The Three Edwards by Thomas B. Costain

the sacred princes, exhorts and ordains that that which touches all shall be approved by all, it is very evident that common dangers must be met by measures concerted in common.” Thus was a great truth laid down which was to continue as the guiding principlethrough the centuries while parliamentary procedure and power were being tested and corrected and finally brought to a working degree of perfection.
    At this great gathering, in order to complete the representation, were the archbishops and bishops, attended (for consultation only) by their archdeacons and proctors.
    This momentous gathering is generally referred to as the Model Parliament because it came so close to settling the form which parliamentary deliberations would finally assume. Edward’s plan, to have the three bodies deliberate separately, was the forerunner of the separation finally effected into two houses, the House of Lords, in which the peers and the bishops sat, and the House of Commons.
    It was a model Parliament in one other respect: it helped in the selection of Westminster as the one place of meeting. There had been a tendency to wander about in previous reigns, and often the barons had been summoned to Winchester, Northampton, or Oxford. Edward, being so continuously on the wing, had fallen into the habit of holding Parliament wherever he happened to be. There were sessions at Winchester, Northampton, Shrewsbury, Acton Burnell, Bury St. Edmunds, Clipstone in Sherwood Forest, Berwick, and Salisbury. This suited the king’s convenience, but it was exasperating for the barons and bishops to be under the necessity of collecting their people and following the dusty-footed monarch all over the kingdom. The journey had to be made by those on horseback with trains of fifty or more servitors, knights, squires, valets, chirurgeons, confessors, grooms, men-at-arms, and archers. It is hard to conceive how the multitudes which constitute a parliament could be housed and fed in, say, Clipstone, where the king had a hunting lodge with the usual small houses about it, a chapel and a mill, and no towns within easy distance. Even Bury St. Edmunds, which had been a royal town in Saxon times but was still relatively small, was hard pressed by the scores of cavalcades converging on it from every direction. What scrambling there must have been to provide food for so many hearty eaters and to find sleeping quarters for them all! Sometimes the deliberations had to be held in churches, inadequate castles, and even in large barns. If the energetic Edward found himself greeted with glum faces when he stalked in to Parliament to express his royal will, it may often have been the result not of dissent with his program but of the great discomforts the members were suffering. Twenty years of this dancing to the royal tune led to a general acceptance of Westminster as the place to meet.
2
    The barons of England, who had forced King John to his knees and had been at odds, and sometimes at war, with Henry III all through the long reign of that exasperating monarch, were not entirely in accord with the forward-looking policies of Edward. They were inclined to hang back, to mutter their disagreement, even to adopt open measures of opposition. They were intensely jealous of their rights, and some of Edward’s wise lawmaking seemed to them to tread too heavily on the iron-shod toes of feudal privilege. Nor did they favor the bringing of the bran-dealers and soap-boilers into the halls where the laws were made.
    They said so openly at a meeting of Parliament which Edward called for February 25, 1297. He was at Salisbury at the time and accordingly the session was held in that ancient town. War with France had blazed up, owing in part to some hostilities between the sailors of the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, Sandwich, Winchelsea, and Rye) and the fishermen from Normandy. There was a wily and ambitious king on the French throne, Philip IV (all through this phase of