and is still, in form, that "the
king wills it"--_Le Roy le veult_. Nevertheless, Parliament usually
originated laws. The early Norman kings cared nothing about
legislation; their sole desire was to get money from the people. For
two centuries, therefore, Parliament was occupied only with laws
recognizing the old Anglo-Saxon laws previously existing, or laws
removing abuses of the royal power; and the desire of the king to tax
the people was used as the lever to get him to assent to these laws.

With the usual sensible indifference of the English race to mere
matters of form, they allowed the Norman kings to go on declaring the
laws and signing them as if they were made only by the crown, which
was the Norman theory--not caring for the shadow, if they could get
the substance. Thus they established, in the first two or three
centuries, the right to force legislation on the king, and they did it
by the instrument of the taxation power. For taxation must be "by the
common consent of the realm"; no taxation without representation, as
the Declaration of Independence puts it, is probably the earliest
principle of the English Constitution; and it is most significant to
the student of the constitutional law, a most necessary reminder to
those who do not value our Constitution, that it was the departure
by George III from this very earliest of English constitutional
principles that caused the loss of his American empire.

This was six hundred years old, therefore, at the time of our
Revolution. Except those two principles, taxation by common consent
and taxation for the common benefit--which latter was not finally
established until two hundred years later (that is, it was put in the
first Magna Charta, John's, and then quietly dropped out by Henry II,
and kept out of the charter for nearly one hundred years),--we have to
come down to the year 1100 before we find the first _sociological_
statute. "Henry I called another convention of all the estates of the
realm to sit in his royal palace at London ... the prohibiting the
priests the use of their wives and concubines was considered, and the
bishops and clergy granted to the king the correction of them for that
offence; by which means he raised vast sums of money compounding with
the priests...."[1]

[Footnote 1: Cobbett's "Parliamentary History of England," I, 4.]

In 1 Henry, cap. VII, is another recognition of personal property--it
says that at a man's death it is to be div