however remained unavenged.  Henry’s dreams were of mightier enterprises than the reduction of the Welsh.  The Popes were still fighting their weary battle against the House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its kingdom of Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy See, to any power that would aid them in the struggle.  In 1254 it was offered to the king’s second son, Edmund.  With imbecile pride Henry accepted the offer, prepared to send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the purposes of his war.  In a Parliament at the opening of 1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the clergy.  A fresh demand was made in 1258.  But the patience of the realm was at last exhausted.  Earl Simon had returned in 1253 from his government of Gascony, and the fruit of his meditations during the four years of his quiet stay at home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to France and Scotland which showed there was as yet no open quarrel with Henry, was seen in a league of the baronage and in their adoption of a new and startling policy.  The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of the Charter:  its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage and a definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge; its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations.  Henry had sworn again and again to observe the Charter and his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken.  The barons had secured the freedom of the realm; the secret of their long patience during the reign of Henry lay in the difficulty of securing its right administration.  It was this difficulty which Earl Simon was prepared to solve when action was forced on him by the stir of the realm.  A great famine added to the sense of danger from Wales and from Scotland and to the irritation at the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year 1258 opened.  It was to arrange for a campaign against Wales that Henry called a parliament in April.  But the baronage appeared in arms with Gloucester and Leicester at their head.  The king was forced to consent to the appointment of a committee of twenty-four to draw up terms for the reform of the state.  The Twenty-four again met the Parliament at Oxford in June, and although half the committee consisted of royal ministers and favourites it was impossible to resist the tide of popular feeling.  Hugh Bigod, one of the firmest adherents of the two Earls, was chosen as Justiciar.  The claim to elect this great officer was in fact the leading point in the baronial policy.  But further measures were needed to hold in check such arbitrary misgovernment as had prevailed during the last twenty years.  By the “Provisions of Oxford” it was agreed that the Great Council should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned by the king or no; and on each occasion “the Commonalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall come to the Parliaments, and at other