion of wise and equitable laws.

At the same time we must not forget, that such a work, and one embracing such a variety of details, could not have been performed by any single mind or single hand. Edward must have been aided by one or more of the most sound and competent of advisers. We cannot doubt that in Robert Burnel he had found such an assistant. And it is, perhaps, the best proof of the perfect unity and harmony which always existed between the king and his wise and able chancellor, that we find it difficult to separate the one from the other. We cannot tell when the king himself speaks, and when we are listening to his chancellor. We find, indeed, sometimes, language so evidently personal, as to make us feel that it must have been the king’s own; but at other times we seem to hear the great lawyer, the jurist, who is fitly interpreting his master’s will. Take, for instance, that noble opening of Edward’s reign, which we find in the preamble of the first statute of his first parliament:—

“Because our lord the king hath great desire to redress the state of the realm in such things as require amendment, for the common profit of the holy church and of the realm; and because the state of the holy church hath been evil kept, and the people otherwise entreated than they ought to be; and the peace less kept, and the laws less used, and offenders less punished than they ought to be—the king hath ordained by his council, and by the assent of archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, and all the commonalty of the realm, these acts under written, which he intendeth to be necessary and profitable to the whole realm.”

We cannot doubt that this high and kingly purpose was truly Edward’s; but we may with equal reason believe, that this right royal declaration came immediately from the pen of Robert Burnel.

There is, however, another feature of this reign which ought never to be overlooked. To frame good laws is a great merit in a ruler; but it is a still higher merit to devise and to create a legislature. And this is, in fact, the principal achievement of this sagacious and high‐minded sovereign.

Until his time the nation, at least for centuries, had known no such thing as a law‐making, still less a representative, body. Under the Norman kings, from A.D. 1066 to 1216, every now and then, “great councils” were held. The military despot who sat upon the throne, often found it convenient and necessary to summon together his barons, the great captains of his Norman soldiery, to ask an aid or contribution from them. But nothing like the construction of a law is ever heard of in these assemblies. At last, towards the end of the reign of John, “Magna Charta” is extracted from him; but this is not so much a statute as a treaty, dictated at the sword’s point by his armed barons.

Then followed the fifty‐six years of Henry’s reign. In the first forty years of this reign, several “great councils” were held, usually, as in Norman times, to consult about “granting the king an aid.” Once in 1236, we find “The provisions of Merton,” which commences “It was provided in the court of our lord the king.” In the same year we find a “royal ordinance” concerning Ireland; and twenty years later, in 1256, “a provision for leap year,” also a “royal ordinance.”

About this time the chroniclers begin to borrow the term “parliament” from France, and we hear that “a parliament was held at Oxford,” at which the barons dictated to the king certain “provisions,” which were afterwards cancelled and set aside by king Louis of France.

Seven years after this, earl Simon, in the king’s name, summonses a meeting in Westminster, and, as many of the nobles kept aloof from him, so that only five earls and seventeen barons were called to this “concilium,” he orders the sheriffs to send knights from the counties, and burgesses from certain towns, so as to form a sufficiently numerous body. But the earl’s object was merely to dictate certain terms to the king. No such thought as that of a legislature—an assembly for agreeing upon necessary laws—is anywhere to be perceived.

After the death of earl Simon, we hear of “a concilium” at Kenilworth; which, like earl Simon’s parliament, is only a council for agreeing upon certain terms, between the king on the one part and the barons on the other. These terms are embodied in “the Dictum of Kenilworth.”

But at last the realm is quieted; king Henry is once more at peace upon his throne, and his son, now arrived at the full manhood of his twenty‐eighth year, is naturally the guide as well as the protector of his weak though well‐meaning father. And now, in the year 1267, all enemies and all perils having vanished, and the king and the prince being left to their own free will, we hear, doubtless from Edward’s lips, words, which for two centuries at least, had never been used in this realm of England. The first document we possess, bearing the name of a “Statute,” is “the Statute of Marlborough,” and of this, the opening sentences run thus:—

“Our lord the king, providing for the better estate of his realm of England, and for the more speedy ministration of justice, as belongeth to the office of a king; the more discreet men of the realm being called together, as well of the higher as of the lower degree; it was provided, agreed, and ordained,” etc.

