The barons drew up a statement of the “great perils and dangers” to which England was exposed through the king’s dependence on bad counsellors.  The franchises of Holy Church were threatened; the king was reduced to live by extortion; Scotland was lost; and the crown was “grievously dismembered” in England and Ireland.  “Wherefore, sire,” the petition concludes, “your good folk pray you humbly that, for the salvation of yourself and them and of the crown, you will assent that these perils shall be avoided and redressed by ordinance of your baronage.”  Edward at once surrendered at discretion, perhaps in the vain hope of saving Gaveston.  On March 16 he issued a charter, which empowered the barons to elect certain persons to draw up ordinances to reform the realm and the royal household.  The powers of the committee were to last until Michaelmas, 1311.  A barren promise that the king’s concession should not be counted a precedent made Edward’s submission seem a little less abject.  Four days later the ordainers were appointed, the method of their election being based upon the precedents of 1258.

Twenty-one lords ordainers represented in somewhat unequal proportions the three great ranks of the magnates.  At the head of the seven bishops was Winchelsea, while both Bishop Baldock of London, the dismissed chancellor, and his successor, John Langton of Chichester, were included among the rest.  All the eight earls attending the parliament became ordainers.  Side by side with moderate men, such as Gloucester, Lincoln, and John of Brittany, Earl of Richmond, were the extreme men of the opposition, Lancaster, Pembroke, Warwick, Hereford, the king’s brother-in-law, and Edmund Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel.  Warenne and the insignificant Earl of Oxford do not seem to have been present in parliament, and are therefore omitted.  With these exceptions, and of course that of the Earl of Cornwall, the whole of the earls were arrayed against the king.  The six barons, who completed the list of nominees, were either colourless in their policy or dependent on the earls and their episcopal allies.  The ordainers set to work at once.  Two days after their appointment, they issued six preliminary ordinances by which they resolved that the place of their sitting should be London, that none of the ordainers should receive gifts from the crown, that no royal grants should be valid without the consent of the majority, that the customs should be paid directly into the exchequer, that the foreign merchants who had lately farmed them should be arrested, and that the Great Charter should be firmly kept.  During the next eighteen months they remained hard at work.