488 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE France against England which was to be often renewed in the course of the later Middle Ages. The Scottish patriot leader, Wallace, was captured and cruelly executed in 1305, but Robert Bruce continued the struggle against annexa- tion, Edward II was decisively defeated at Bannockburn, and Scotland remained an independent country. Edward I was more successful against Wales, which he subjugated and divided into shires in English fashion, but to which he did not grant representation in Parliament. The Welsh revolted several times against English rule dur- ing the later Middle Ages, but without success, and the oldest son of the English king has borne the title Prince of Wales ever since the reign of Edward I. It should not be thought that England alone among medieval lands possessed parliamentary institutions. In Medieval most states of western Europe there developed representa- f rom the feudal courts of the great lords, whether blies outside kings or dukes or counts, tax-granting and legis- England l a tive bodies representing the three " estates" of clergy, feudal landed nobility, and townsmen. Such assem- blies existed in Normandy, Vermandois, Brittany, Artois, Burgundy, Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and elsewhere. The Cortes or "Courts" of Aragon embraced four instead of three estates, since the nobles divided into great and small like the English barons and knights of the shire. Nation al senti ment mad e itself fe lt in Aragon in a united protest of the estat es agai nst Peter IPs submissio nto Innocen t III ten years before the English baronsTorced " jtheir king , John, an other of Innocent's vassals, to sign Magna Carta . In Aragon as in England the Cortes came to insist that their grievances must be redressed before they would grant the king taxes, and no law could be enacted without the consent of all four estates. The King of Den- mark in 1250 called representatives of the towns to his coro- nation assembly (Reichstag). He died on a campaign against Frisian peasants who had refused to pay a new tax called the "Plough-Penny." His successors during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had to consent at the-