Here we have the first rough sketch or outline of what we now call “the British Constitution.” This constitution, we are often told, was wrung from the unwilling hands of successive sovereigns by the urgent demands of the people, in times of royal exigency. With respect to some later details, this may be true; but not less true is it, that the main and general outline was freely given to the people by the “legislative mind” of Edward, aided by his great chancellor, Robert Burnel.

Four hundred years after Edward’s day we had a philosopher in England, John Locke, who had read and pondered much, and who explained to us that the very nature of a civilized and free society is “to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.” The very object, he adds, “of civil society is to authorize a legislature to make laws for us, as the public good shall require.” These principles, as we have said, arose in John Locke’s mind, in the course of study and cogitation. But several centuries before this, the same thoughts had occurred to an English prince, to whom “study,” as we understand the word, was impossible, and who must have owed these conclusions, in a large measure, to that sagacity and true nobility of soul with which God had endowed him. Yet we ought not to overlook the fact, that in Edward’s youth one of the earliest of our great lawyers, Bracton, had thus written:—

“The king ought not to be subject to man, but to God, and to the law; for the law maketh the king. Let the king, therefore, render to the law what the law hath invested in him with regard to others, dominion and power; for he is not truly king where will and pleasure rule, and not the law.” And again, “The king also hath a superior, namely, God, and also the law, by which he was made a king.”

Just while Edward was rising into early manhood, did this great lawyer appear, and the probability surely approaches to something like a certainty, that Robert Burnel had been a student of Bracton’s writings, had felt the truth and force of the above words, and had made the young prince acquainted with those invaluable pages.

Edward’s coronation had taken place in August. His four years’ absence on the Continent must have occasioned an accumulation of matters needing regulation; his castles and palaces, his forests and royal domains, would require to be visited and brought into order. A new state of things must be established. We see immediately an important change in the “Exchequer Issues.” In Henry’s reign, we read: “To Humphrey de Rohan, earl of Hereford, £120 for 50 casks of wine, _taken from him_ by Imbert Pugeis (a soldier), for the king’s use.” “To Gerard de Bosco, a merchant of Bordeaux, 70 marks, for 20 casks of wine _taken from him_ for the queen’s use.” But on Edward’s accession these seizures disappear, and the entries run thus, “To Raymund de Alemaunt, of Bordeaux, £46 13s. for 20 casks of wine, _purchased from him_, for the king’s use, by Gregory de Rokesle and Matthew de Columbius, the king’s butlers.”

The royal revenues and the royal expenditure were now, for the first time for a century, to be brought into order and under proper regulation. Christmas would naturally approach, long before all this business could be despatched, and it is not surprising that, however he may have desired it, Edward found it impossible to convene his first parliament earlier than the February of 1275.

In that month—the same which, in modern times, has been found the most suitable and convenient, did this first of English parliaments assemble.[20] And when the clerk, sitting at the chancellor Burnel’s feet, took pen in hand to record its proceedings, his entry ran in the following terms:—

“These be the acts of king Edward, made at Westminster, at the first parliament‐general after his coronation; by his council, and by the assent of archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, and all the commonalty of the realm, thither summoned.”

Here we find, set forth rather more fully, the same idea and purpose which we had seen expressed at Marlborough in 1267;—a legislature, a council summoned for the purpose of making and establishing laws; which council was not to consist of great barons only, or of barons and prelates only, but, “of the lower as well as of the higher degree,” of “bishops, earls, barons, _and all the commonalty of the realm_.”

This idea was, as yet, but vaguely expressed. In Edward’s after years we shall see it more fully worked out, until the whole British Constitution rises to completeness under his creative hand. In this first attempt he merely recognizes the principle that the “lower degree as well as the higher” ought to be present,—ought to be consulted. What “the commonalty of the realm, hither summoned,” may mean, we cannot now define with any certainty. The most probable view of the matter is, that the London corporation, then fully existing and on the spot, was invited to represent “the commonalty of the realm,” and did appear, doubtless with awe and reverence, as a portion of the first parliament, the first real legislature, that had been assembled in England in Anglo‐Norman times.

