[Sidenote:  Law and the Baronage]

What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers such as these by the Crown and its council was the need which was still to exist for centuries of an effective means of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law.  Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had now become established.  A king could no longer make laws or levy taxes or even make war without their assent.  The nation reposed in them an unwavering trust, for they were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose violence the strong hand of a Norman ruler had been needed to protect his subjects; they were as English as the peasant or the trader.  They had won English liberty by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound them to look on themselves as its natural guardians.  The close of the Barons’ War solved the problem which had so long troubled the realm, the problem how to ensure the government of the realm in accordance with the provisions of the Great Charter, by the transfer of the business of administration into the hands of a standing committee of the greater barons and prelates, acting as chief officers of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers of the Crown.  The body thus composed was known as the Continual Council; and the quiet government of the kingdom by this body in the long interval between the death of Henry the Third and his son’s return shows how effective this rule of the nobles was.  It is significant of the new relation which they were to strive to establish between themselves and the Crown that in the brief which announced Edward’s accession the Council asserted that the new monarch mounted his throne “by the will of the peers.”  But while the political influence of the baronage as a leading element in the whole nation thus steadily mounted, the personal and purely feudal power of each individual baron on his own estates as steadily fell.  The hold which the Crown gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage, the circuits of the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds within which baronial justice saw itself circumscribed, the blow dealt by scutage at their military power, the prompt intervention of the Council in their feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to the common level of their fellow subjects.  Much yet remained to be done; for within the general body of the baronage there existed side by side with the nobles whose aims were purely national nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal despotism simply a chance of setting up again their feudal privileges; and different as the English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a feudal noblesse like that of Germany or France there is in every military class a natural drift towards violence and lawlessness.  Throughout Edward’s reign his strong hand was needed to enforce order on warring nobles.  Great earls, such as those of Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in Shropshire the Earl of Arundel