and of the quiet state of the kingdom under the regency of his cousin the earl of Cornwall, the archbishop of York, and the earl of Gloucester. He spent a whole year in Italy and France, settled the affairs of Guienne, and arranged some commercial disputes with the countess of Flanders. At length he landed at Dover on the 2nd of August, 1274, and was crowned at Westminster, with his queen Eleanor, on the 19th.

Edward's attention was first given to the internal affairs of the kingdom. In a parliament held at Westminster (1275) he took measures for the due administration of justice, and for the suppression of robbery and peculation. In 1278 was enacted the Statute of Gloucester, under which commissions were issued to protect and improve the royal demesne and revenue, and to inquire into the encroachments made thereon by the nobles. Turning next to the Church, which had been enriched by large grants from Henry III., the king and parliament enacted the celebrated Statute of Mortmain, forbidding lands and tenements to be made over to ecclesiastical corporations without the king's permission. This statute was so called because the members of such bodies, being devoted to the Divine service, were dead in the eye of the law, and property held by them was therefore said to be in mortua manu (in a dead holding). In the same year Edward went over to France, and was confirmed in the possession of Guienne, at the same time renouncing all claim to Normandy.

He now turned his whole attention to the CONQUEST OF WALES. The mountains of that country had afforded a refuge to a large part of the Britons at the Saxon conquest. From that time downwards an almost constant state of hostility had been maintained by the incursions of the Welsh princes on the one hand, and the efforts of the English kings to subdue them on the other. The chief leaders of the Welsh had at length come to acknowledge the king of England as their feudal lord; and on such terms LLEWELLYN, the prince of Wales, had received pardon for his adherence to De Montfort. But he disobeyed the repeated summons of Edward to attend the parliament; and in 1276, when his betrothed bride, the daughter of De Montfort, was seized on her voyage to Wales, he broke out into open insurrection. Edward marched at once into the heart of North Wales, secured the passes, and advanced to Snowdon, Llewellyn's last refuge. The prince surrendered at discretion, returned with Edward, and did homage to him at Westminster for the territories which he was permitted to retain round Snowdon and in the Isle of Anglesey, and received back his bride. But his submission served only to rouse the national spirit of the people to a final struggle for their independence. Their

bards fanned the flame of patriotism with prophecies, ascribed to Merlin, which marked the present time as the epoch of their liberation. Llewellyn was reconciled to his brother David--who had in the former war placed himself under Edward's protectionand, in 1282, they stormed the castles of Flint and Rhuddlan, which Edward had built as the keys of North Wales. But, while Edward advanced with an overwhelming force, Llewellyn fell in a battle with the marchers, Dec. 11; and his brother David, hunted from hill to hill, was at length betrayed and taken prisoner. He was carried to Shrewsbury, where the king had established the courts of justice, was found guilty by the peers of high treason—that is, the crime of compassing the king's death-and suffered the full extremity of the horrible penalty of treason, which was invented for this occasion, and which has only very recently (1814) ceased to disgrace our statute-book. He was drawn to the gibbet on a hurdle, hanged and cut down before life was extinct, his bowels cut out and burnt before his face, and his head struck from his body, which was then divided into four quarters, and these were sent to different parts of the kingdom to be exposed for the terror of traitors (1283). The tradition-so familiar to us by Gray's splendid ode― that Edward's vengeance was extended to a general massacre of the bards, does not rest on any sufficient authority.

66

Wales was now not only subdued but incorporated with England, and brought under the same forms of judicial administration by the Statute of Wales," which was enacted at Rhuddlan, March 19, 1284. In the following month (April 25) the birth of his fourth son in the castle of Caernarvon gave Edward the opportunity, in a spirit of somewhat ironical conciliation, to restore to his new subjects a native "Prince of Wales." This title was conferred upon the young prince, afterwards Edward II., when, by the death of his eldest surviving brother, Alphonso, in the following August, he became heir to the throne; and it has ever since been borne by the heir of the reigning sovereign.

Soon after these events Edward went over to Gascony (1286) and arbitrated a dispute concerning Sicily between the kings of France and Aragon. On his return, after three years' absence, he held a parliament to repress disorders, especially corruption in the administration of justice, for which all the judges, except two, were deposed and fined.

In the following year (1290) the Jews, who had suffered as much since Edward's accession in the name of justice as they had endured from lawless violence in former reigns, were finally banished from the kingdom. Their exclusion remained in force till the time of the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile the troubles of the KINGDOM OF SCOTLAND seemed to offer to Edward the prospect of uniting the whole island under one sovereign, a prospect, however, not destined to be realized for still three centuries. We have already seen the kings of Scotland doing homage to the kings of England for their possessions in the ancient Northumbria; and Alexander III. had rendered that homage to Edward in the parliament at Westminster in 1278. In 1287 Alexander died, leaving only one direct descendant, his granddaughter Margaret, called the Maid of Norway, of which country her father, Eric, was the king. On the birth of prince Edward his father betrothed him to the Maid of Norway with the consent of the estates of Scotland. But the hope of the peaceful union of the two kingdoms was frustrated by the death of the young queen Margaret on her voyage to Scotland, Oct. 7, 1290. The crown of Scotland was now claimed by thirteen competitors; but the real question lay between the representatives of the three daughters of David earl of Huntingdon, brother of Malcolm IV. and William the Lion. These were JOHN BALIOL, grandson of Margaret the eldest daughter; ROBERT BRUCE, son of Isabel the second daughter; and Hastings lord of Abergavenny, son of Ada the third daughter. Baliol claimed as the lineal descendant of the eldest daughter; Bruce as being one degree nearer to the common ancestor; while Hastings claimed only a third of the kingdom, which was held by the estates to be indivisible. The parliament of Scotland referred the decision to Edward, who advanced to the frontier with a great army and summoned the competitors and the parliament to meet him at Norham Castle on the south bank of the Tweed. Here he announced his claim to make the decision as suzerain of the whole kingdom of Scotland, and sent back the astonished parliament to deliberate within their own border. Unable to resist, but unwilling to yield, the parliament kept silence. Edward then demanded homage from the candidates; and among those who submitted were Baliol and Bruce. Edward easily obtained the impartial judgments of the highest authorities in Europe in favour of the claim of Baliol, for whom, therefore, he decided, after receiving the renewal of his homage both on Scotch and English ground (Nov. 30 and Dec. 26, 1292). He now began to show his ultimate designs by summoning Baliol to London on trivial complaints, and treating him with marked indignity, evidently to drive him into rebellion, and Baliol returned with the resolution to shake off the English yoke.

