The first functions of Parliament were restricted to voting taxes.  The king called the barons together merely to get “aids,” and they wouldn’t give them until he recognized what they chose to call the old law of England, always a pre-existing law.  It was still a long time before there was constructive legislation.  Just as, before the Conquest, in the seventh century, we find it said of the law of Wihtred:  “Then the great lords with the consent of all came to a resolution upon these ordinances and added them to the customary laws of the men of Kent”; and, in the time of King Alfred:  “I, then, Alfred, king, gathered these [laws] together, and commanded many of those to be written which our forefathers held, those which to me seemed good; and many of those which seemed to me not good I rejected them, by the counsel of my ‘witan,’ and they then said that it seemed good to them all to be holden";[1] so, after the Conquest, every Norman king was made on his coronation oath to promise this, the law of Edward the Confessor, until Magna Charta; after that they promised to respect Magna Charta instead, which was thus reissued or confirmed thirty-two times in the eighty-two years which intervened between Runnymede and the final Confirmation of Charters under Edward I. Thus, William the Conqueror himself, in his charter to the city of London, says, in Anglo-Saxon:  “And I do you to wit that I will that ye two be worthy of all the laws that ye were worthy of in King Edward’s day.”  So the Domesday Book records “the customs,” that is to say, the laws, of various towns and counties; these bodies of customs invariably containing a mere list of penalties for the breach of the established law; while later charters usually give the inhabitants of a town all the customs and free privileges enjoyed by the citizens of London.

[Footnote 1:  Stubbs’s “Charters,” p. 62.]

But after the Conquest laws could only be enacted with the concurrence of the king; and the phrase was, and is still, in form, that “the king wills it”—­Le Roy le veult.  Nevertheless, Parliament usually originated laws.  The early Norman kings cared nothing about legislation; their sole desire was to get money from the people.  For two centuries, therefore, Parliament was occupied only with laws recognizing the old Anglo-Saxon laws previously existing, or laws removing abuses of the royal power; and the desire of the king to tax the people was used as the lever to get him to assent to these laws.

With the usual sensible indifference of the English race to mere matters of form, they allowed the Norman kings to go on declaring the laws and signing them as if they were made only by the crown, which was the Norman theory—­not caring for the shadow, if they could get the substance.  Thus they established, in the first two or three centuries, the right to force legislation on the king, and they did it by the instrument of the taxation power.  For taxation