to beg for mercy.  At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a tournament at Challon.  It was this love of adventure which lent itself to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry.  His fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight.  At his “Round Table of Kenilworth” a hundred lords and ladies, “clad all in silk,” renewed the faded glories of Arthur’s Court.  The false air of romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his “Vow of the Swan,” when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn.  Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity.  “Knight without reproach” as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common robber.

[Sidenote:  Influence of Legality]

The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power over Edward’s mind than the French conception of kingship, feudality, and law.  The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties such as commendation into a definite vassalage.  But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman Law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time.  When the “sacred majesty” of the Caesars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage every constitutional relation was changed.  The “defiance” by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason, his after resistance “sacrilege.”  That Edward could appreciate what was sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities.  He was never wilfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law.  The high conception of royalty which he borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign.  Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown.  It was incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their fathers had borne.

[Sidenote:  His Moral Grandeur]