The Constitutional History of England

Constitutional History I Ref resent ation 71as great vassals of the king ; they were both ; but the assemblyis a court of tenants in chief. Now we can hardly say thatthe clauses of the charter which require the consent of anassembly of this kind to the imposition of a scutage or aidever became part of the law of the realm. They were notrepeated in any later edition of the charter. Henry 111at his coronation was a child in the hands of WilliamMarshall the great Earl of Pembroke, rector regis et regni, thehead of the English baronage, and the king's guardians andministers may have thought it undesirable that their handsshould be bound by such clauses at a moment of grave perilwhen the foreigner was in the realm, and bonds may haveseemed needless. This is not to be regretted; had theseclauses become a permanent part of the law Parliament mighthave formed itself on strictly feudal lines ; we might have hadthe Scottish parliament instead of the English. As it was,the necessity for raising money forced the king to negotiatewith all classes of his realm. Henry was a thriftless, shiftlessking, always extravagant and always poor. The meetings ofthe national assembly during his reign were many. Probablythey were summoned in accordance with the principle laiddown in the charter of 1215, the major barons being summonedindividually, the lesser tenants in chief by general writsaddressed to the sheriff. To such an assembly, held on theoccasion of the king's marriage in I 236, we owe the Statute ofMerton. These meetings were realities ; counsel and consentcould no longer be taken for granted ; under John the baronagehad learned to act together as a whole. Demands for moneyare met by demands for reform-demands which sometimesseem startling even to us. From I234 onwards Henry wastrying to rule without great ministers, without justiciar,chancellor, or treasurer. The scheme which from time totime pleases the baronage is that of a small number of ministersor counsellors appointed by and answerable to the commoncouncil of the realm. Henry was lavish with promises whichare always broken.Meanwhile the representative principle was growing. Thenotion of the representation of a community by some of itsmembers must have been old. Already in the Leges HenriciPrjmj we find that in the local courts the townships arerepresented by the priest, the reeve and four of the bestmen1. This usage may already have been very old. Certainlyat a little later date we find that the county court when summonedin all its fulness to meet the king's justices in theireyres comprises not only all the free tenants of the shire, butalso a representation of the boroughs and townships, fromevery township four lawful men and the reeve, from everyborough twelve lawful burgesses2. The whole system of trialby jury in its earliest form implies representations-a personis tried by the country, by the neighbourhood, yonit se superpatriam, super vicinetum. The voice of the jurors is theverdict of the country, veredictum patriae. When we lookat the eyre rolls of this time (there are plenty of rolls fromthe first years of Henry 111) we are struck by the deeproot which this notion has taken :-the whole county ispresent and can speak its mind, every hundred is present,every township-the hundred of Berkeley says this, thetownship (villnta) of Stow says that; the county, thehundreds, the townships can be amerced and fined for neglectof their police duties or for saying what is false. Butrepresentation does not necessarily imply election by therepresented ; representatives may be chosen by a publicofficer or by lot. However in I 194 we find that the juriesfor the various hundreds are appointed thus: four lawfulknights are elected from the county, who choose two lawfulknights from each hundred, who again choose ten lawfulknights from the hundred to make with themselves thetwelve jurors for the hundred. The coroners again from thefirst moment of their institution in I 194 had been elected bythe county. This local organization had, we have seen, beenmade use of for fiscal purposes ; assessments to taxes onmovables and even on land had been made by local juries.At an exceptional crisis in 1213 four lawful men with thereeve from the vills of the royal demesne had been calledon to meet the bishops and barons, and in the same year fourdiscreet men from each shire had been summoned ad Zoquen-Sebct Charters, p. 105, VII, 7.ib. p. 358.