real representation, not of any single order or class, but of the whole English nation. This system of representation, which has grown and widened from humble beginnings until it has become the dominant force in the constitution, derived its original vitality from the fact that the representatives of the lesser landholders, who were for a long time the strength of the country, severed themselves from the baronage,1 and then united upon equal terms with the representatives of the towns in the formation of the third estate. The third estate in England thus acquired a vital element of strength which in continental lands it did not possess. How the representatives of the shire and town communities were chosen, and how they were drawn together and happily united in a single chamber, are questions which must be worked out hereafter in connection with the growth of parliament. From what has now been said, the fact appears that, al- Summary. though the elements out of which the three estates were organized existed from the very earliest times, the causes through which these elements were finally worked into a definite and formal shape sprang directly from the Norman conquest. The forces which the Conquest put in motion brought about not only the severance of the clergy from the laity, but the division of the laity themselves into the two estates of the baronage and the commons. The process of definition which begins with the Conquest is completed by the end of the reign of Edward I. The parliaments of Eadward were assemblies of estates; in them each estate or order appeared in person or by representatives. But the process of definition was by no means complete when the struggle for the charters begins. It was in the course of that struggle, in which each class or order was fighting primarily to establish its own special rights and privileges, that the corporate identity of each estate was definitely and permanently defined. 3. The statement has heretofore been made that the struggle for the charters did not grow out of the mere possession by wise and politic princes of the type of Henry I., and of the estate of the nobles."- Freeman, Growth of the English Constitution, p. 130. 1 "In most other countries the class of men who were returned as representatives of the counties, the knights of the shire, would have been members of the royal class in the reign of Richard I. Taxation under his grandson Henry II., of vast and practically unlimited. powers which were never deliberately employed for purposes of oppression merely. Not until the grinding weight of the royal authority was heedlesly and wantonly applied by careless despots to the oppression of all classes and conditions of men did the collective people, in the persons of the three estates, rise up to grapple with the crown in a struggle for the establishment of rights which were made eternal. With Pressure of the wanton and irritating pressure of the royal authority authority upon every class in the reign of Richard I., the struggle for upon every the charters really begins. The royal statesman and financier who preceded Richard, while engaged in the work of reorganizing the general system of administration, remodelled. and expanded with special care the machinery of taxation. Until the latter part of the reign of Henry II. all taxation, Henry II. excepting the customs, fell upon the land, and consisted (1) of the ancient customary dues, and the tax on the hide, -survivals of the Old-English system; and (2) of the feudal incidents, and the scutage or tax on the knight's fee, — products of the new system of military tenures. Leaving out of view the ancient customary dues and the feudal incidents, the two land taxes that stand prominently forth are the Old-English tax on the hide, whether known as aid, hidage, carucage, or, in the case of towns, talliage; and the new feudal tax on the knight's fee known as scutage. These two taxes affected two distinct classes of land-owners: the scutage was the tax assessed upon the lands of the tenants-in-chivalry, the hidage. or carucage upon the lands of the freeholders. Only on rare occasions were both of these taxes imposed at once; as a general rule, a year marked by grant of a scutage was not marked by the grant of a carucage. But as Henry's reign drew to a close, tempted by the great development in national wealth which had followed his policy of reform and order, he determined to widen the basis of taxation by a marked innovation. With the consent of a great council held at Geddington in 1188, Henry brought taxation to bear of personal directly upon personal property by decreeing a tithe of a Land taxes: hidage; scutage. Taxation property. tenth of movables to aid the common host of Christendom in retaking the Holy City from Saladin. In order fairly to assess the tithe, Henry resorted to his favorite institution of inquest by the oaths of local jurors. Whenever any one was suspected of contributing less than his share, four or six lawful men of the parish were chosen to declare on oath what he should give. In this way the representative principle is first brought into contact with the system of taxation.1 The fruit of this enlarged and improved system, embracing not only land but personal property, was a gross receipt from all sources, in the last year of Henry's reign, of £48,000.2 And according to one chronicler, his treasure at the time of his death amounted to the improbable sum of £900,000.3 At the death of Henry the vigorous system of taxation which he had constructed with care and wielded with moderation passed into the hands of a spendthrift knight-errant, who from the beginning to the end of his reign strained it to the limit of its capacity to support brilliant adventures in foreign lands in which his people had little or no real concern. From Taxation a constitutional standpoint, the reign of Richard I. is chiefly Richard I. interesting in so far as it illustrates the improvements in the system of taxation suggested by its constant use, and the oppressions which arose out of its incessant application to all classes and conditions of men. Richard's first act after his accession was to seize upon his father's treasure, which he augmented by the sale of every available species of property, or office, or feudal right for which he could find a purchaser, from the disposal of the royal wards in marriage up to the sale of the supremacy over Scotland. With the money thus hastily accumulated during the few months of his sojourn in his English kingdom, he sailed in December, 1189, for Palestine. During his absence, which, with the exception of his sojourn after his captivity, was coextensive with his reign, the administration of the kingdom was committed in turn to four ciars. justiciars, who would no doubt have wielded the royal au 1 For the authorities upon the subject of taxation as it existed in the reign of Henry II. see above, p. 298. 