his successor. The latter however could only obtain real possession of
the royal power by overthrowing the faction to which his father had
succumbed. While he restored the memory of the two Despencers, who had
been condemned and executed by the barons, he also decided to carry on
a Parliamentary government; it is the first that existed in England.

For the general course of the development it is significant that the
rights of Parliament in relation to the voting of taxes, and now also
to legislation as a whole, were acknowledged before an appropriate
form was found for its consultations. In the first years of Edward III
its four constituent parts, prelates, barons, knights, and town
deputies, held their debates in four different assemblies; but
gradually the two first were fused into an Upper, the two last into a
Second House, without any definite law being laid down to that effect:
the nature of things led to the custom, the custom in course of time
became law.

That which had been already preparing under the first Edward came
under the third for the first time into complete operation, viz. the
participation of the Estates in the management of foreign affairs and
of war.

In the year 1333 the Parliament advised the King to break the peace
with Scotland, which the barons had concluded of their own authority
according to their own views, not to put up with any more outrages,
and not merely to take back the lost border-fortress of Berwick, but
to force the Scots to acknowledge the supremacy of England.

In the year 1337 and afterwards the Parliament more than once approved
the King's plan of asserting the claim he had through his mother on
the French throne by force of arms and through alliances with foreign
princes,[51] and promised to support him in it with their lives and
properties; it was all the more ready for this, as France had been
repeatedly threatening England with a new Conquest. In the year 1344
the Peers, each in his own name, called on the King to cross the sea
and not let himself be hindered by any one, not even by the Pope, from
appealing to the judgment of God by battle. The clergy imposed on
themselves a three-years' tenth, the counties a fifteenth, the towns
two tenths; the great nobles followed him in person with their squires
and horsemen, without even alluding to their old remonstrances. So
that splendid army made its appearance in France, in which the weapons
of the yeomen vied with those of