let loose every element of misery, and roused every political constituent to resistance.

Strangely enough the head of the disaffection was the man who perhaps had least of all in common with the nation, except the sense of justice. Simon de Montfort was a foreign adventurer; by descent representing on one side the purest feudalism of Normandy, and on the other the great feudal party of the Conquest; brother-in-law of the king, and by the hereditary ambition which marked his paternal house, fitted rather for a usurper than for a defender of other men's rights. Yet there is no reason to doubt either his political wisdom or his sincerity and honesty. His strength, however, was in the false position of the king. Neither the ability of the versatile, experienced, and travelled statesman, nor the confidence of the Church, nor the wealth of his English earldom, nor his own brilliant nature, could have won for him the reputation of a hero and martyrsaint, much less the substance of power. At the head of the barons, trusted by the clergy and worshipped by the people, he forced on the king the new programme of good government; a programme which contained indeed little more than was already binding, but which owes its importance, as its advocate owes his strength, to Henry's falseness. Strong in resistance, and victorious in battle, Simon de Montfort undertook to administer, and attempted to unite under a premature political organization, all the possessors of power in the land. But the strength which had been so great against the king in arms, was inefficient in supremacy: again it became clear that Simon's chief strength was in his rival's folly and weakness. The escape of Edward from captivity renewed the strife, this time with a different result. The death of Simon restored Henry III to the throne, and left the party which Simon had united broken, and ready for new combinations.

The long struggle of the constitution for existence ends with the reign of Edward I. This great monarch, whose commanding spirit, defining and organizing power, and thorough honesty of character, place him in strong contrast not merely with his father, but with all the rest of our long line of kings, was not

likely to surrender without a struggle the position which he had inherited. For more than twenty years he reigned as Henry II had done, showing proper respect for constitutional forms, but exercising the reality of despotic power. He loved his people, and therefore did not oppress them: they knew and loved him, and endured the pressure of taxation, which would not have been imposed if it had not been necessary. He admits them to a share, a large share, in the process of government: he develops and defines the constitution in its mechanical character in a way which Simon de Montfort had never contemplated. The organization of parliament, of convocation, of the courts of law, of provincial jurisdiction, is elaborated and completed until it seems to be as perfect as it is at the present day; and the legislation is so full that the laws of the next three centuries are little more than a necessary expansion of it. But until he is compelled by the action of the barons, he retains the substance of royal power; the right to the pursestrings, the right to talliage the towns and the demesnes of the crown without a grant. Edward I would not have been nearly so great a king as he was if he had not thought this right worth a struggle; nor if, when that struggle was going against him, he had not seen that it was time to yield; nor if, when he had yielded, he had not determined honestly to abide by his concessions. The political party that forced him to the concession was not to be compared with the earlier combinations of the century. Bohun and Bigod had doubtless personal claims at heart, and not political ones: but they took advantage of a state of things which Edward saw could not be resisted. The confirmation of the Charters completes the present survey of political history.

The idea of constitutional government, defined by the measures of Edward I, and summarized in the legal meaning of the word parliament, implies four principles: first, the existence of a central or national assembly, a 'commune consilium regni ;' second, the representation in that assembly of all classes of the people, regularly summoned; third, the reality of the representation of the whole people, secured either by its presence in

the council, or by the free election of the persons who are to represent it, or any portion of it; and fourth, the assembly so summoned and elected must possess definite powers of taxation, legislation, and general political deliberation. We will now trace very briefly the origin, growth, and combination of these.

First. The Commune Concilium had existed from the earliest times, first as the witenagemot, and afterwards as the court of the king's vassals, or in a manner as combining the characters of each. It had in neither stage been representative, in the modern meaning of the word. The witenagemot acted for the nation, but was not delegated or elected by it: the great council of the Norman kings included in theory all tenants in chief of the crown, but had no special provision for these to represent their under-tenants, or for the securing of the rights of any not personally present. The witenagemot possessed and exercised all the powers of a free council; the Norman court or parliament, claiming the character of a witenagemot, if it possessed these rights in theory, did not exercise them. At no period, however, of our early history was the assembling of the national council dispensed with.

