den, p. 468. Brompton, p. 1021.
Haguistadt, p. 310.]

To give greater authenticity to these concessions, Henry lodged a copy
of his charter in some abbey of each county, as if desirous that
it should be exposed to the view of all his subjects, and remain a
perpetual rule for the limitation and direction of his government: yet
it is certain that, after the present purpose was served, he never once
thought, during his reign, of observing one single article of it; and
the whole fell so much into neglect and oblivion, that, in the following
century, when the barons, who had heard an obscure tradition of it,
desired to make it the model of the Great Charter which they exacted
from King John, they could with difficulty find a copy of it in the
kingdom. But as to the grievances here meant to be redressed, they were
still continued in their full extent; and the royal authority, in all
those particulars, lay under no manner of restriction. Reliefs of heirs,
so capital an article, were never effectually fixed till the time of
Magna Charta;[*] and it is evident that the general promise here given,
of accepting a just and lawful relief, ought to have been reduced to
more precision, in order to give security to the subject. The oppression
of wardship and marriage was perpetuated even till the reign of Charles
II.; and it appears from Glanville,[**] the famous justiciary of Henry
II., that in his time, where any man died intestate--an accident which
must have been very frequent when the art of writing was so little
known--the king, or the lord of the fief, pretended to seize all the
movables, and to exclude every heir, even the children of the deceased;
a sure mark of a tyrannical and arbitrary government.

[* Glanv. lib. ii. cap. 36.]

[** Lib. vii. cap. 15.]

The Normans, indeed, who domineered in England, were, during this age,
so licentious a people, that they may be pronounced incapable of any
true or regular liberty; which requires such improvement in knowledge
and morals, as can only be the result of reflection and experience, and
must grow to perfection during several ages of settled and established
government. A people so insensible to the rights of their sovereign, as
to disjoint, without necessity, the hereditary succession, and permit
a younger brother to intrude himself into the place of the elder, whom
they esteemed, and who was guilty of no crime but being absent, could
not expect that. What is calle