hat if there be in the said Charter any point obscure or
doubtful, it shall be declared by the said Ordainours, and others
whom they will, for that purpose, call to them, when they shall see
occasion and season during their power." Section XXXVIII: "That the
Great Charter ... and the Points which are doubtful in it be explained
by the advice of the Baronage and of the Justices, and of other sage
Persons of the Law." It was ordained that the king should not go out
of the realm, a precedent never violated until modern times, and even
followed by our own presidents, except for Roosevelt's trip to Panama
and Taft's to the borders of Mexico. Again we find "new customs"
abolished, "as upon Wools, Cloths, Wines, Avoir de pois, and other
Things, whereby the Merchants come more seldom, and bring fewer Goods
into the Land, and the Foreign Merchants abide longer than they were
wont to do, by which abiding things become more dear," saving only to
the king his duty on wool and leather, half a mark for a sack of wool
and one mark for a last of leather. "The king shall hold a Parliament
once in the year or twice if need be, and that in a convenient place."
This principle has maintained itself in the English mind, still more
in the American mind, ever since. To this day, in Massachusetts,
for instance, we cannot get a constitutional amendment to have the
legislature sit only once in two years, though it would probably be a
very wise reform, on account of this old inherited feeling that there
is something peculiarly free about an annual parliament, as indeed
there is. The Anglo-Norman kings called parliaments once a year
or oftener. Most of the States in this country now have their
legislatures sit every two years. Alabama and some other States have
recently changed, that they only sit once in four years. But the
conservative old States, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, have still
the rule that the legislature sits every year; and the prejudice in
favor of the annual legislature goes back at least as far as this law
of 1330, where the Commons succeeded in getting a law that Parliament
should sit as often as once in a year, and is incorporated in
England's and Massachusetts' Bill of Rights.

And then we find the first statute restraining what we should now call
chancery jurisdiction, complaining that the law of the land and
common right was delayed by letters issued under the king's will, and
ordaining that henceforth they shall not be