1274-1284

barons, and he called the representatives of the towns together in any matter which affected the townsmen, and so on with the other classes.

Outside England Edward's first difficulty was with the Welsh, who, though their princes had long been regarded by the English kings as vassals, had practically maintained their independence in the mountainous regions of north Wales of which Snowdon is the center. The Welshmen made forays and plundered the English lands, and the English retorted by slaughtering Welshmen whenever they could come up with them among the hills. Naturally the Welsh took the side of any enemy of the English kings with whom it was possible to ally themselves. Llewelyn, Prince of Wales, had joined Earl Simon against Henry III., and had only done homage to Henry after Simon had been defeated. After Henry's death he refused homage to Edward till 1276. In 1282 he and his brother David renewed the war, and Edward, determined to put an end to the independence of such troublesome neighbors, marched against them. Before the end of the year Llewelyn was slain, and David was captured in 1283, and executed in 1284. Wales then came fully under the dominion of the English kings. Edward's second son, afterwards King Edward II., was born at Carnarvon in 1284, and soon afterwards, having become heir to the crown, upon the death of his elder brother, was presented to the Welsh as Prince of Wales, a title from that day usually bestowed upon the king's eldest son. At the same time, though Edward built strong castles at Conway and Carnarvon to hold the Welsh in awe, he made submission easier by enacting suitable laws for them, under the name of the Statute of Wales, and by establishing a separate body of local officials to govern them, as well as by confirming them in the possession of their lands and goods.

Though Edward I. was by no means extravagant, he found it impossible to meet the expenses of government without an increase of taxation. In 1275 he obtained the consent of Parliament to the increase of the duties on exports and imports which had hitherto been levied without Parliamentary sanction. He was now to receive by a Parliamentary grant a fixed export duty of 6s. 8d. on every sack of wool sent out of the country, and of a corresponding duty on wool-fells and leather. Under ordinary circumstances it is useless for any government to attempt to gain a revenue by export duty. On the Continent men could not produce much wool or leather for

Painting by Peter Morris

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX

TILDEN FOUNDATION

1285-1290

sale, because private wars were constantly occurring, and the fighting men were in the habit of driving off the sheep and the cattle, while in England under the king's protection sheep and cattle could be bred in safety. There were now growing up manufactures of cloth in the fortified towns of Flanders, and the manufacturers there were obliged to come to England for the greater part of the wool which they used. They could not help paying not only the price of the wool, but the king's export duty as well, because if they refused they could not get sufficient wool in any other country.

Every king of England since the Norman Conquest had exercised authority in a two-fold capacity. On one hand he was the head of the nation, on the other hand he was the feudal lord of his vassals. Edward laid more stress than any former king upon his national headship. Early in his reign he organized the courts of law, completing the division of the Curia Regis into the three courts which existed till recent times: the Court of King's Bench, to deal with criminal offenses reserved for the king's judgment, and with suits in which he was himself concerned; the Court of Exchequer, to deal with all matters touching the king's revenue; and the Court of Common Pleas, to deal with suits between subject and subject. Edward took care that the justice administered in these courts should as far as possible be real justice, and in 1289 he dismissed two chief justices and many other officials for corruption. In 1285 he improved the Assize of Arms of Henry II., so as to be more sure of securing a national support for his government in time of danger.

It was in accordance with the national feeling that Edward, in 1290, banished from England the Jews, whose presence was most profitable to himself, but who were regarded as cruel tyrants by their debtors. On the other hand, Edward took care to assert his rights as a feudal lord. In 1279, by the statute De religiosis, commonly known as the Statute of Mortmain, he forbade the gift of land to the clergy, because in their hands land was no longer liable to the feudal dues. In 1290, by another statute, Quia emptores, he forbade all new sub-infeudation. If from henceforth a vassal wished to part with his land, the new tenant was to hold it, not under the vassal who gave it up, but under that vassal's lord, whether the lord was the king or anyone else. The object of this law was to increase the number of tenants-in-chief, and thus to bring a larger number of land-owners into direct relations with the king.

1285

In his government of England Edward had sought chiefly to strengthen his position as the national king of the whole people, and to depress legally and without violence the power of the feudal nobility. He was, however, ambitious, with the ambition of a man conscious of great and beneficent aims, and he was quite ready to enforce even unduly his personal claims to feudal obedience whenever it served his purpose to do so. His favorite motto, "Keep troth" (Pactum serva), revealed his sense of the inviolability of a personal engagement given or received, but his legal mind often led him into construing in his own favor engagements in which only the letter of the law was on his side, while its spirit was against him. It was chiefly in his relations with foreign peoples that he fell into this error, as it was here that he was most strongly tempted to lay stress upon the feudal tie which made for him, and to ignore the importance of a national resistance which made against him. In dealing with Wales, for instance, he sent David to a cruel death, because he had broken the feudal tie which bound him to the king of England, feeling no sympathy with him as standing up for the independence of his own people.

In the earlier part of Edward's reign Alexander III. was king of Scotland. Alexander's ancestors, indeed, had done homage to Edward's ancestors, but in 1189 William the Lion had purchased from Richard I. the abandonment of all the claim to homage for the crown of Scotland which Henry II. had acquired by the treaty of Falaise. William's successors, however, held lands in England, and had done homage for them to the English kings. Edward would gladly have restored the old practice of homage for Scotland itself. There was something alluring in the prospect of being lord of the whole island, as it would not only strengthen his own personal position, but would bring two nations into peaceful union. Between the southern part of Scotland, indeed, and the northern part of England, there was no great dissimilarity. On both sides of the border the bulk of the population was of the same Anglian stock, while, in consequence of the welcome offered by the Scottish kings to persons of Norman descent, the nobility was as completely Norman in Scotland as it was in England, many of the nobles indeed possessing lands on both sides of the border. A prospect of effecting a union by peaceful means offered itself to Edward in 1285, when Alexander III. was killed by a fall from his horse near Kinghorn. Alexander's only descendant was Margaret,