waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine.  To the lesser and poorer nobles the wealth of the trader, the long wain of goods as it passed along the highway, remained a tempting prey.  Once, under cover of a mock tournament of monks against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded in introducing themselves into the great merchant fair at Boston; at nightfall every booth was on fire, the merchants robbed and slaughtered, and the booty carried off to ships which lay ready at the quay.  Streams of gold and silver, ran the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down the gutters to the sea; “all the money in England could hardly make good the loss.”  Even at the close of Edward’s reign lawless bands of “trail-bastons,” or club-men, maintained themselves by general outrage, aided the country nobles in their feuds, and wrested money and goods from the great tradesmen.

[Sidenote:  Edward and the Baronage]

The king was strong enough to face and imprison the warring earls, to hang the chiefs of the Boston marauders, and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous commissions.  But the repression of baronial outrage was only a part of Edward’s policy in relation to the Baronage.  Here, as elsewhere, he had to carry out the political policy of his house, a policy defined by the great measures of Henry the Second, his institution of scutage, his general assize of arms, his extension of the itinerant judicature of the royal judges.  Forced by the first to an exact discharge of their military duties to the Crown, set by the second in the midst of a people trained equally with the nobles to arms, their judicial tyranny curbed and subjected to the king’s justice by the third, the barons had been forced from their old standpoint of an isolated class to the new and nobler position of a people’s leaders.  Edward watched jealously over the ground which the Crown had gained.  Immediately after his landing he appointed a commission of enquiry into the judicial franchises then existing, and on its report (of which the existing “Hundred-Rolls” are the result) itinerant justices were sent in 1278 to discover by what right these franchises were held.  The writs of “quo warranto” were roughly met here and there.  Earl Warenne bared a rusty sword and flung it on the justices’ table.  “This, sirs,” he said, “is my warrant.  By the sword our fathers won their lands when they came over with the Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep them.”  But the king was far from limiting himself to the mere carrying out of the plans of Henry the Second.  Henry had aimed simply at lowering the power of the great feudatories; Edward aimed rather at neutralizing their power by raising the whole body of landowners to the same level.  We shall see at a later time the measures which were the issues of this policy, but in the very opening of his reign a significant step pointed to the king’s drift.  In the summer of 1278 a royal writ ordered all freeholders who held lands to the value of twenty pounds to receive knighthood at the king’s hands.