STUBBS (1873)

The design, as interpreted by the result, was the creation. of a national parliament, composed of the three estates, organized on the principle of concentrating local agency and machinery in such a manner as to produce unity of national action, and thus to strengthen the hand of the king, who personified the nation. This design was perfected in 1295. It was not the result of compulsion, but the consummation of a growing policy. Edward did not call his parliament . . . on the spur of a momentary necessity, or as a new machinery invented for the occasion and to be thrown aside when the occasion was over, but as a perfected organization, the growth of which he had for twenty years been doing his best to guide.

WILLIAM STUBBS, Constitutional History of England. II. 305.

TASWELL-LANGMEAD (1879)

From 1265 to 1295 was a transitionary period and it is only from the latter year that we can date the regular and complete establishment of a perfect representation of the Three Estates in Parliament. . . . The position of the kingdom was still critical, and Edward seems to have felt that he required to be backed up by the whole nation, supporting him as well by their common counsel and approval as by a general and adequate grant of an aid. He accordingly, on the 30th of September, summoned a parliament to meet at Westminster in the November following, so constituted as to represent and have the power to tax the whole nation.

T. P. TASWELL-LANGMEAD, English Constitutional History. 200-207.

J. K. HOSMER (1890)

It was in the autumn of 1295 that he (Edward I.) performed his most memorable act, the last formal step which established fully the representation of the Commons. . . . The forward steps which the nation took, sometimes, to be sure, in spite of him, but sometimes under his guidance, were most momentous. The Great Charter was again and again confirmed, until it became as fixed as the hills, in the national life. . . . In 1297, it was clearly established that there can be no taxation without

representation, -a principle upon which, five hundred years later, stood the Americans of '76. . . . Parliament, too, stood forth, a well defined and organized expositor of the national will. J. K. HOSMER, Anglo-Saxon Freedom. 60, 61.

BOUTMY (1891)

In 1295, the custom of summoning two knights from each county had become fixed. . . . From that time forward no Parliament was formally constituted without a summons addressed to each of these two classes. During the same period another element had been admitted to the assembly. The principal towns, those especially which possessed charters, had been convoked in 1265 by Simon de Montfort; thirty years later a royal ordinance called upon them to send two inhabitants, citizens, or burgesses, as representatives, and after that year they received regularly a summons to Parliament. The year 1295 is therefore a date of capital importance. The beginning of the fourteenth century found Parliament consisting of all the essentials of a truly national assembly, and representing even more completely than at the present day (for certain elements have been lost by exclusion or disuse) the various components of the English nation.

ÉMILE BOUTMY, English Constitution. 65, 66.

FREEMAN (1892)

One may certainly doubt whether Edward, when he summoned a baron to Parliament, meant positively to pledge himself to summon that baron's heirs for ever and ever or even necessarily to summon the baron himself to every future parliament. The facts are the other way: the summons still for a while remains irregular. But the perpetual summons, the hereditary summons, gradually became the rule, and that rule may in a certain sense be said to date from 1295, the year from which so many things parliamentary date. EDWD. FREEMAN, House of Lords, in Fourth Series of Historical Essays. 454.

RANSOME (1895)

In this assembly were represented each of what were beginning to be known as the three estates of the realm, the

clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty. . . . Thirty years had elapsed since the citizens and burgesses had been called to Simon de Montfort's convention in 1265. Since then it had been no uncommon thing to summon knights and burgesses to parliament, but the exact constitution of the assembly was by no means definitely settled. . . . This is, therefore, the first real parliament in which they had ever taken part. . . . The meeting of the Model Parliament of 1295 was a memorable day for England, and marks the beginning of a new era of parliamentary government.

CYRIL RANSOME, Advanced History of England. 219, 220.

S. R. GARDINER (1895)

Edward, attacked on two sides, threw himself for support on the English nation. Towards the end of 1295 he summoned a Parliament which was in most respects the model for all succeeding Parliaments. It was attended not only by bishops, abbots, earls, and barons, by two knights from every shire, and two burgesses from every borough, but also by representatives of the chapters of cathedrals and of the parochial clergy. S. R. GARDINER, Student's History of England. 218.

G. B. ADAMS (1900)

If the burgesses were certain to be admitted into the older institution there was nothing in that fact or in any other circumstance of the time that determined the form and character which the new institution was to assume, and this was a question of vital importance for the future. Upon it depended the existence of the constitution quite as much as upon the survival and the broadened significance of the ideas of the Magna Carta. In this particular the decisive period, the danger period, was that which extended from 1254 to 1295. We have a right, I think, to make 1295 the date of the beginning of Parliament. To be sure there was nothing whatever about the parliament of 1295 considered by itself alone which indicated that it was to be any more truly the model parliament than any one of the different experimental forms of the preceding forty years. It possessed more of the features of the curia regis than of a later parliament; the whole question of

estates and of organization was still unsettled; the struggle for the supremacy of the new parliament over the survivals of the old curia regis had still to be fought out in the following century, but as a historical fact the parliament of 1295 was the model parliament. The age of experimenting was over. In all the creative fundamental principles, both of constitution and of powers, Parliament was in existence as a different thing institutionally from the old curia regis. The later development was a perfection of details, an application of established principles to a constantly enlarging range of cases, not a work of new creation.

GEO. B. ADAMS, Critical Periods of English constitutional History, in American Historical Review (July, 1900). 656.

CHAPTER IV

CONFIRMATIO CHARTARUM (1297)

SUGGESTIONS

IN events which led to this Charter we trace two distinct forces, each of them the result of accumulating influence, but timed by an extraordinary coincident, through the King's necessities, the treasury was utterly drained. King Edward, from sheer want, was driven to tyrannous extortion, when planning his second attack on France with the aid of Flanders. The Church and Baronage alike defied him. Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, headed the opposition. Edward found himself powerless to move, and in a burst of feeling owned that he had taken their substance without due warrant of law. Still in want of money, he appealed to the barons, but they in turn demanded redress of grievances and the confirmation of Magna Charta. In August, Edward proceeded to Ghent, leaving his son, Edward, Prince of Wales, as Regent. As soon as the King had departed, the Earls seized the opportunity to press their demands. Entering the Exchequer, they peremptorily forbade the Barons there to levy the aid, the grant of which they asserted had been illegally obtained, until the charters had been confirmed. Supported by a large military following, and backed up by the citizens of London, they were masters of the situation, and the young Prince and his Council found it necessary to yield. The Confirmatio Chartarum, which, although a statute, is drawn up in the form of a charter, was passed on the 10th of October, 1297, in a Parliament at which knights of the shire attended as representatives of the Commons, as well as the lay and clerical Baronage. It was immediately sent over to King Edward at Ghent, and there confirmed by him on the 5th of November following.

In Confirmatio Chartarum, as in Magna Charta, we find a culmination of influences bringing about a document which has a vital place in the organization of all future government. Such charters are "the rallying-point of the oppressed and the offended," and no student of American liberty can appreciate intelligently the struggle from 1765 to 1776 without an insight into the historic beginnings of " Taxation without representation."

For Outlines and Material, see Appendix A.