Bracton had already laid down the doctrine that no prescription can avail against the rights of the crown, and it was a commonplace with the lawyers of the age that nothing less than a clear grant by royal charter could justify such delegation of the sovereign’s powers into private hands.  Within a few months of his landing, Edward sent out commissioners to inquire into the baronial immunities.  The returns of these inquests, which were carried out hundred by hundred, are embodied in the precious documents called the Hundred Rolls.  The study of these reports inspired the procedure of the statute of Gloucester, by which royal officers were empowered to traverse the land demanding by what warrant the lords of franchises exercised their powers.  The demand of the crown for documentary proof of royal delegation would have destroyed more than half the existing liberties.  But aristocratic opinion deserted Edward when he strove to carry out so 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