hampered by large possessions on the Continent, so that he was able to devote himself freely to further the interests of England. Two objects presented themselves to his mind; first, to reduce to thorough efficiency the government of England, and secondly, to unite under one sceptre the whole of the British Isles. The former he was able to pursue from the beginning of his reign; the latter only opened itself to him as time went on. In dealing with the administration Henry II. had to force all his reforms on the country in the teeth of his barons; Edward was able to use his barons to help him in ordering the Constitutional country. This he did by means of Parliament. government of Edward was the first king who used Parliament Edward. as a means of government. His predecessors had looked on this assembly as diminishing their power, or at best as a means of getting money; Edward took it into his confidence, and gained its aid. Great statutes of the reign. Statute of Mortmain. Among the many Statutes of this reign the following are to be remembered. First, the Statute of Mortmain. Mortmain means "dead hand," and when land was owned by a body of men and not by an individual, it was said in Roman law to be held in mortuâ manu, i.e. in mortmain, or dead hand. Land held by the Church was said to be in mortmain. Now, people disliked land being acquired by the clergy, for many thought they had more than was good for them already; and, moreover, land in mortmain escaped some of the feudal services and payments, such as reliefs and wardship and marriage. It was not easy to prevent the Church from acquiring land, because the clergy used to persuade men when dying to leave property to the Church, so that their souls might be prayed for when they were dead. Many persons also made sham grants of their land to the Church, receiving it back as tenants on easy terms, thus defrauding the revenue. Accordingly, the Parliament of 1279 passed a very strict law to forbid land being given to the clergy without the consent of the king. This statute dealt with the Next is the Statute of Winchester. defence of the country, and was founded upon the assize of arms which had been issued by Henry II. in 1181. It Statute of must be considered together with the order about knighthood, which was issued in 1278. By this, all persons who Winchester. H owned land to the value of twenty pounds a year were ordered to be knighted, and such knights were always expected to serve the king, either in person or by deputy, when he called for their services. All other freeholders were ordered to have arms suitable to their wealth, which were inspected at regular intervals. By this means the country was provided with an efficient defensive force. The third statute is that of Quia Emptores. This struck a stout blow at the power of the great barons, by preventing them from Quia Emptores. granting out portions of their estates to be held as sub-tenancies. Such portions were always to be held from the superior lord, and as the king was the superior lord of all the great barons, this statute added largely to his power. Another statute affecting land was that of De Donis Con ditionalibus, which enacted that when an estate was Entails. granted to a man and his heirs, the holder of the property, being only a life-tenant, could not part with it. Such estates were said to be entailed, and the passage of this act was a most important event in the history of English land tenure. Regulation of Besides passing these important statutes, Edward also further regulated the law courts, and, in the year 1300, arranged by the Articuli Super Cartas that the Courts of Chancery and the law courts. King's Bench were still to follow the king, but the Exchequer Court was to remain at Westminster, as the Court of Common Pleas had done since the granting of the Great Charter. During this reign the lawyers became very important, and statutes or decisions which date from the reign of Edward I. are enforced at the present day, unless they have been especially set aside. A familiar institution, that of Justices of the Peace, dates from the same period. These officers were first appointed to carry out the Statute of Winchester, and were then called conservators of the peace. They got their present title in the time of Edward III. Another event of the reign of the first Edward was the expulsion of the Jews from England. In the Middle Ages the Jews The Jews in alone let out money at interest, because usury was forbidden to Christians by the Church. Their rates were very high, as was natural when there were few lenders and many borrowers, and when the times were insecure, and they England. made the Jews very unpopular. The Jews, however, were under the protection of the king, who regarded them as his chattels, kept a register of their loans, and helped to enforce repayment. For these advantages he made them pay heavily, by exacting an annual poll-tax of threepence on every Jew above fourteen years of age, and by taxing them whenever he wanted money. The Jewries. The Jews always lived together in special quarters, and to preserve them from attacks they were obliged to be indoors at a certain time, and the gates of the Jewry were kept locked at night, and they also wore a badge to distinguish them from Christians. The hatred against them grew in the thirteenth century because they constantly sold up the lands of their debtors, which then passed into the hands of the large proprietors. At last they were accused of clipping the coin of the realm, Edward found it impossible to support them any longer, and they were all ordered to leave England in the year 1290. It was not till long afterwards that they were allowed to live openly in England. The expulsion of the Jews added to the power of Parliament, as it deprived the king of a large source of income. Their expulsion. The most interesting events of