ants to pay, was specifically abolished. Provisions of
such a character show that the king had made no effort to observe
either the Great Charter or the laws of Edward I. Even the recent
statute of Stamford, and the six ordinances of the previous year, had
to be re-enacted. Similar restatements of sound principles were too
common in the fourteenth century to make the ordinances an epoch. The
vital clauses were those providing for the control of the king and for
penalties against his favourites.

Under the first of these heads, the ordainers worked out to the
uttermost consequences their favourite distinction between the crown
and the king. The crown was to be strengthened, but the king was to be
deprived of every shred of power. The great offices of state in
England, Ireland, and Gascony were to be filled up with the counsel and
consent of the barons, a provision which, if literally interpreted,
meant that the barons intended to govern Gascony as well as England.
The king was not to go to war, raise an army, or leave the kingdom
without the permission of parliament. He was to "live of his own,"
however scanty a living that might be. Special judges were to hear
complaints against royal ministers and bailiffs. Parliaments were to
meet once or twice a year. It was a complete programme of limited
monarchy. But there was no reference to the commons and clergy. We are
still in the atmosphere of the Provisions of Oxford, and there is no
Earl Simon to emphasise the fuller conception of national control.

To Edward and to the barons, the penal clauses were the very essence of
the ordinances. The twentieth ordinance declared that Peter of
Gaveston, "as a public enemy of the king and kingdom, be forthwith
exiled, for all time and without hope of return," from all dominions
subject to the English king. He was to leave England before All Saints'
day, and the port of Dover was to be his place of embarkation. Other
ordinances dealt with lesser offenders. Exile was once more to be the
doom of the Frescobaldi, and the other alien merchants who had acted as
Edward's financial agents; Gaveston's kinsfolk, followers and abettors
incurred their master's fate. All Gascons were to be sent to their own
country, their allegiance to the crown in no wise saving them from the
hatred meted out to all aliens. Neither high nor low were spared: Henry
de Beaumont, the grandson of an Eastern emperor, and his sister, the
lady Vesey, were to leave the re