the realm.

[Sidenote: Parliament at Westminster]

A hardly less important difference may be found in the gradual restriction
of the meetings of Parliament to Westminster. The names of Edward's
statutes remind us of its convocation at the most various quarters, at
Winchester, Acton Burnell, Northampton. It was at a later time that
Parliament became settled in the straggling village which had grown up in
the marshy swamp of the Isle of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled
pile towered over the Thames and the new Westminster which was still rising
in Edward's day on the site of the older church of the Confessor. It is
possible that, while contributing greatly to its constitutional importance,
this settlement of the Parliament may have helped to throw into the
background its character as a supreme court of appeal. The proclamation by
which it was called together invited "all who had any grace to demand of
the King in Parliament, or any plaint to make of matters which could not be
redressed or determined by ordinary course of law, or who had been in any
way aggrieved by any of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or
their bailiffs, or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated,
charged, or surcharged to aids, subsidies, or taxes," to deliver their
petitions to receivers who sat in the Great Hall of the Palace of
Westminster. The petitions were forwarded to the King's Council, and it was
probably the extension of the jurisdiction of that body and the rise of the
Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient right of the subject to the
formal election of "Triers of Petitions" at the opening of every new
Parliament by the House of Lords, a usage which is still continued. But it
must have been owing to some memory of the older custom that the subject
always looked for redress against injuries from the Crown or its ministers
to the Parliament of the realm.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Scotland]

The subsidies granted by the Parliament of 1295 furnished the king with the
means of warfare with both Scotland and France while they assured him of
the sympathy of his people in the contest. But from the first the
reluctance of Edward to enter on the double war was strongly marked. The
refusal of the Scotch baronage to obey his summons had been followed on
Balliol's part by two secret steps which made a struggle inevitable, by a
request to Rome for absolution from his oath of fealty and by a treaty of
alliance