his English name, was in fact the sign of a
new epoch. England was made. The long period of national formation had come
practically to an end. With the reign of Edward begins the constitutional
England in which we live. It is not that any chasm separates our history
before it from our history after it as the chasm of the Revolution divides
the history of France, for we have traced the rudiments of our constitution
to the first moment of the English settlement in Britain. But it is with
these as with our language. The tongue of AElfred is the very tongue we
speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it has to be
learned like the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the English of
Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the historian
and philologer can study the origin and developement of our national
speech, in the last a schoolboy can enjoy the story of Troilus and Cressida
or listen to the gay chat of the Canterbury Pilgrims. In precisely the same
way a knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for the right
understanding of later legislation, its origin and its developement, while
the principles of our Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in
the Meetings of Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great Council of barons
after it. But the Parliaments which Edward gathered at the close of his
reign are not merely illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they
are absolutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen's. At
the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons, the Courts of Justice, the
forms of public administration, the relations of Church and State, all
local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, in great measure the
framework of society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially
retain. In a word the long struggle of the constitution for actual
existence has come to an end. The contests which follow are not contests
that tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual fabric of our
institutions; they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which
England has learned and is still learning how best to use and how wisely to
develope the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the balance
of its social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms
to the varying conditions of the time.

[Sidenote: The Earlier Finance]

The news of his father's death found Edward at Capua in the opening of
1273; but the q