СНАР.

IV.

Germ of

sentative System.

If, however, the Great Charter offered no remedy here, there were in existence forces which would sooner or later come to the front. In the counties the old shire§ II. mote, under the Norman name of the county court, was the Repremore than ever flourishing. It was accustomed to elect persons to assess taxation locally in concert with the judges. Sooner or later, the system which prevailed locally was certain to make itself felt in the conduct of the general affairs of the nation. Even John himself had dimly recognised the value of the support which might thus be gained, and had summoned elected knights on one or two occasions to meet him on affairs of public importance. The time had not yet arrived when the representative system could take permanent shape. For the barons the immediate question was not so much how the Great Council was to be constituted in the future, as how the existing king was to be controlled or deposed. John soon showed that no promises could bind him, and the barons, in despair of a successful resistance, invited Lewis-the son of the king of France, and the husband of John's niece-to replace him on the throne, much in the same way that their descendants invited William of Orange to replace James II.

§ 12.

of Henry

Accession

III. and

the modi

Charter.

Happily John's death rendered the step unnecessary, `and his son, then a mere boy, was soon universally accepted as Henry III. Those who acted in his name declared their adhesion to the Great Charter. But the fied clause binding the king to levy the feudal aids and scutages only on a grant from the Council was omitted. When Henry grew up to manhood, he showed himself less vigorously tyrannical than his father. But he was a weak and heartless spendthrift, throwing money freely away on himself, and still more freely on a swarm of foreigners, the relatives and connexions of his mother

CHAP.
IV.

§13. Extinction of

Papal Influence.

and of his wife, for whom he seemed to think that nothing in England was too good His ever-craving need drove back those whose money he demanded upon the theory of the invalidity of a royal demand for taxation without the consent of the Council, while at the same time it led them to make the foundations of that Council as broad as possible in order that all classes might present a united front to a common danger.

In such a conflict, with dangers on every side, the national institutions of Englishmen were hardened as in the fire. Above all there was the danger lest, in a contest in defence of property, however nobly waged, the habit of looking after the right to money should lead to mere selfish faction, and that when once the king had been restrained, the strong would trample on the weak, and the rich would grind the faces of the poor Never is it more necessary than in times of civil strife to keep warm the heart and to maintain the sense of brotherhood. Nor was the civil strife of the thirteenth century without special dangers of its own. Hitherto the ecclesiastical organisation, with the Pope at its head, had kept alive a sense of unity amidst the distractions of feudal warfare. Everywhere through Western Christendom, the Church had been the protector of the helpless, the advocate of peace, the protector against violence and wrong. Everywhere the Pope could be looked up to as the common father. But there were signs that it would not be so much longer. Innocent III. had taken part distinctly with John, wicked and bloodthirsty as he was, as soon as John had acknowledged him as his feudal superior; and though Honorius II., who followed him, had done much to help on the pacification which ensued on the accession of Henry, neither his influence nor that of his successors was likely to be exercised in giving any support to the growth of a constitutional control

by subjects over their sovereign. As an ecclesiastical autocracy, the papacy was certain to oppose the development of free institutions in the state; whilst, as a universal system, the highest merit of which was that it placed itself above distinctions of race, of language, and of government, it was equally certain to look askance upon the tightening bonds of nationality which were causing Englishmen to regard foreigners as unfit to take part in the management of English affairs. And at the same time that the papacy was losing its intelligent perception of the real wants of Englishmen, circumstances led it to make the heaviest demands upon the purses of Englishmen. Two successive popes, Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., engaged in a deadly struggle with the Emperor Frederick II. The object of that struggle, even at its commencement, had very little of a spiritual nature in it. The popes no longer, as in the eleventh century, burned with zeal for the reform of the Church and the world. They wanted chiefly to maintain their independence as temporal sovereigns. For this they fought ; for this they sent emissary after emissary to England, subjecting the English clergy and laity to taxation, and infringing on the rights of lay patrons as well as clerical expectants by the appointment of needy Italians to English benefices. It was not long before the pope came to be regarded as merely one foreign bloodsucker the more, as mischievous as the brothers-in-law of the king, who cared for nothing in England except its wealth.

СНАР.

IV.

Friars.

In the sturdy growth of a national feeling lay the § 14. The strength of England. But it was not without its own risks. There was a danger lest a claim to power, arising from the desire to guard the purse, should end in a struggle for pelf rather than in an increase of righteous rule, and that the pursuit of material objects should lead in the end to disintegration rather than to union. Once

CHAP.
IV.

more England had to look abroad for the remedy. The
new thought came across the sea with the Friars, and
more especially with the Franciscans, the followers of
Francis of Assisi, the gentle mystical Italian, rather than
with those of Dominic, the combative and persecuting
Spaniard. The friars were the last helpful gift of the
medieval Church to the world. Like the old monks in
their self-abnegation, and in their complete renunciation
of the pleasures and interests of the world, the friars in-
troduced an entirely new element into the ecclesiastical
system. The monk stood apart from humanity for his own
soul's welfare, crucifying the flesh in order that the spirit
might live, and teaching indirectly by example, and not,
except accidentally, by direct word or guidance. The
friar's work was carried on, not in retired cloisters but in
the busy haunts of men. He lived not for himself but
for others. Wherever men were most wretched, struck
down by the most loathsome of diseases, or pinched and
hunger-starved with famine, there the little mission chapel
of the friars was raised. Francis of Assisi wooed, in his
own mystical language, poverty as his bride; but it was
poverty revealed in others as well as in himself. The
world for him was not a haunt of demons to be avoided
at the peril of eternal death, but a home of sin and
misery to be healed and alleviated. Whilst
Whilst pope and
emperor, king and baron, were contending for this world's
goods, the Franciscan drew close the golden bond of
charity, and told not in word, but in very deed, of the
love which is stronger to draw together than this world's
goods are powerful to separate. They had their reward
even in that of which they were most careless. The
intellectual sway of the world, the organising of its
science, even what knowledge of its physical laws was
then possible, fell into their hands. Thomas Aquinas
and Roger Bacon were of the friars. Even in political

change their weight was felt. In the English constitutional struggle, the man whose influence was ever used to exalt the standard of right and to bind together the hostile elements of faction, was one who had imbibed their teaching most deeply-Earl Simon de Montfort was a pupil of the friars.

CHAP.

IV.

It is possible that Earl Simon's foreign origin may § 15. Sihave had something to do with the freshness of insight mon de which enabled him to look to the bottom of our English difficulties. Fully assuming his position as an Englishman, and associating himself completely with the struggles of the English baronage, he saw, ever more clearly as the conflict with the king continued, that the substitution of the government of an irresponsible aristocracy for an irresponsible king would not be a gain to anyone. The Provisions of Oxford in 1258, which were in the main the work of the baronage, contemplated some such a settlement as this. Earl Simon's own arrangements, made after the victory of Lewes in 1264, contemplated a national constitution.

scheme of a represen

Parlia

For some time knights had been sent with increasing § 16. His frequency to represent the smaller landowners in Parliament. Almost accidentally the barrier between tenants tative in chief, and subtenants, and again between subtenants ment. and ordinary freeholders had been broken down. If knights were to be sent to parliament at all, there was no machinery for their election except in the county court, and the county court was still what it had been as the shiremote before the Conquest, the place of the meeting of landowners irrespective of the nature of their tenure. The step from a feudal to a national assembly was thus taken without any special contrivance by any special statesman. But it could not have been taken unless the fusion of feudal and nonfeudal elements in parliament had already been completed in the nation.