The History of England A Study in Political Evolution

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. When, three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, they were noted as exceptions; but now the vernacular language of the subject race was forcing its way into higher circles, and

wanted money, and in their rights of jurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a ready marketable commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king's price was generally the local merchant guild; and while these transactions developed local government, they did not necessarily promote popular self-government, because the merchant guild was a wealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the jurisdiction it had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit

und it necessary to tax personalty as well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors in the thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes on personalty to the great council. This representative system must not be regarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self- government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted a popular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance and muttered, "C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer"; and Edward I's people

y on a less enlightened people. A parliamentary "summons" had the imperative, minatory sound which now only attaches to its police court use; and centuries later members were occasionally "bound over" to attend at Westminster, and prosecuted if they failed. On one occasion the two knights for Oxfordshire fled the country on hearing of their election, and were proclaimed outlaws. Members of parliament were, in fact, the scapegoats for the people, who were all "intended" or understood to be present in parliament, but enjoyed the privilege of absence through representation. The greater barons never secured this privilege; they had to come in person when summoned, just as they had to serve in person when the king went to the wars. Gradually, of course, this attitude towards representation changed as

in the art of war. Edward I discovered in his Welsh wars that the long-bow was more efficient than the weapons of the knight; and his grandson won English victories at Crecy and Poitiers with a weapon which was within the reach of the simple yeoman. The discovery of gunpowder and development of artillery soon proved as fatal to the feudal castle as the long-bow had to the mailed knight;

e great lords held those portions of sovereign authority which they called their liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenne produced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibited further subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, the purchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of the vendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable, because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased. He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their us

an Englishman on the bishops' bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable as villeins of even taking orders in the church, and when the vernacular language had been ousted from its services. But with the English nation grew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliens in the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. It was

onal feelings which took advantage of the king's embarrassments. The king's necessity was his subjects' opportunity, and the Confirmation of Charters extorted from him in 1297 stands, it is said, to the Great Charter of 1215 in the relation of substance to shadow, of achievement to promise. Edward, however, gave away much less than has often been imagined; he certainly did not abandon his right to tallage the towns, and the lustre of his motto, "Keep troth," is tarnished by his application to the pope for ab

to fight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There was Scotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward's clutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne, from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there were bickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimed under Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands which England wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling its feet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural, especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural a sovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much a Frenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England had grown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing French beca

Model Parliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted by classes-but the House of Commons represented the communities of the realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated all these communities-shires, cities, and boroughs-and welded them into a single community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for national feeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and the sectionalism of feudal society; and

n the redress of grievances; the crown finally lost its right to tallage; and its powers of independent taxation were restricted to the levying of the "ancient customs" upon dry goods and wines. If it required more than these and than the proceeds from the royal domains, royal jurisdiction, and diminishing feudal aids, it had to apply to parliament. The expense of the Hundred Years' War rendered such applicatio

al licence, though royal connivance and popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for nearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamed against the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope at Avignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy, the king of France; and that captivity was follow

the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrote in English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language of the court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records of guilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedings are taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to be written in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, even the laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturally enough, in it

p the more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services from villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and the imposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt of town artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did not long impede their emancipation, and the process of com

they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another; and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not have in England. A peer in France claimed equality wi

ommons. The greater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to the House of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issue of these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did not mean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father did not involve the summons of his eldest son

ses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer; and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. New tit

s finally to convince the country of the meaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim to his own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne as the king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown against their rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reduced almost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords c

brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but a statesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from the fact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation more catholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory at Agincourt, married

ad spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hir

o town stood a siege. It looks as though the great military and feudal specialists, whose power lay principally on the Borders, were engaged in a final internecine struggle for the control of England, in somewhat the same way as the Ostmark or East Border of the Empire became Austria, and the Nordmark or North Border became Prussia, and in turn dominated Germany. Certainly the defeat of these forces was a victory for southern and eastern England, and for the commercial and maritime interests on which its growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in the wars was no