An opportunity was soon offered by a war with France, in which Edward became involved by a collision between some Norman and English sailors. when the mariners of the Cinque Ports gained a

decisive victory over a Norman fleet (1293). Philip IV. of France cited Edward, as his vassal for the duchy of Guienne, to answer for the alleged outrage; and, by the help of a stratagem not unlike that which Edward himself had practised on the Scots, he obtained possession of Guienne and declared it forfeit to the French crown (1294). While Edward prepared for war, Philip formed a secret alliance with John Baliol, which proved the beginning of a long and close union between France and Scotland.

As soon as Edward gained a knowledge of this treaty he marched against Scotland and took Berwick, March 30, 1296. Baliol, on his part, openly renounced his allegiance; and a great battle was fought at Dunbar, where the Scots were utterly defeated. Baliol surrendered himself and resigned the crown to Edward, who marched unopposed as far as Aberdeen and Elgin, and then returned to London, carrying with him the regalia of Scotland and the venerated stone on which the Scottish kings had been crowned at Scone from time immemorial. This stone may still be seen in the chair of Edward the Confessor, in which the sovereigns of England are still crowned, at Westminster Abbey. Baliol was imprisoned in the Tower for two years and then suffered to retire to France, where he died. The government of Scotland was intrusted to John de Warenne earl of Surrey, with Hugh Cressingham as treasurer, both of whom soon became odious for their tyranny.

The war with France was meanwhile continued with little success, and Edward raised money by the most arbitrary exactions. The clergy submitted, but the nobles and commons made a firm resistance, under the guidance of the constable and the marshal of England-Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk. When Edward had crossed over into Flanders, to carry on the war, they obtained from the prince of Wales that confirmation of the Great Charter which the king had steadily refused. The Charter was sent over to the king at Ghent with an act renouncing his claim to tax the people at his own will. Edward ratified both instruments in the twenty-fifth year of his reign (1297), a memorable epoch for English liberty.

Edward was released from his French war by the mediation of pope Boniface in 1298; not before all his energies were required to deal with Scotland. The Scots, ground down by their English governors, and distrusting their nobles as either timid or treacherous, had at length found a leader whose name occupies one of the highest places in the Scottish legends of heroism, but many of whose acts are utterly unworthy of such fame. WILLIAM WALLACE was a simple knight of Ellerslie in Renfrewshire. His courage

and prodigious personal strength were early proved in encounters with small parties of the English; and he soon had a private cause of vengeance. His house had been sacked and his young wife brutally killed by the governor of Lanark. With an unlimited power of enduring hardship and fatigue, he held out in hiding-places, and gathered about him a hardy band of followers. These he trained in a succession of bold enterprises till he was strong enough to withstand the English in the open field; and he defeated a large army under de Warenne at Stirling, where Cressingham was killed and his dead body flayed in sign of hatred for his cruelty. De Warenne retreated from Scotland, while Wallace ravaged the north of England as far as Durham with the same relentless cruelty that the Scots had suffered. But his forces were no match for the mighty army of 100,000 men which Edward now led into Scotland; and the Scots were utterly crushed in the battle of Falkirk (1298).

But the spirit of the nation was not crushed. While Edward retired for want of supplies, the Scots appointed a regency under Robert Bruce and Comyn, and took Stirling. Pope Boniface VIII. espoused their cause, but his claims were rejected by a parliament held at Lincoln in 1301. Edward, after invading the country several times with partial success, made a grand expedition, supported by a fleet on the eastern coast, and marched through from south to north (1303). Bruce and Comyn, with other nobles, submitted to him, and Stirling surrendered, July 20, 1304. To crown these successes Wallace was captured through the treachery of Sir John Menteith. He was carried to London, tried as a rebel and traitor, and suffered in Smithfield the same cruel death which had been inflicted on David prince of Wales (Aug. 24, 1305).

The conquest of Scotland seemed now complete; and a council was held at London, in September, to regulate its affairs. But even while it was sitting, ROBERT BRUCE, the son of the competitor for the crown, who had died in 1304, left London to claim the crown, to which the death of Baliol had given him an undoubted right. He assembled the Scottish nobles at Dumfries (Feb. 1306), where he found nearly all ready for a new effort, except John Comyn, whose name is branded in Scottish history as a traitor. A quarrel ensued, and Bruce stabbed Comyn in the cloister of the Grey Friars. Alarmed at the sacrilege, he exclaimed to Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, "I doubt I have slain the red Comyn." "Do you doubt?" said Kirkpatrick, "ich mak sicher" (I make sure); and returning to the cloisters, he despatched the wounded man. This deed united the nobles by the tie of a common danger, and Bruce was crowned at Scone by the bishop of St. Andrews as Robert I. (March 25, 1306). The English were driven out of Scotland; but