The whole situation was changed by the king’s arrival.  Edward met the innumerable complaints against his subordinates by dismissing nearly all the judges from office, and appointing a special commission to investigate the charges brought against royal officials of every rank.  Thomas Weyland, chief justice of the common pleas, anticipated inquiry by taking sanctuary with the Franciscan friars of Bury St. Edmunds.  A knight and a married man, he had taken subdeacon’s orders in early life and sought to little purpose to be protected by his clergy.  His refuge was watched by the local sheriffs; finally, he was starved into surrender, and suffered to abjure the realm.[1] He fled to France, whence he never returned.  For some years the commission investigated the offences of the ministers of the crown.  Though much that was irregular was proved against them, many charges broke down under inquiry, and, as time went on, the official class saw that their interest lay in condoning rather than in punishing scandals.  Some of the worst offenders, such as the greedy and corrupt Adam of Stratton, were never restored to office;[2] but Hengham, the chief justice of the King’s Bench, was soon reinstated.  There were not enough good lawyers in England to make it prudent for Edward to dispense with the services of such a man.  A rigorous maintenance of a high standard of official morality meant getting rid of nearly all the king’s ministers, and any successors would have been inferior in experience and not superior in honesty.  Edward had to work with such material as he had, and on the whole he made the best of it.  Scandalous as were the proceedings of his agents, their iniquities are but trifles as compared with the offences of the counsellors of Philip the Fair.

    [1] For the abjuratio regni see A. Reville in the Revue
    Historique, 1. (1892), 1-42.

[2] For Adam of Stratton see Hall, Red Book of the Exchequer, iii., cccxv.-cccxxxi.  Extracts from the Assize rolls recording the proceedings of the special commission will soon be published by the Royal Historical Society.

Fear of Edward drove nobles into obedience as well as ministers into honesty.  Gloucester desisted unwillingly from his attacks on Brecon, and was constrained to divorce his wife and marry the king’s daughter, Joan of Acre.  In becoming the king’s son-in-law, he was forced to surrender his estates to the crown, receiving them back entailed on the heirs of the marriage or, in their default, on the heirs of Joan.  Thus the system of entails made possible by the statute De donis was used by Edward to strengthen his hold over the most powerful of his feudatories and increase the prospect of his estates escheating to the crown.  Considered in this light, Gilbert’s marriage with the king’s daughter seems less a reward of loyalty than a punishment for lawlessness.  In the same year as this marriage, Edward passed another