Second. The representation of all classes of the people is necessary for the complete organization of a national council, and that complete organization is legally constituted by summons to parliament. In this three principles are involved: the idea of representation, the idea of exhaustive representation, and the definite summons.

I. The idea of representation was familiar to the English in the minor courts, the hundredmoot and the shiremoot. The reeve and four men represented the township in these assemblies; the twelve assessors of the sheriff represented the judicial opinion, sometimes the collective legal knowledge of the shire. At a later period the inquest by sworn recognitors, in civil suits, in the presentment of criminals, and in the assessment of real and personal property, represented the country, that is the shire or hundred or borough, for whose business they were sworn to answer.

II. The political constituents of the nation (exclusive of the

king), the three estates of the realm, are the clergy, the baronage, and the commons. A perfect national council must include all these the baronage by personal attendance, the clergy and people by representation. The bishops, although their right to appear personally in the Commune Concilium is older than the introduction of the feudal system on which this division of the estates is based, have, by the definition of lawyers, been made to sink their character of witan in that of barons, amongst whom they may for our present purpose be included. The representation of the estates then implies the union in parliament of (1) the baronage lay and clerical, (2) the lower clergy, and (3) the commons.

1. The baronage, in its verbal meaning, includes all barones, that is all homagers, holding directly of the crown; but by successive changes, the progress of which is far from easy to fix chronologically, it has been limited, first, to all who possess a united 'corpus' or collection of knights' fees held under one title: secondly, to those who, possessing such a barony, are summoned by special writ: thirdly, to those who, whether entitled by such tenure or not, have received a special summons: and finally, to those who have become by creation or prescription entitled hereditarily to receive such a summons. The variations of dignity among the persons so summoned, represented by the names duke, marquis, earl, and viscount, are of no constitutional significance. The baronial title of the bishops and mitred abbots originates in the second and third of the principles thus developed.

2. The inferior clergy had immemorially their diocesan assemblies and their share in the provincial councils of the Church, a share which would be as difficult to define as is that of the plebs or populus in the 'commune consilium regni ;' but which does not much affect constitutional history until the period of Magna Carta. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the doctrine was gaining ground that the taxpayer should have a voice in the bestowal of the tax; the legal position of the beneficed clergy had been long definitely settled, and the changes in the character of taxation took from them the immunities which

they had earlier possessed and still persistently claimed. The aids which John condescended to ask of the clergy were not granted by assemblies, but collected by separate negotiation through the archdeacons; in the same way that the sheriffs or itinerant judges negotiated the aids of the towns and counties. In a council held by John in 1207 the regular clergy were represented by the abbots; in another in 1213 the cathedral clergy were represented by the deans; the rest of the clergy not at all. In both of these cases there are analogies with the dealings of the lay estates that might be traced at length. Passing over the anomalous councils of the next forty years, we find in 1254 a writ directing the archbishops and bishops to assemble all the clergy for the purpose of granting an aid; in 1255 the proctors of the clergy appeared in parliament at Westminster and presented their gravamina. In 1283, Edward I summoned them by their proctors to great councils at Northampton and York; in 1294 they were summoned by their proctors to the parliament at Westminster; and in 1295, by the clause praemunientes in the writ summoning the bishops to parliament, the clergy were summoned to appear there, the deans and priors of the cathedrals and the archdeacons in person, the chapters by one proctor, and the clergy of each diocese by two, having full and sufficient power from the chapters and the clergy. This clause has been inserted, with a few exceptions, ever since; the constant usage dating, as stated by Hody, from the 28th of Edward III. It has not been acted upon since the fourteenth century. We may trace in this the defining hand of Edward I, who doubtless intended by this means to introduce a complete and symmetrical system of representation into the lower department of his parliament. It was defeated by the clergy themselves, who preferred to vote their aids in convocation, their own especial assembly or provincial council; which, also during the reign of Edward I, was a few years earlier reconstituted on the representative basis, in two divisions, one at London and the other at York. The convocations, which were summoned by the archbishops and were divided according to the provinces, the measure of representation differing in the two, must be care