NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 481 general are the articles correcting abuses in the administra- tion of justice and promising that no freeman shall be im- prisoned or punished without a legal trial, and that "to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice." It is noteworthy that there was such united action by the English feudal nobles against the Crown. This was largely due to the fact that all the great lords and many The Great of the lesser nobles held their lands directly of Counci1 the king, and that out of the feudal custom of court attend- ance, which as vassals they owed to their lord the king, had grown a great council of the leading nobles. It was at a meeting of this body in 12 13 that the agitation began which led to the signing of Magna Carta two years later. The Charter in turn assigned to the Great Council an important place in the government and declared that its assent was necessary for all taxes other than the three customary feudal aids. The Great Council had come to consist mainly of the leading nobles, because the number of tenants-in-chief who held their fiefs directly of the king was too great in England to make it advisable that all of them should be strictly held to the feudal duty of court attendance. The Charter there- fore directs that the king shall summon individually by letter the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, while other tenants-in-chief shall merely receive a general invitation from the sheriffs and bailiffs in the shire. In 12 16 John died while vainly struggling to repudiate the Charter and to crush the barons. He was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Henry III. During Henry's Misrule of minority the regency was shared between the Henr y ni papal legates, — for the pope as feudal overlord of England claimed Henry as his ward, — the barons, and Hubert de Burgh, one of the chief royal officials of John's reign. Their rule was on the whole conformable to the provisions of the Charter. But as the king came of age, he came into conflict, like his father before him, with the nobility of the realm. Henry was a better man than John and a sympathetic
