NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 483 Prince Edward, the king's oldest son, protesting against it as too oligarchical. By this time the Great Council was coming to be called a "parliament," or meeting to talk things over. We have heard the same word used in the Italian cities simonde for a popular mass-meeting, parlamento, and in Montfort's France it came to be applied to the chief court of ar iamen justice, parlement. In England it was to be transformed from a council of magnates summoned by the king into a national assembly of two houses, one a hereditary body com- posed of nobles, the other a locally elected body represent- ing the commons or people. Under Simon de Montfort, a son of the leader of the Albigensian Crusade and for a time one of the king's foreign favorites, but who now took the lead in the movement toward reform, a parliament was held in 1265 to which were summoned not only prelates and greater barons, but two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns. But the next year Simon was defeated and slain in battle by royal forces under Prince Edward, who for a time had supported De Montfort, but then had become reconciled with his father. After the death of Simon, Prince Edward won back the other barons by his conciliatory attitude and then went off on a crusade. While he was thus absent, Henry _, ttt t. 1 t ,1- Edward I III died, but no attempt was made to dispute Edward's succession. He was the first truly English king since the Norman conquest. He was tall, with fair hair and red cheeks, and he had no liking either for foreign favorites or foreign ways. He opposed papal interference in English state affairs, and joined Philip the Fair of France in resisting Pope Boniface VIII, as the next chapter will tell. His reign (1 272-1 307) showed that the government of England was henceforth to be controlled neither by an absolute monarch nor by an oligarchy of nobles, but by a sovereign whose power was limited by the permanent existence of a national representative and legislative body. Edward adopted De Montfort's scheme of summoning
