of their power in matters involving a temporal element.  Again Peckham was fain to acquiesce.  His policy had not only irritated the king, but alienated his fellow bishops.  He visited his province with pertinacity and minuteness, and he was the less able to stand up against the king as he was engaged in violent quarrels with all his own suffragans.  The leader of the bishops in resisting his claims was Thomas of Cantilupe.  Restored to England by the liberal policy of Edward, Montfort’s chancellor after Lewes had been raised to the see of Hereford, where his sanctity and devotion won him the universal love of his flock.  Involved in costly lawsuits with the litigious primate, Thomas was forced to leave his diocese to plead his cause before the papal curia.  He died in Italy in 1282, and his relics, carried back by his followers to his own cathedral, won the reputation of working miracles.  A demand arose for his canonisation, and Edward before his death had secured the appointment of the papal commission, which, a few years later, added St. Thomas of Hereford to the list of saints.[1] Thus the chancellor of Montfort obtained the honour of sanctity through the action of the victor of Evesham.

    [1] The processus canonisationis of Cantilupe, printed in the
    Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, Oct. 1, 539-705, illustrates many
    aspects of this period.

The second Welsh war interrupted both the conflict between Edward and the archbishop, and the course of domestic legislation.  Yet even in the midst of his campaigns Edward issued the statute of Acton Burnell of 1283, which provided a better way of recovering merchants’ debts, and the statute of Rhuddlan of 1284 for the regulation of the king’s exchequer.  The king’s full activity as a lawgiver was renewed after the settlement of his conquest by the statute of Wales of 1284, and the legislation of his early years culminated in the two great acts of 1285, the statute of Westminster the Second, and the statute of Winchester.  That year, which also witnessed the passing of the Circumspecte agatis, stands out as the most fruitful in lawmaking in the whole of Edward’s reign.

The second statute of Westminster, passed in the spring parliament, partook of the comprehensive character of the first statute of that name.  There were clauses by which, as the Canon of Oseney puts it, “Edward revived the ancient laws which had slumbered through the disturbance of the realm:  some corrupted by abuse he restored to their proper form:  some less evident and apparent he declared:  some new ones, useful and honourable, he added”.  Among the more conspicuous innovations of the second statute of Westminster was the famous clause De donis conditionalibus, which forms a landmark in the law of real property.  It facilitated the creation of entailed estates by providing that the rights of an heir of an estate, granted upon conditions, were not to be barred on account of the alienation of such