uiet of his realm under a regency of which Roger Mortimer
was the practical head left him free to move slowly homewards. Two of his
acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his mind was already
dwelling on the state of English finance and of English law. His visit to
the Pope at Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission to levy from the
clergy a tenth of their income for the three coming years, while he drew
from Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco Accursi, to aid in the task
of legal reform. At Paris he did homage to Philip the Third for his French
possessions, and then turning southward he devoted a year to the ordering
of Gascony. It was not till the summer of 1274 that the king reached
England. But he had already planned the work he had to do, and the measures
which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the spirit in
which he was to set about it. The First Statute of Westminster was rather a
code than a statute. It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was
an attempt to summarize a number of previous enactments contained in the
Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the Statute of Marlborough, as
well as to embody some of the administrative measures of Henry the Second
and his son. But a more pressing need than that of a codification of the
law was the need of a reorganization of finance. While the necessities of
the Crown were growing with the widening of its range of administrative
action, the revenues of the Crown admitted of no corresponding expansion.
In the earliest times of our history the outgoings of the Crown were as
small as its income. All local expenses, whether for justice or road-making
or fortress-building, were paid by local funds; and the national "fyrd"
served at its own cost in the field. The produce of a king's private
estates with the provisions due to him from the public lands scattered over
each county, whether gathered by the king himself as he moved over his
realm, or as in later days fixed at a stated rate and collected by his
sheriff, were sufficient to defray the mere expenses of the Court. The
Danish wars gave the first shock to this simple system. To raise a ransom
which freed the land from the invader, the first land-tax, under the name
of the Danegeld, was laid on every hide of ground; and to this national
taxation the Norman kings added the feudal burthens of the new military
estates created by the Conquest, reliefs paid on inheritance, p