to weaken the power of the nobles by filling the great earldoms with kinsmen of the royal house.  He had made Simon of Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to the nation in the Barons’ war.  In loading his second son, Edmund Crouchback, with honours and estates he raised a family to greatness which overawed the Crown.  Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham he had received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he had been made Earl of Derby on the extinction of the house of Ferrers.  His son, Thomas of Lancaster, was the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add to these lordships the Earldom of Lincoln.  And to the weight of these great baronies was added his royal blood.  The father of Thomas had been a titular king of Sicily.  His mother was dowager queen of Navarre.  His half-sister by the mother’s side was wife of the French king Philip le Bel and mother of the English queen Isabella.  He was himself a grandson of Henry the Third and not far from the succession to the throne.  Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a nobler man, his adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided the king into a really national policy.  As it was his weight proved irresistible.  When Edward at the close of the Parliament recalled Gaveston the Earl of Lancaster withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament which met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the realm should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-one “Ordainers” with Archbishop Winchelsey at their head.

[Sidenote:  Edward and the Ordainers]

Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North.  A triumph in Scotland would have given him strength to baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of his father’s military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep an army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell back to his southern realm to meet the Parliament of 1311 and the “Ordinances” which the twenty-one laid before it.  By this long and important statute Gaveston was banished, other advisers were driven from the Council, and the Florentine bankers whose loans had enabled Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out of the realm.  The customs duties imposed by Edward the First were declared to be illegal.  Its administrative provisions showed the relations which the barons sought to establish between the new Parliament and the Crown.  Parliaments were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the king’s servants were to be brought, if need were, to justice.  The great officers of state were to be appointed with the counsel and consent of the baronage, and to be sworn in Parliament.  The same consent of the barons in Parliament was to be needful ere the king could declare war or absent himself from the realm.  As the Ordinances show, the baronage still looked on Parliament rather as a political organization of the nobles than as a gathering of the three Estates of the realm.  The lower clergy pass unnoticed; the Commons are regarded as mere taxpayers