2 Cf. Pipe Roll of the 1st Richard I. for the year ending at Michælmas, 1189. 3 "Et inventa fuerunt et numero et pondere plusquam nongenta millia librarum in auro et argento."-Benedictus, vol. ii. pp. 76, 77. Hoveden makes a much smaller estimate,-"excedens numerum et valentiam centum millia marcarum.”. - Vol. iii. p. 8; see note 2, R. S. Benedictus, vol. ii. pp. 90, 91. "Willelmus rex Scottorum dedit Ricardo regi Angliæ decem millia marcarum sterlingorum."— Ibid., p. 98. 5 "The English history of the reign is, then, the history, not of Richard, but of his ministers; of the administrations of his four successive justiciars, William Longchamp, Walter of Coutances, under Adminis trations of the justi to raise som. thority with wisdom and moderation had it not been for the The effort increasing pecuniary demands of their reckless master. In 1192, during the justiciarship of the archbishop of Rouen, Richard made his first great demand for money from the prison of the duke of Austria, who held him for a ransom of £100,000, double the whole revenue of his kingdom.1 Hubert Walter, who visited his master in captivity, was appointed to the then vacant see of Canterbury,2 and sent home to aid the justiciar in raising the ransom. Although the machinery of taxation was strained to the utmost by the taking of an aid of 20s. on the knight's fee, by the imposition of a carucage and talliage which fell upon all other lands, by the seizure of the wool of the Cistercians and the treasures - even the chalices of the churches, and by the exaction of one fourth of movables, still the whole sum demanded could not be raised. By the payment of what could be raised, and by surrendering his kingdom into the hands of the emperor and receiving it back again as a fief, Richard purchased his release from captivity, which was followed in March 1194,5 by his second and last visit to England. Richard's last visit to England. The second visit, like the first, was for the purpose of putsecond and ting everything salable to auction, and of collecting through the machinery of taxation every shilling that could be wrung out of every class of tax-payers. In a great council held at Nottingham in April, after putting up the offices for sale, he asked for a carucage, for a third part of the service of the knights, and for the wool of the Cistercians. In addition to these demands, he directed the justices to make a visitation of the shires under a commission which contemplated a general review of the whole system of local administration.7 Under the itinerant system as then organized, the justices Hubert Walter, and Geoffrey Fitz 1 Hoveden, vol. iii. pp. 208, 210, 217, 2 Elected to Canterbury, May, 1193. Hoveden, vol. iii. p. 213; becomes justiciar at Christmas, 1193. R. Diceto, c. 671. 3 See Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 501, and note 1. 4 Hoveden, vol. iii. p. 202. Hove den adds that the emperor on his death-bed released him from the tribute of £5,000 a year. 5 Lands at Sandwich, March 13, 1194 (Hoveden, vol. iii. p. 235), and sails for Normandy May 12 of the same year (Ibid., p. 251). For the proceedings of the council, see Hoveden, vol. iii. pp. 240-243. 7 As to the history of the important Iter of 1194, see Hoveden, vol. iii. pp. 262-267; Gervase, c. 1588; and also Select Charters (2d ed.), p. 258. of the jus were charged under their commissions not only with judicial Visitation but fiscal business. It was their duty not only to hear tices in causes, but, as a local court of exchequer, to inquire into and 1194. enforce the rights of the crown to all dues arising out of wardships, marriages, advowsons, escheats, sergeantries, measures, wines, franchises, and coinage, markets and tolls, together with all other proprietary and feudal rights to which the king was entitled. The sums which arose from these sources, added to the fines, amercements, and forfeitures which resulted from the administration of the criminal law, constituted a very material item in the royal revenue.1 The "Iter of 1194" is memorable not only for the relation which it bears to the constitution of the grand jury, as heretofore explained, but for its comprehensive and oppressive character. Among other things, the justices were commanded to collect a talliage from all cities, towns, and demesnes of the king.2 In 1196 the king, being impatient at the delay in the progress of the visitation, sent over new agents to impart fresh energy to the work. In this year it was that the poorer citizens of London, under the leadership of William Fitz-Osbert, broke Popular out into open revolt at the manner in which the talliage was under collected. The poorer people contended that as the talliage Fitzwas collected by poll, instead of being assessed according to the property of each tax-payer, an unequal part of the burden fell upon them. Although Fitz-Osbert was slain and the outbreak put down, without apparent benefit to those who were engaged in it, the occurrence serves to indicate the severity of the distress among the people at large resulting from the continuous and persistent pressure of royal taxation. rising Osbert. onage to Two years later a fresh demand for money from the bar- Opposition onage led to a revolt in a higher sphere. In a council held of the barat Oxford in 1198, the king demanded from the baronage taxation in through the justiciar that they should furnish him for his war in Normandy three hundred knights to serve for a year at 1 All this is clearly explained by Sir James Fitz-James Stephen in his great history of the Criminal Law, vol. i. p. IOI seq. 2"(XXII.) Præterea tailleantur omnes civitates, et burgi, et dominica domini regis."- Hoveden, vol. iii. p. 264. 8 Ibid, vol. iv. p. 5; William of Newburgh, v. c. 19. For the history of the rising, see Will. Newb. v. c. 20; R. Diceto, c. 691; Hoveden, vol. iv. pp. 5, 6, and preface, vol. iv. p. lxxxix. See, also, Palgrave's preface to the Rotuli Curiæ Regis. 1198. |