But it is with these as with our language.  The tongue of AElfred is the very tongue we speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it has to be learned like the tongue of a stranger.  On the other hand, the English of Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own.  In the first the historian and philologer can study the origin and developement of our national speech, in the last a schoolboy can enjoy the story of Troilus and Cressida or listen to the gay chat of the Canterbury Pilgrims.  In precisely the same way a knowledge of our earliest laws is indispensable for the right understanding of later legislation, its origin and its developement, while the principles of our Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in the Meetings of Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great Council of barons after it.  But the Parliaments which Edward gathered at the close of his reign are not merely illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they are absolutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen’s.  At the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons, the Courts of Justice, the forms of public administration, the relations of Church and State, all local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, in great measure the framework of society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially retain.  In a word the long struggle of the constitution for actual existence has come to an end.  The contests which follow are not contests that tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual fabric of our institutions; they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which England has learned and is still learning how best to use and how wisely to develope the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the balance of its social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms to the varying conditions of the time.

[Sidenote:  The Earlier Finance]

The news of his father’s death found Edward at Capua in the opening of 1273; but the quiet of his realm under a regency of which Roger Mortimer was the practical head left him free to move slowly homewards.  Two of his acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his mind was already dwelling on the state of English finance and of English law.  His visit to the Pope at Orvieto was with a view of gaining permission to levy from the clergy a tenth of their income for the three coming years, while he drew from Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco Accursi, to aid in the task of legal reform.  At Paris he did homage to Philip the Third for his French possessions, and then turning southward he devoted a year to the ordering of Gascony.  It was not till the summer of 1274 that the king reached England.  But he had already planned the work he had to do, and the measures which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the spirit in which he was to set about it.  The First Statute of Westminster was rather a code than a statute.  It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was an attempt