as well as ad consulendum et consentiendum being the form of summons usual in the case of a Great Council. Edward I, in 1283, summons the representatives of the towns ad audiendum et faciendum; in 1294 he summons the knights of the shire ad consulendum et consentiendum, pro se et communitate illa, iis quæ comites, barones, et proceres prædicti ordinaverint, with which agrees the fact that, in 1290, they were not assembled until the legislative part of the work of the Parliament had been transacted. From the year 1295, however, the form is ad faciendum; under Edward II it becomes ad consentiendum et faciendum, to assent and enact. From this time, then, the commons were admitted to a share of the character of the sapientes, which in this respect the bishops and barons had engrossed since the Conquest, and the king was enabled to state with truth, as Edward I did to the pope, that the custom of England was, that in business affecting the state of the kingdom the counsel of all whom the matter touched should be required. The corresponding variations in the pramunientes clause summoning the clergy are: in 1295, ad tractandum, ordinandum, et jaciendum; in 1299, ad faciendum et consentiendum; from 1381, only ad consentiendum, a function adequately discharged by absence.

§ 12. Connection between Taxation and Representation

The share of the commons in taxation takes precedence of their share in legislation. The power of voting money was more necessary than that of giving counsel. Of this power, as it existed up to the date of Magna Carta, enough has been said. The witenagemot and its successor, the royal council of barons, could impose the old national taxes; the ordinary feudal exactions were matters of common law and custom, and the amount of them was limited by usage. But the extraordinary aids which Henry II and his sons substituted for the Danegeld, and the taxes on the demesne lands of the crown, were arbitrary in amount and incidence; the former clearly requiring, and the latter, on all moral grounds, not less demanding, an act of consent on the part of the payers. This right was early recognized; even John, as we have seen, asked his barons sometimes for grants, and treated with the demesne lands and towns through the Exchequer, with the clergy through the bishops and archdeacons.

Magna Carta enunciates the principle that the payers shall be called to the common council to vote the aids which had been

previously negotiated separately; but the clause was never confirmed by Henry III, nor was it applicable to the talliage of demesne. It is as the towns begin to increase, and at the same time taxation ceases to be based solely on land and begins to affect personal as well as real property, that the difficulties of the king and the hardships of the estates liable to talliage become important. The steps by which the king was compelled to give up the right of taking money without a parliamentary grant, are the same as those which led to the confirmation of the charters by Edward I. It was virtually surrendered in the clause then conceded in addition to the charter, which is commonly known under the form of the articles, de tallagio non concedendo. And this completed the taxative powers of Parliament. The further steps of development, the determination of the different proportions in which the various branches of the three estates voted their supplies, and the final engrossing of the taxing power by the House of Commons, the struggles by which the grants were made to depend on the redress of grievances, and the determination of the disposal of supplies assumed by the Parliament, belong to later history.

We have thus brought our sketch of constitutional history to the point of time at which the nation may be regarded as reaching its full stature. It has not yet learned its strength, nor accustomed itself to economize its power. To trace the process by which it learned the full strength of its organism, by which it learned to use its powers and forces with discrimination and effect; to act easily, effectually, and economically; or, to use another metaphor, to trace the gradual wear of the various parts of the machinery, until all roughness was smoothed, and all that was superfluous, entangling, and confusing was got rid of, and the balance of forces adjusted, and action made manageable and intelligible, and the power of adaptation to change of circumstances fully realized,is the story of later politics, of a process that is still going on, and must go on as the age advances, and men are educated into wider views of government, national unity, and political responsibility. We stop, however, with Edward I, because the machinery is now completed, the people are at full growth. The system is raw and untrained and awkward, but it is complete. The attaining of this point is to be attributed to the defining genius, the political wisdom, and the honesty of Edward I, building on the immemorial foundation of national custom; fitting together all that Henry I had planned, Henry II had organized, and the heroes of the thirteenth century had inspired with fresh life and energy.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Baldwin, Early Records of the King's Council, in the American Historical Review, October, 1905. Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chaps. xxiv-xxv. Hearn, The Government of England, chaps. xvi-xviii. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap. iii, for the organization of the county and borough. Pike, Constitutional History of the House of Lords. Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History, chaps. xvii and xviii. For the illustrative documents consult the Pennsylvania Translations and Reprints, Vol. I, no. 6.

CHAPTER VII

GROWTH OF PARLIAMENTARY POWERS

Ir was a long time after the Model Parliament of Edward I before Parliament took on a definite form of two houses, each with its settled customs and rules of procedure. A general account of this further development will be found in almost any good textbook, especially in Mr. Medley's excellent manual, English Constitutional History, chapter iv. While tracing the evolution of the forms of Parliament, the student must also observe an equally important process, that is, the development of the powers of the respective houses, not in an abstract fashion, but always in relation to concrete contemporary events. Originating as a feudal and taxing body, Parliament, in the struggle with the kings, attempted to control not only the amount and form of taxes, but also their expenditure. Furthermore, Parliament contended for the right to make new laws and restrain the king from arbitrary action in this sphere also. The methods by which these various claims to power were made effective are elaborately discussed by Dr. Stubbs in the seventeenth chapter of his Constitutional History, from which only a few passages can be given here.

§ 1. Parliamentary Control of Royal Ministers1

The idea of controlling expenditure and securing the redress of all administrative abuses by maintaining a hold upon the king's ministers, and even upon the king himself, appears in our history, as soon as the nation begins to assert its constitutional rights, in the executory clauses of the Great Charter. Three methods of attaining the end proposed recommended themselves at different

1 Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, Vol. II, chap. xvii. By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

times: these are analogous, in the case of the ministers, to the different methods by which, under various systems, the nation has attempted to restrain the exercise of royal power; the rule of election, the tie of the coronation oath, and the threats of deposition; and they are liable to the same abuses.

The scheme of limiting the irresponsible power of the king by the election of the great officers of state in Parliament has already been referred to as one of the results of the long minority of Henry III. It was in close analogy with the practice of election to bishoprics and abbacies, and to the theory of royal election itself. When, in 1244 and several succeeding years, the barons claimed the right of choosing the justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer, they probably intended that the most capable man should be chosen, and that his appointment should be, if not for life, at least revocable only by the consent of the nation in Parliament. The king saw more clearly perhaps than the barons that his power thus limited would be a burden rather than a dignity, and that no king worthy of the name could consent to be deprived of all freedom of action. Henry III pertinaciously resisted the proposal, and it was never even made to Edward I, although in one instance he was requested to dismiss an unpopular treasurer. Revived under Edward II, in the thirteenth and following articles of the Ordinances, and exercised by the ordainers when they were in power, it was defeated or dropped under Edward III; in 1341 the commons demanded that a fresh nomination of ministers should be made in every Parliament; Edward agreed, but repudiated the concession.

It was naturally enough again brought forward in the minority of Richard II. The commons petitioned in his first Parliament that the chancellor, treasurer, chief justices and chief baron, the steward and treasurer of the household, the chamberlain, privy seal, and wardens of the forests on each side of the Trent, might be appointed in Parliament; and the petition was granted and embodied in an ordinance for the period of the king's minority. In 1380 the commons again urged that the five principal ministers, the chancellor, treasurer, privy seal, chamberlain, and steward of the household should be elected in Parliament, and that the five chosen in the present Parliament might not be removed before the next session; the king replied by reference to the ordinance made in 1377. In 1381 they prayed that the king would appoint as chancellor the most efficient person he could find, whether spiritual or temporal; in 1383 that he would employ sage, honest, and discreet counsellors; and in 1385 he had to decline summarily to