sition, and prove with
what exception and reserve we ought to celebrate his love of
justice. He took care that his subjects should do justice to
each other; but he desired always to have his own hands free
in all his transactions, both with them and with his
neighbors.

But though Edward appeared thus, throughout his whole reign, a friend
to law and justice, it cannot be said that he was an enemy to arbitrary
power; and in a government more regular and legal than was that of
England in his age, such practices as those which may be remarked in
his administration, would have given sufficient ground of complaint, and
sometimes were even in his age the object of general displeasure. The
violent plunder and banishment of the Jews; the putting of the whole
clergy at once, and by an arbitrary edict, out of the protection of law;
the seizing of all the wool and leather of the kingdom; the heightening
of the impositions on the former valuable commodity; the new and illegal
commission of Trailbaston; the taking of all the money and plate of
monasteries and churches, even before he had any quarrel with the
clergy; the subjecting of every man possessed of twenty pounds a year
to military service, though by the statute of Northampton, passed in the
second of Edward III.; but it still continued, like many other abuses.
There are instances of it so late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

The chief obstacle to the execution of justice in those times was the
power of the great barons; and Edward was perfectly qualified, by
his character and abilities, for keeping these tyrants in awe,
and restraining their illegal practices. This salutary purpose was
accordingly the great object of his attention; yet was he imprudently
led into a measure which tended to increase and confirm their dangerous
authority. He passed a statute which, by allowing them to entail their
estates, made it impracticable to diminish the property of the great
families, and left them every means of increase and acquisition.[*]

* Brady of Boroughs, p. 25, from the records

Edward observed a contrary policy with regard to the church: he seems to
have been the first Christian prince that passed a statute of mortmain;
and prevented by law the clergy from making new acquisitions of lands,
which by the ecclesiastical canons they were forever prohibited from
alienating. The opposition between his maxims with regard to the
nobility and to the e