But what was the work which this first “parliament of England” had to do? And the answer to this question reveals to us the real greatness of Edward’s wise counsellor. Robert Burnel, who had accompanied his master to Palestine, and who had, at Acre, been named one of his executors, seems to have been despatched to England, when the king, on his homeward journey, was delayed by business in Gascony and in Flanders. We find him in England, acting as one of the regents or guardians of the realm, several months before the king landed at Dover. He, doubtless, possessed his master’s entire confidence, maintained a regular correspondence with him, and was fully occupied in bringing all things into order, before Edward himself appeared at Dover. To some such mind as this we owe it, that so soon as the king had landed, and had conferred on two of his greatest nobles the honour of a visit while passing from the coast to London, he found, on reaching the metropolis, the whole ceremony of the coronation, with its great banquet and rejoicings, only awaiting his arrival. Can we see there assembled, awaiting the king’s arrival, the king of Scotland, the duke of Bretagne, all the nobles of the land, with their countless retinues; can we remark the new buildings prepared, and the vast provision for the banquet, and all these and many other preparations, all concentrating to one point, and all involving a large expenditure—without acknowledging that in bringing such a variety of affairs to a ripeness on a day before appointed, there is visible the mind of a man of vast ability? All, at last, is in readiness. The king arrives at Dover, passes on with kingly state and deliberation to the castle of his greatest subject, the earl of Gloucester; then to Reigate, to earl Warenne’s,—then to the metropolis, and to his own palace of Westminster. He rests apparently but a single night, and then proceeds from his palace into the abbey, and is at once crowned king. And his very first act, after thus taking his rightful place, is, to make his trusted friend and most able counsellor, Robert Burnel, the chancellor of England.

To this great man, we doubtless owe that noble production, the “Statute of Westminster.” In the five or six months which intervened before the meeting of parliament; while the king was examining and regulating the condition of his castles, palaces, establishments, and household, his chancellor, looking forward to the great event which was to follow immediately after Christmas, was occupied, we may safely assert, with the preparation of the work of legislation; a work then to be commenced, but never afterwards to be discontinued in this realm.

Parliaments, such as we now possess, were new things in England. The “concilium,” or great council, which we find in Anglo‐Norman history, was a gathering of earls, barons, and prelates, for the decision, usually, of a simple question—most generally, of granting an aid to the king. All through the long reign of Henry III., the idea that it was necessary occasionally to meet for the purpose of making laws, never once appears in any record. Of course parliaments holding protracted sittings, for weeks or months together, were wholly unthought of. Provision for the residence and maintenance of the prelates and barons would have been difficult. All that was contemplated was, one meeting, to do one thing and then to separate. Very naturally, therefore, Chancellor Burnel, while he had discovered the need of several laws on different subjects, combined his various reforms in one great statute. Lord Campbell observes that, “The ‘Statute of Westminster’ deserves the name of a code, rather than an act of parliament. Its object was, to correct abuses, to supply defects, and to remodel the administration of justice.” * * * “It protects the property of the church from violence and spoliation; it provides for the freedom of popular elections; it contains a strong declaration to enforce the enactments of ‘Magna Charta’ against excessive fines; it enumerates and corrects the great abuses of tenure, particularly with regard to the marriage of wards; it regulates the levying of tolls; it corrects and restrains the power of the king’s escheator, and other officers under the crown; it amends the criminal law; it embraces the subject of procedure, both in civil and criminal matters, introducing many regulations with a view to render it cheaper, more simple, and more expeditious.”

This great measure was in fact the beginning of English legislation. Up to this period, for centuries, the law of England had been a mere tradition, an unwritten collection of rules and principles, handed down from one generation to another, and deposited in the minds and memories of the judges and students of law. Recollections and traditions of Saxon laws, confirmed in “Magna Charta,” doubtless constituted its substance. Such a traditionary code is now of great value, under the name of “common law,” because it is expounded in books, and administered by judges of known integrity. But in the days of which we are speaking, books, _i.e._, manuscripts, were rare and of great price, and the judges, as a rule, were corruptible. Hence, Burnel, having observed and learned what provisions were chiefly needed, began, in this first of parliaments, to apply the remedy of written and authoritative law. A legislative system, worked by a new power; a real legislature, meeting usually every year, but in some years twice or thrice, began now to be known in England. This legislature, under Edward’s watchful eye, was enlarged and strengthened from time to time, until, before his reign had closed, we find it closely resembling the parliament of our own day—consisting, in 1304, of “the prelates, nine earls, ninety‐four barons, the knights of the shire, and the burgesses sent by 159 towns.”

In the great “Statute of Westminster”—the beginning of our English Statute law—there is one provision which, if the mind dwells upon it, suggests many inquiries. It runs thus:—