violent a revolution. The irritation of
the whole baronage is well expressed in the story of how Earl Warenne,
unsheathing a rusty sword, declared to the commissioners: "Here is my
warrant. My ancestors won their lands with the sword. With my sword I
will defend them against all usurpers." Nor was this mere boasting. The
return of the king's officers tells us that Warenne would not say of
whom, or by what services, he held his Yorkshire stronghold of
Conisborough, and that his bailiffs refused them entrance into his
liberties and would not suffer his tenants to answer or appear before
them.[1] Edward found it prudent not to press his claims. He disturbed
few men in their franchises, and was content to have collected the mass
of evidence embodied in the _placita de quo warranto_, and thus to have
stopped the possibility of any further growth of the franchises. A few
years later he accepted the compromise that continuous possession since
the coronation of Richard I. was a sufficient answer to a writ of _quo
warranto_. In this lies the whole essence of Edward's policy in relation
to feudalism, a policy very similar to that of St. Louis. Every man is
to have his own, and the king is not to inquire too curiously what a
man's own was. But no extension of any private right was to be
tolerated. Thus feudalism as a principle of political jurisdiction
gradually withered away, because it was no longer suffered to take fresh
root. The later land legislation of Edward's reign pushed the idea still
further.

[1] _Kirkby's Quest for Yorkshire_, pp. 3, 227, 231, Surtees
Soc.

In 1278 it had been the turn of the barons to suffer. Next came the
turn of the Church. Though Edward was a true son of the Church, he saw
as clearly as William the Conqueror and Henry II. the essential
incompatibility between the royal supremacy and the pretensions of the
extreme ecclesiastics. The limits of Church and State, the growth of
clerical wealth and immunities, and the relations of the world-power of
the pope to the local authority of the king, were problems which no
strong king could afford to neglect, and perhaps were incapable of
solution on medieval lines. Edward saw that the most practical way of
dealing with clerical claims was for him to stand in good personal
relations to the chief dispensers of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. With
a pope like Gregory X. it was easy for Edward to be on friendly terms;
but it was more difficult to feel an