necessary for him to face parliament.  Leaving Gaveston protected by the strong walls of Bamburgh, the king quitted the border at the end of July, and met his parliament a month later in London.  Though the ordainers had been appointed by a baronial parliament, the three estates were summoned to hear and ratify the results of their labours.  Thirty-five more ordinances, covering a very wide field, were then laid before them.  Disorderly and disproportioned, like most medieval legislation, they ranged from trivial personal questions and the details of administration to the broadest schemes for the future.  Many of them were simply efforts to get the recognised law enforced.  There were clauses forbidding alienation of domain, the abuses of purveyance, the usurpations of the courts of the royal household, the enlargement of the forests, and the employment of unlawful sources of revenue.  Under the last head, the new custom, which Edward I. had persuaded the foreign merchants to pay, was specifically abolished.  Provisions of such a character show that the king had made no effort to observe either the Great Charter or the laws of Edward I. Even the recent statute of Stamford, and the six ordinances of the previous year, had to be re-enacted.  Similar restatements of sound principles were too common in the fourteenth century to make the ordinances an epoch.  The vital clauses were those providing for the control of the king and for penalties against his favourites.

Under the first of these heads, the ordainers worked out to the uttermost consequences their favourite distinction between the crown and the king.  The crown was to be strengthened, but the king was to be deprived of every shred of power.  The great offices of state in England, Ireland, and Gascony were to be filled up with the counsel and consent of the barons, a provision which, if literally interpreted, meant that the barons intended to govern Gascony as well as England.  The king was not to go to war, raise an army, or leave the kingdom without the permission of parliament.  He was to “live of his own,” however scanty a living that might be.  Special judges were to hear complaints against royal ministers and bailiffs.  Parliaments were to meet once or twice a year.  It was a complete programme of limited monarchy.  But there was no reference to the commons and clergy.  We are still in the atmosphere of the Provisions of Oxford, and there is no Earl Simon to emphasise the fuller conception of national control.

To Edward and to the barons, the penal clauses were the very essence of the ordinances.  The twentieth ordinance declared that Peter of Gaveston, “as a public enemy of the king and kingdom, be forthwith exiled, for all time and without hope of return,” from all dominions subject to the English king.  He was to leave England before All Saints’ day, and the port of Dover was to be his place of embarkation.  Other ordinances dealt with lesser offenders.  Exile was once more to be the doom of the Frescobaldi,