times when occasion shall be when the King and his Council shall send for them, to treat of the wants of the king and of his kingdom.  And the Commonalty shall hold as established that which these Twelve shall do.”  Three permanent committees of barons and prelates were named to carry out the work of reform and administration.  The reform of the Church was left to the original Twenty-four; a second Twenty-four negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent Council of Fifteen advised the king in the ordinary work of government.  The complexity of such an arrangement was relieved by the fact that the members of each of these committees were in great part the same persons.  The Justiciar, Chancellor, and the guardians of the king’s castles swore to act only with the advice and assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two great officers, with the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at the end of the year.  Sheriffs were to be appointed for a single year only, no doubt by the Council, from among the chief tenants of the county, and no undue fees were to be exacted for the administration of justice in their court.

[Sidenote:  Government of the Barons]

A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in that tongue since the Conquest which has reached us, ordered the observance of these Provisions.  The king was in fact helpless, and resistance came only from the foreign favourites, who refused to surrender the castles and honours which had been granted to them.  But the Twenty-four were resolute in their action; and an armed demonstration of the barons drove the foreigners in flight over sea.  The whole royal power was now in fact in the hands of the committees appointed by the Great Council.  But the measures of the barons showed little of the wisdom and energy which the country had hoped for.  In October 1259 the knighthood complained that the barons had done nothing but seek their own advantage in the recent changes.  This protest produced the Provisions of Westminster, which gave protection to tenants against their feudal lords, regulated legal procedure in the feudal courts, appointed four knights in each shire to watch the justice of the sheriffs, and made other temporary enactments for the furtherance of justice.  But these Provisions brought little fruit, and a tendency to mere feudal privilege showed itself in an exemption of all nobles and prelates from attendance at the Sheriff’s courts.  Their foreign policy was more vigorous and successful.  All further payment to Rome, whether secular or ecclesiastical, was prohibited, formal notice was given to the Pope of England’s withdrawal from the Sicilian enterprise, peace put an end to the incursions of the Welsh, and negotiations on the footing of a formal abandonment of the king’s claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in October 1259 in a peace with France.

[Sidenote:  Simon and the Baronage]