the reign are those which are connected with Edward's attempts to annex Wales and Scotland. Circumstances gave him opportunities of interfering in both countries, of which he was not slow to avail himself; but Edward cannot be accused in either case of entering upon a war of wanton aggression. Attempt to annex Wales and Scotland. Llewelyn, During the troubles of the previous reign, the Prince of Wales had taken the side of the barons, and had managed to assume greater importance than his predecessors. The present prince, Llewelyn, wished to play the same part, and proposed to marry the daughter of Simon de Montfort. This put Edward on his guard, and when Llewelyn put off doing homage again and again, the king detained the young lady, and invaded the country in 1277. Wales. Wars with Wales. The Welsh made a vigorous resistance, but were hemmed in among the barren mountains of Snowdon, and forced to come to terms. Llewelyn was allowed to marry his intended bride, but only to keep as his principality Anglesea and the district of Snowdon. For three years the Welsh were quiet, but in 1282, David, Llewelyn's brother, who had hitherto been on the English side, and been most kindly treated by Edward, made an unprovoked attack on Hawarden Castle. The prince, his brother, joined the rising and went to the south, while David endeavoured to defend the north. Llewelyn, however, met his death at the hands of a single knight during a skirmish on the Llewelyn. Wye, and David, having fallen into the hands of the English, was condemned, by an assembly of lay barons and members for the towns and counties, to suffer a traitor's death. Death of Annexation After the fall of these leaders Edward annexed the country, and his son Edward, who happened to be born at Carnarvon during the king's residence in Wales, was the next Prince of and settlement Wales. Edward is said to have won the favour of the of Wales. Welsh by telling them that he would give them a prince who could not speak a word of English; but he took effective measures to secure order, by dividing Wales into counties and hundreds, and introducing the English law and administration of justice, while he tried to win the Welsh from their rude pastoral life by granting charters to towns, and giving encouragement to trade and commerce. Relation between England and Scotland. In Scotland Edward was less successful. As we have seen from time to time, the English kings since the days of Edward the Elder had held some sort of superiority over the Scottish monarchs, but what these rights were was uncertain, and since Richard I. had surrendered the terms exacted by Henry II. from William the Lion, this uncertainty had increased. The present King of Scots, Alexander III., had done homage to Edward, but for his English fiefs alone, and not for his kingdom. It happened, however, that all Alexander's children died within a short time of one another, and one only, a daughter who had married the King of Norway, left behind her a child. Alexander himself was killed by an accident in 1286, and his grand-daughter became the heir to the throne. In these events Edward saw the means of bringing about the union between the crowns of England and Scotland, and he persuaded the Scots to consent to a marriage between their little queen and his son, the new Prince of Wales. Unhappily, the Maid of Norway, as she was called, died at the Marriage arranged between the Prince of Wales and the heiress of Scotland. Orkneys on her voyage to Scotland, so this plan fell to the ground. But her death only caused a new difficulty, for a number of claimants to the crown at once appeared; but it was agreed, as was usual in the case of a fief, to submit their claims to Edward as the superior lord. Edward agreed, and after securing the acknowledgment of his superiority, proceeded to consider the case. Disputed succession' referred to Edward. Of the competitors only two had any real claim. These were John Balliol, the grandson of Margaret, niece of William the Lion, and Robert Bruce (the elder), son of Isabella, Margaret's younger sister. Edward allowed Balliol and Bruce each to choose forty Scots; to these he added twenty-four English, and to this body the question who was the rightful king was put. Of course they decided for Balliol, whose claims were incontestably the stronger; and he, after swearing allegiance to Edward in the strongest terms, received the crown. as to the feudal rights of Edward. It was one of the points in the feudal law that if any tenant felt aggrieved by a decision in the court of his lord, he had a right to appeal to the court of the superior lord. In accord- New difficulties ance with this right, which had certainly never been thought of when Constantine, King of Scots, commended himself to Edward the Elder, some of Balliol's subjects appealed to the English law courts; and Balliol was summoned to defend his decision, which he might do, if he chose, by deputy. This was galling to Balliol, who, however, seems to have been in the hands of his barons, and to have had little power. Difficulty about Guienne. Meanwhile a difficulty had arisen in France, where Edward himself, as Duke of Guienne, was a vassal of the French king. A Norman sailor had chanced to be murdered by an Englishman, and the Normans, in revenge, seized a passenger in an English ship and hung him topmast high, with a dog at his feet. The result was a series of fights between the merchantmen of the two nations, in which the French got the worst. The fight soon spread to the land, and then the French king called upon Edward to answer for the conduct of his subjects. Edmund, the king's brother, went as his representative, summoned to and allowed himself to be gulled by the Frenchmen into surrendering the castles of Gascony for six weeks, on the promise that at the end of that time they should be restored. The promise Edward Paris. |