yed Earl Simon in Gascony, where Simon
had put down the resistance of the nobles with a heavy hand. The
Gascons complained to Henry, and Henry quarrelled with Simon more
bitterly than before. In =1254= Henry crossed the sea to restore order
in person. To meet his expenses he borrowed a vast sum of money, and
this loan, which he expected England to meet, was the only result of
the expedition.

[Illustration: A bed in the reign of Henry III.]

14. =The Knights of the Shire in Parliament. 1254.=--During the king's
absence the queen and Earl Richard, who were left as regents, and who
had to collect money as best they might, gathered a Great Council, to
which, for the first time, representative knights, four from each
shire, were summoned. They were merely called on to report what amount
of aid their constituents were willing to give, and the regents were
doubtless little aware of the importance of the step which they were
taking. It was only, to all appearances, an adaptation of the summons
calling on the united jury to meet at St. Albans to assess the damages
of the clergy in the reign of John. It might seem as if the regents
had only summoned a united jury to give evidence of their
constituents' readiness to grant certain sums of money. In reality the
new scheme was sure to take root, because it held out a hope of
getting rid of a constitutional difficulty which had hitherto proved
insoluble--the difficulty, that is to say, of weakening the king's
power to do evil without establishing baronial anarchy in its place.
It was certain that the representatives of the freeholders in the
counties would not use their influence for the destruction of order.

[Illustration: Barn of thirteenth-century date at Raunds,
Northamptonshire.]

15. =Fresh Exactions. 1254-1257.=--At the end of =1254= Henry returned
to England. In =1255= a new Pope, Alexander IV., confirmed his
predecessor's grant of the kingdom of Sicily to Edmund, on condition
that Henry should give a large sum of money for the expenses of a war
against Manfred. To make it easy for Henry to find the money,
Alexander gave him a tenth of the revenues of the English clergy, on
the plea that the clergy had always borne their share of the expenses
of a crusade, and that to fight for the Pope against Manfred was
equivalent to a crusade. Immense sums were wrung from the clergy, who
were powerless to resist Pope and king combined. Their indignation was
the greater, not only bec