any grant, and Edward met his refusal by a general outlawry of the whole order.  The King’s Courts were closed, and all justice denied to those who refused the king aid.  By their actual plea the clergy had put themselves formally in the wrong, and the outlawry soon forced them to submission; but their aid did little to recruit the exhausted treasury.  The pressure of the war steadily increased, and far wider measures of arbitrary taxation were needful to equip an expedition which Edward prepared to lead in person to Flanders.  The country gentlemen were compelled to take up knighthood or to compound for exemption from the burthensome honour, and forced contributions of cattle and corn were demanded from the counties.  Edward no doubt purposed to pay honestly for these supplies, but his exactions from the merchant class rested on a deliberate theory of his royal rights.  He looked on the customs as levied absolutely at his pleasure, and the export duty on wool—­now the staple produce of the country—­was raised to six times its former amount.  Although he infringed no positive provision of charter or statute in his action, it was plain that his course really undid all that had been gained by the Barons’ war.  But the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward found stout resistance within his realm.  The barons drew together and called a meeting for the redress of their grievances.  The two greatest of the English nobles, Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, placed themselves at the head of the opposition.  The first was Constable, the second Earl Marshal, and Edward bade them lead a force to Gascony as his lieutenants while he himself sailed to Flanders.  Their departure would have left the Baronage without leaders, and the two earls availed themselves of a plea that they were not bound to foreign service save in attendance on the king to refuse obedience to the royal orders.  “By God, Sir Earl,” swore the king to the Earl Marshal, “you shall either go or hang!” “By God, Sir King,” was the cool reply, “I will neither go nor hang!” Both parties separated in bitter anger; the king to seize fresh wool, to outlaw the clergy, and to call an army to his aid; the barons to gather in arms, backed by the excommunication of the Primate.  But the strife went no further than words.  Ere the Parliament he had convened could meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness; Winchelsey offered his mediation; and Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of Forests as the price of a grant from the clergy and a subsidy from the Commons.  With one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of which his nature was capable the king stood before his people in Westminster Hall and owned with a burst of tears that he had taken their substance without due warrant of law.  His passionate appeal to their loyalty wrested a reluctant assent to the prosecution, of the war, and in August Edward sailed for Flanders, leaving his son regent of the realm.  But the crisis