that is for the Highlands and islands.  Sheriffs “natives either of England or Scotland” were nominated for each of the shires, and it was significant that the great majority of them were Scots and that the hereditary sheriffdoms of the older system were still continued.  The “custom of the Scots and the Welsh,” that is the Celtic laws of the Highlanders and the Strathclyde Welsh, was “henceforth prohibited and disused”.  John of Brittany was to “assemble the good people of Scotland in a convenient place” where “the laws of King David and the amendments by other kings” were to be rehearsed, and such of these laws as are “plainly against God and reason” were to be reformed, all doubtful matters being referred to the judgment of Edward.  The king’s lieutenant was bidden to “remove such persons as might disturb the peace” to the south of the Trent, but their deportation was to be in “courteous fashion” and after taking the advice of the “good people of Scotland”.  Care for the preservation of the peace, and for administrative reform, is seen in the oath imposed upon officials and in the pains taken to secure the custody of the castles.  The Scots parliament was to be retained, and recent precedents also suggested the probability of Scottish representation in the parliament of England.  If Scotland were to be ruled by Edward at all, it would have been difficult to devise a wiser scheme for its administration.  Yet the Scottish love of independence was not to be bartered away for better government.  Within six months the new constitution was overthrown, and the chief part in its destruction was taken by the Scots by whose advice Edward had drawn it up.

Edward at last felt himself in a position to take his long deferred revenge on Winchelsea.  The primate still kept aloof from the councils of the king, and his spirit was as irreconcilable as ever.  He gained his last victory in the Lenten parliament of 1305, when he prevented the promulgation of a statute, passed on the petition of the laity, but agreed to by all the estates, which forbade taxes on ecclesiastical property involving the exportation of money out of the country.[1] At this moment the long vacancy of the papacy, which followed the pontificate of Benedict XI., Boniface VIII.’s short-lived successor, had not yet come to an end.  Soon, however, Winchelsea’s zeal on behalf of papal taxation was to be ill requited.  On June 5, 1305, Bertrand de Goth, a Gascon nobleman who since 1299 had been archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected to the papacy as Clement V., through the management of Philip the Fair.  A dependant of the King of France and a subject of the King of England, the new pope showed a complaisance towards kings which stood in strong contrast to the ultramontane austerity of his predecessors.  He refused to visit Italy, received the papal crown at Lyons, and spent the first years of his pontificate in Poitou and Gascony.  Ultimately establishing himself at Avignon, he began that seventy years of Babylonish captivity of the