money to at least twenty pounds a year and representing a far
higher proportional income at the present time. Whatever its original
purpose may have been, the result of the statute was a wide
disfranchisement. It was aimed, in its own words, against voters "of no
value, whereof every of them pretended to have a voice equivalent with the
more worthy knights and esquires dwelling in the same counties." But in
actual working the statute was interpreted in a more destructive fashion
than its words were intended to convey. Up to this time all suitors who
attended at the Sheriff's Court had voted without question for the Knight
of the Shire, but by the new statute the great bulk of the existing
voters, every leaseholder and every copyholder, found themselves
implicitly deprived of their franchise.

[Sidenote: The French War and the Baronage]

The kingship of Edward and his successors therefore was not a mere
restoration of the kingship of John or of Henry the Second. It was the
kingship of those kings apart from the constitutional forces which in
their case stood side by side with kingship, controlling and regulating
its action, apart from the force of custom, from the strong arm of the
baron, from the religious sanctions which formed so effective a weapon in
the hands of the priest, in a word, apart from that social organization
from which our political constitution had sprung; even the power of
Parliament itself died down at the very moment when the cessation of war,
the opening of new sources of revenue, the cry for protection against
social anarchy, doubled the strength of the Crown. The force of the
monarchy however lay above all in its position as the one representative
of national order and in its policy of peace. For two hundred years
England had been almost constantly at war, and to war without had been
added discord and misrule within. The violence and anarchy which had
always clung like a taint to the baronage grew more and more unbearable as
the nation moved forward to a more settled peacefulness and industry. At
the very time however when this movement became most pronounced under
Edward the Third, the tendency of the nobles to violence received a new
impulse from the war with France. Long before the struggle was over it had
done its fatal work on the mood of the English noble. His aim had become
little more than a lust for gold, a longing after plunder, after the
pillage of farms, the sack of cities, the rans