generally prevalent. The feeling is thoroughly well expressed
by the partisan of Montfort who wrote in his jingling Latin
verse:—
| “Dicitur vulgariter ‘ut rex vult lex vadit’: Veritas vult aliter: nam lex stat, rex cadit.” |
Law has become something greater than, and independent of, royal caprice. The great lawyers of the day, of whom Bracton is the most celebrated name, were spinning theories of its origin and development, studying Roman precedents, and turning the medley of half-understood Saxon and Norman customs into a system.
Intellectual growth was accompanied by great religious activity; it is no longer merely on the old questions of dispute between church and state that men were straining their minds. The reign of Henry III. saw the invasion of England by the friars, originally the moral reformers Religious life: the friars. of their day, who preached the superiority of the missionary life over the merely contemplative life of the old religious orders, and came, preaching holy poverty, to minister to souls neglected by worldly incumbents and political prelates (see Mendicant Movement). The mendicants, Dominican and Franciscan, took rapid root in England; the number of friaries erected in the reign of Henry III. is astounding. For two generations they seem to have absorbed into their ranks all the most active and energetic of those who felt a clerical vocation. It is most noteworthy that they were joined by thinkers such as Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Still more striking is the fact that the friars threw themselves energetically into the cause of political reform, and that several of their leading brothers were the close friends and counsellors of Simon de Montfort.
Architecture and art generally were making rapid strides during this stirring time. The lofty Early English style had now completely superseded the more heavy and sombre Norman, and it was precisely during the years of the maladministration of Henry III. that some of Literature and art. the most splendid of the English cathedrals, Salisbury (1220–1258) and Wells (1230–1239), were built. The king himself, when rearing the new Westminster Abbey over the grave of Edward the Confessor, spent for once some of his money on a worthy object. It may be noted that he showed a special reverence for the old English royal saint, and christened his eldest son after him; while his second bore the name of Edmund, the East Anglian martyr. These were the first occasions on which princes of the Angevin house received names that were not drawn from the common continental stock, but recalled the days before the Conquest. The reappearance of these old English names bears witness to the fact that the vernacular was reasserting itself. Though French was still the language of the court and of law, a new literature was already growing up in the native tongue, with such works as Layamon’s Brut and the Ormulum as its first fruits. Henry III. himself on rare occasions used English for a state document.
All these facts make it sufficiently clear that England was irritated rather than crushed by Henry’s irregular taxation and thriftless expenditure. The nation was growing and prospering, despite of its master’s maladministration of its resources. On several occasions when he endeavoured to commit parliaments to back his bills and endorse his policy, they refused to help him, and left him to face his debts as best he might. This was especially the case with the insane contract which he made with Pope Innocent IV. in 1254, when he bound the realm of England to find 140,000 marks to equip an army for the conquest of Naples and Sicily. Henry lacked the energy to attempt to take by force what he could not obtain by persuasion, and preferred to break his bargain with the pope rather than to risk the chance of civil war at home.
It was over this Sicilian scheme, the crowning folly of the
king, that public opinion at last grew so hot that the intermittent
criticism and grumbling of the baronage and the nation passed
into vigorous and masterful action. At the “Mad Parliament,”
which met at Oxford, 1258, the barons informed their masterPublic discontent. The Provisions
of Oxford.
that his misgovernment had grown so hopeless that they were
resolved to put him under constitutional restraints.
They appointed a committee of twenty-four, in which
Simon de Montfort was the leading spirit, and entrusted
it with the duty, not only of formulating
lists of grievances, but of seeing that they were redressed.
Henry found that he had practically no supporters
save his unpopular foreign relatives and favourites, and yielded
perforce. To keep him in bounds the celebrated “Provisions
of Oxford” were framed. They provided that he was to do
nothing without the consent of a permanent council of fifteen
barons and bishops, and that all his finances were to be controlled
by another committee of twenty-four persons. All aliens were
to be expelled from the realm, and even the king’s household
was to be “reformed” by his self-constituted guardians. The
inevitable oath to observe honestly all the conditions of the
Great Charter of 1215 was, as usual, extorted from him with
special formalities. Though Montfort and the barons voiced the
public discontent, the constitution which they thus imposed
on the king had nothing popular about it. The royal functions
of which Henry was stripped were to be exercised by a series of
baronial committees. The arrangement was too cumbersome,
for there was nothing which would be called a central executive;
the three bodies (two of twenty-four members each, the
third of fifteen) were interdependent, and none of them possessed
efficient control over the others. It was small wonder
that the constitution established by the Provisions of Oxford
was found unworkable. They were not even popular—the
small landholders and subtenants discovered that their interests
had not been sufficiently regarded, and lent themselves to an
agitation against the provisional government, which was got
up by Edward, the king’s eldest son, who now appeared prominently
in history for the first time. To conciliate them the
barons allowed the “Provisions of Westminster” to be enacted
in 1259, in which the power of feudal courts was considerably
restricted, and many classes of suit were transferred to the royal
tribunals, a sufficient proof that the king’s judges did not share
in the odium which appertained to their master, and were regarded
as honest and impartial.
The limited monarchy established by the Provisions of Oxford lasted only three years. Seeing the barons quarrelling among themselves, and Montfort accused of ambition and overweening masterfulness by many of his colleagues, the king took heart. Copying the example of his father in 1215, he obtained from the pope a bull, which declared the new constitution irregular and illegal, and absolved him from his oath to abide by it. He then began to recall his foreign friends and relatives, and to assemble mercenaries. De Montfort answered by raising an army, arresting prominent aliens, and seizing the lands which the king had given them. Henry thereupon, finding his forces too weak to face the earl, took refuge in the Tower of London and proposed an arbitration. He offered to submit his case to Louis IX., the saintly king of France, whose virtues were known and respected all over Europe, if the baronial party would do the same. An appeal to the pope they would have laughed to scorn; but the confidence felt in the probity of the French king was so great that Montfort advised his friends to accede to the proposal. This was an unwise step. Louis was a saint, but he was also an autocratic king, and had no knowledge of the constitutional customs of England. Having heard the claims of the king and the barons, he issued the mise of Amiens (Jan. 23, 1264), so called from the city at which he dated it, a document which stated that King Henry ought to abide by the terms of Magna Carta, to which he had so often given his assent, but that the Provisions of Oxford were wholly invalid and derogatory to the royal dignity. “We ordain,” he wrote, “that the king shall have full power and free jurisdiction over his realm, as in the days before the said Provisions.” The pope shortly afterwards confirmed the French king’s award.
Simon de Montfort and his friends were put in an awkward position by this decision, to which they had so unwisely
