because its practitioners used the French tongue as their technical instrument.  There were no longer lawyers in England who, like Bracton, strove to base the law of the land on the forms and methods of Roman jurisprudence.  There were no longer kings, like Edward I., with Italian trained civilians at their court ready to translate the law of England into imperialist forms.  The canonist still studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but his career was increasingly clerical, and the Church, unlike the State, was unable to nationalise itself, though the whole career of Wycliffe and the strenuous efforts of the kings and statesmen who passed the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, showed that some of the English clergy, and many of the English laity, were willing to make the effort.  English law, in divorcing itself from the universities and the clergy, became national as well as lay.  There were no longer any Weylands who concealed their clerical beginnings, and hid away the subdeacon under the married knight and justice, the founder of a landowning family.  The lawyers of Edward’s reign were frankly laymen, marrying and giving in marriage, establishing new families that became as noble as any of the decaying baronial houses, and yet cherishing a corporate ideal and common spirit as lively and real as those of any monastery or clerical association.

In enumerating the many convergent tendencies which worked together in strengthening the national life, we must not forget the growing importance of commerce.  Merchant princes like the Poles could rival the financial operations of Lombard or Tuscan, and climb into the baronial class.  The proud and mutinous temper of the Londoners was largely due to their ever-increasing wealth.  We are on the threshold of the careers of commercial magnates, like the Philpots and the Whittingtons.  Even when Edward III. was still on the throne, a London mayor of no special note, John Pyel, could set up in his native Northamptonshire village of Irthlingborough a college and church of remarkable stateliness and dignity.  The growth of the wool trade, and its gradual transfer to English hands, the development of the staple system, the rise of an English seaman class that knew all the havens of Europe, the beginnings of the English cloth manufacture, all indicate that English commerce was not only becoming more extensive, but was gradually emancipating itself from dependence on the foreigner.  Thus before the end of Edward’s reign England was an intensely national state, proudly conscious of itself, and haughtily contemptuous of the foreigner, with its own language, literature, style in art, law, universities, and even the beginnings of a movement towards the nationalisation of the Church.  The cosmopolitanism of the earlier Middle Ages was everywhere on the wane.  A modern nation had arisen out of the old world-state and world-spirit.  In the England of Edward III., Chaucer, and Wycliffe, we have reached the consummation of the movement whose first beginnings we have traced in the early storms of the reign of Henry III.  It is in the development of this tendency that the period from 1216 to 1377 possesses such unity as it has.