and not by
any legislature. And the first two or three centuries of English
parliamentary history were mainly taken up, in the English Parliament,
so far as it concerns the subject of our course here, in the contest
between Parliament and the king as to who should make law and what
law was. It took more than one century for the Parliament, after the
Norman Conquest, to revive as a Parliament at all; then when it
did finally get together it took two or three centuries before it
established the principle that it had anything to do with the making
of law. The Norman kings regarded the Parliament as a mere method of
getting money from the people, hardly even as a Council when they
sought for popular support; and yet it was through the fact that they
so regarded Parliament that Parliament was enabled ultimately to
acquire the law-making or the legislative power which exists in all
our legislatures to-day. The king, in those days, derived his revenue
mainly from his own land. It was not necessary for the government to
have any revenue except for what we should call the king's private
purse. What was wanted for public expense was for two or three
well-recognized purposes, all purposes of defence. The old English
taxation system was in a sense no system. There wasn't any such thing
as taxation. There was the "threefold necessity" as it was called. It
was necessary for the king to have money, horses, grain, supplies,
etc., to defend the kingdom, and to build forts, and to maintain
bridges or defensive works; and that was the only object of taxation
in those times. Those were the only "aids"--they were called
"aids"--those were the only aids recognized. The first word for tax is
an "_aid_", granted voluntarily, in theory at least, by the barons to
the king, and for these three purposes only. The king's private purse
was easily made up by the enormous land he held himself. Even to-day
the crown is probably the largest land-owner in the kingdom, but at
the time of the Conquest, and for many years afterward, he certainly
owned an hundredfold as much, and that gave him enough revenue for his
purse; of course, in those days, money for such things as education,
highways, police, etc., was entirely out of their mind. They were
not as yet in that state of civilization. So the king got along
well enough for his own income with the land he owned himself as
proprietor. But very soon after the Norman Conquest the Norman kings
began to want m