to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and acquit and discharge them thereof in the best manner that law and custom will give.  And I now make protestation in their name that they will no longer be in your fealty and allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as king, but will account you hereafter as a private person, without any manner of royal dignity.”  A significant act followed these emphatic words.  Sir Thomas Blount, the steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony used only at a king’s death, and declared that all persons engaged in the royal service were discharged.  The act of Blount was only an omen of the fate which awaited the miserable king.  In the following September he was murdered in Berkeley Castle.

Chapter II
Edward the third
1327-1347

[Sidenote:  Estate of the Commons]

The deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed to the world the power which the English Parliament had gained.  In thirty years from their first assembly at Westminster the Estates had wrested from the Crown the last relic of arbitrary taxation, had forced on it new ministers and a new system of government, had claimed a right of confirming the choice of its councillors and of punishing their misconduct, and had established the principle that redress of grievances precedes a grant of supply.  Nor had the time been less important in the internal growth of Parliament.  Step by step the practical sense of the Houses themselves completed the work of Edward by bringing about change after change in its composition.  The very division into a House of Lords and a House of Commons formed no part of the original plan of Edward the First; in the earlier Parliaments each of the four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses met, deliberated, and made their grants apart from each other.  This isolation however of the Estates soon showed signs of breaking down.  Though the clergy held steadily aloof from any real union with its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire were drawn by the similarity of their social position into a close connexion with the lords.  They seem in fact to have been soon admitted by the baronage to an almost equal position with themselves, whether as legislators or counsellors of the Crown.  The burgesses on the other hand took little part at first in Parliamentary proceedings, save in those which related to the taxation of their class.  But their position was raised by the strifes of the reign of Edward the Second when their aid was needed by the baronage in its struggle with the Crown; and their right to share fully in all legislative action was asserted in the statute of 1322.  From this moment no proceedings can have been considered as formally legislative save those conducted in full Parliament of all the estates.  In subjects of public policy however the barons were still regarded as the sole advisers of the Crown, though the knights