tect his subjects; they
were as English as the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty
by their swords, and the tradition of their order bound them to look on
themselves as its natural guardians. The close of the Barons' War solved
the problem which had so long troubled the realm, the problem how to ensure
the government of the realm in accordance with the provisions of the Great
Charter, by the transfer of the business of administration into the hands
of a standing committee of the greater barons and prelates, acting as chief
officers of state in conjunction with specially appointed ministers of the
Crown. The body thus composed was known as the Continual Council; and the
quiet government of the kingdom by this body in the long interval between
the death of Henry the Third and his son's return shows how effective this
rule of the nobles was. It is significant of the new relation which they
were to strive to establish between themselves and the Crown that in the
brief which announced Edward's accession the Council asserted that the new
monarch mounted his throne "by the will of the peers." But while the
political influence of the baronage as a leading element in the whole
nation thus steadily mounted, the personal and purely feudal power of each
individual baron on his own estates as steadily fell. The hold which the
Crown gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and marriage,
the circuits of the royal judges, the ever-narrowing bounds within which
baronial justice saw itself circumscribed, the blow dealt by scutage at
their military power, the prompt intervention of the Council in their
feuds, lowered the nobles more and more to the common level of their fellow
subjects. Much yet remained to be done; for within the general body of the
baronage there existed side by side with the nobles whose aims were purely
national nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal despotism simply a
chance of setting up again their feudal privileges; and different as the
English baronage, taken as a whole, was from a feudal _noblesse_ like that
of Germany or France there is in every military class a natural drift
towards violence and lawlessness. Throughout Edward's reign his strong hand
was needed to enforce order on warring nobles. Great earls, such as those
of Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war; in Shropshire the Earl
of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and poorer
nobles th