The first general parliament of the reign to which the king summoned the commons was held at Westminster in the spring of 1275.  Its work was the statute of Westminster the First, a comprehensive measure of many articles which covered almost the whole field of legislation, and is especially noteworthy for the care which its compilers took to uphold sound administration and put down abuses.  Not less important was the provision of an adequate revenue for the debt-burdened king.  The same parliament made Edward a permanent grant of a custom on wool, wool-fells, and leather, which remained henceforth a chief source of the regular income of the crown.  The later imposition of further duties soon caused men to describe the customs of 1275 as the “Great and Ancient Custom”.  It was significant of the economic condition of England that the great custom was a tax on exports, not imports, and that, with the exception of leather, it was a tax on raw materials.  Granted the more willingly since the main incidence of it was upon the foreign merchants, who bought up English wool for the looms of Flanders and Brabant, the custom proved a source of revenue which could easily be manipulated, increased, and assigned in advance to the Italian financiers, willing to lend money to a necessitous king.  A new step in our financial history was attained when this tax on trade steps into the place so long held by the taxes on land, from which the Normans and Angevins had derived their enormous revenue.

The statute of Westminster the First had a long series of fellows.  Next year came the statute of Rageman, which supplemented an earlier inquest into abuses by instituting a special inquiry in cases of trespass.  In 1277 the first Welsh war interrupted the current of legislation.  The break was compensated for in 1278 by the passing of the important statute of Gloucester, the consummation of a policy which Edward had adopted as soon as he set foot on English soil.  The troubles of Edward’s youth had made clear to him the obstacles thrown in the path of orderly government by the great territorial franchises.  He had been forced to modify his policy to gratify the lord of Glamorgan, and win over the house of Mortimer by the erection of a new franchise that was a palatinate in all but name.  But such great “regalities” were, after all, exceptional.  Much more irritating to an orderly mind were the innumerable petty immunities which made half the hundreds in England the appendages of baronial estates, and such common privileges as “return of writs,” which prevented the sheriff’s officers from executing his mandates on numerous manors where the lords claimed that the execution of writs must be entrusted to their bailiffs.[1] These widespread powers in private hands were the more annoying to the king since they were commonly exercised with no better warrant than long custom, and without direct grant from him.

    [1] See on “return of writs” and a host of similar immunities,
    Pollock and Maitland’s History of English Law, i., 558-82.