Part 4 (1/2)
These views found expression in the coronation oath. Edward II. was forced to swear:
”Will you grant and keep, and by your oath confirm to the people of England the laws and customs to them, granted by the ancient kings of England, your righteous and G.o.dly predecessors; and especially to the clergy and people, by the glorious King St. Edward, your predecessor?”
The king's answer--”I do them grant and promise.”
”Do you grant to hold and keep the laws and rightful customs which the commonalty of your realm shall have chosen, and to maintain and enforce them to the honor of G.o.d after your power?”
The king's answer--”I this do grant and promise.”
I shall not dwell upon the event most frequently quoted with reference to the era of the Plantagenets--I mean King John's ”Magna Charta.” It was more social than territorial, and tended to limit the power of the Crown, and to increase that of the barons. The Plantagenets had not begun to call Commons to the House of Lords. The issue of writs was confined to those who were barons-by-tenure, the PATRICIANS of the Norman period. The creation of n.o.bLES was the invention of a later age.
The baron feasted in his hall, while the slave grovelled in his cabin.
Bracton, the famous lawyer of the time of Henry III., says: ”All the goods a slave acquired belonged to his master, who could take them from him whenever he pleased,” therefore a man could not purchase his own freedom. ”In the same year, 1283,” says the Annals of Dunstable, ”we sold our slave by birth, William Fyke, and all his family, and received one mark from the buyer.” The only hope for the slave was, to try and get into one of the walled towns, when he became free. Until the Wars of the Roses, these serfs were greatly hara.s.sed by their owners.
In the reign of Edward I., efforts were made to prevent the alienation of land by those who received it from the Norman sovereigns. The statute of mortmain was pa.s.sed to restrain the giving of lands to the Church, the statute DE DONIS to prevent alienation to laymen. The former declares:
”That whereas religious men had entered into the fees of other men, without license and will of the chief lord, and sometimes appropriating and buying, and sometimes receiving them of gift of others, whereby the services that are due of such fee, and which, in the beginning, were provided for the defence of the realm, are wrongfully withdrawn, and the chief lord do lose the escheats of the same (the primer seizin on each life that dropped); it therefore enacts: That any such lands were forfeited to the lord of the fee; and if he did not take it within twelve months, it should be forfeited to the king, who shall enfeoff other therein by certain services to be done for us for the defence of the realm.”
Another act, the 6th Edward I., cap. 3, provides:
”That alienation by the tenant in courtesy was void, and the heir was ent.i.tled to succeed to his mother's property, notwithstanding the act of his father.”
The 13th Edward I., cap. 41, enacts:
”That if the abbot, priors, and keepers of hospitals, and other religious houses, aliened their land they should be seized upon by the king.”
The 13th Edward I., cap. 1, DE DONIS conditionalitiis, provided:
”That tenements given to a man, and the heirs of his body, should, at all events, go to the issue, if there were any; or, if there were none, should revert to the donor.”
But while the fiefs of the Crown were forbidden to alien their lands, the FREEMEN, whose lands were Odhal (n.o.ble) and of Saxon descent, the inheritance of which was guaranteed to them by 55 William I. (ANTE, p.
13), were empowered to sell their estates by the statute called QUIA EMPTORES (6 Edward I.). It enacts:
”That from henceforth it shall be lawful to every FREEMEN to sell, at his own pleasure, his lands and tenements, or part of them: so that the feoffee shall hold the same lands and tenements of the chief lord of the fee by such customs as his feoffee held before.”
The scope of these laws was altered in the reign of Edward III. That monarch, in view of his intended invasion of France, secured the adhesion of the landowners, by giving them power to raise money upon and alien their estates. The permission was as follows, 1 Edward III., cap.
12:
”Whereas divers people of the realm complain themselves to be grieved because that lands and tenements which be holden of the king in chief, and aliened without license, have been seized into the king's hand, and holden as forfeit: (2.) The king shall not hold them as forfeit in such case, but will and grant from henceforth of such lands and tenements so aliened, there shall be reasonable fine taken in chancery by due process.”
1 Edward III., cap. 13:
”Whereas divers have complained that they be grieved by reason of purchasing of lands and tenements, which have been holden of the king's progenitors that now is, as of honors; and the same lands have been taken into the king's hands, as though they had been holden in chief of the king as of his crown: (2.) The king will that from henceforth no man be grieved by any such purchase.”
De Lolme, chap. iii., sec. 3, remarks on these laws that they took from the king all power of preventing alienation or of purchase. They left him the reversionary right on the failure of heirs.
These changes in the relative power of the sovereign and the n.o.bles took place to enable Edward to enter upon the conquest of France; but that monarch, conferred a power upon the barons, which was used to the detriment of his descendants, and led to the dethronement of the Plantagenets.
The line of demarcation between the two sets of t.i.tles, those derived through the ANGLO-SAXON laws and those derived through the grants of the Norman sovereigns, was gradually being effaced. The people looked back to the laws of Edward the Confessor, and forced them upon Edward II.
But after pa.s.sing the laws which prevented n.o.bles from selling, and empowering FREEMEN to do so, Edward III. found it needful to a.s.sert his claims to the entire land of England, and enacted in the twenty-fourth year of his reign: