the chief abuses of the time in their Provisions of Oxford and Westminster.  The appointment of all officers of state indeed was jealously reserved to the crown.  But the royal expenditure was brought within bounds.  Taxation was only imposed with the assent of the Great Council.  So utterly was the land at rest that Edward felt himself free to take the cross in 1268 and to join the Crusade which was being undertaken by St. Lewis of France.  He reached Tunis only to find Lewis dead and his enterprise a failure, wintered in Sicily, made his way to Acre in the spring of 1271, and spent more than a year in exploits which want of force prevented from growing into a serious campaign.  He was already on his way home when the death of Henry the Third in November 1272 called him to the throne.

Chapter IV
Edward the first
1272-1307

[Sidenote:  Edward’s Temper]

In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object of an almost boundless admiration.  He was in the truest sense a national king.  At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger but an Englishman.  The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings.  Edward’s very temper was English to the core.  In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious.  It is this oneness with the character of his people which parts the temper of Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house.  He inherited indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet.  But his nature had nothing of the hard selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long characterized the house of Anjou.  His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered; and for the most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgive.  “No man ever asked mercy of me,” he said in his old age, “and was refused.”  The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders.  “It is I who have brought you into this strait,” he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, “and I will have no advantage