Edward's reign had not been in general somewhat arbitrary, and if
the Great Charter had not been frequently violated, the parliament would
never have applied for these frequent confirmations, which could add no
force to a deed regularly observed, and which could serve to no other
purpose, than to prevent the contrary precedents from turning into a
rule, and acquiring authority. It was indeed the effect of the irregular
government during those ages, that a statute which had been enacted some
years, instead of acquiring, was imagined to lose, force by time, and
needed to be often renewed by recent statutes of the same sense and
tenor. Hence likewise that general clause, so frequent in old acts of
parliament, that the statutes, enacted by the king's progenitors,
should be observed;[**] a precaution which, if we do not consider the
circumstances of the times, might appear absurd and ridiculous. The
frequent confirmations in general terms of the privileges of the church
proceeded from the same cause.

It is a clause in one of Edward's statutes, "that no man, of what estate
or condition soever, shall be put out of land or tenement, nor taken,
nor imprisoned, nor disherited, nor put to death, without being
brought in answer by due process of the law."[***] This privilege
was sufficiently secured by a clause of the Great Charter, which
had received a general confirmation in the first chapter of the same
statute. Why then is the clause so anxiously, and, as we may think,
so superfluously repeated? Plainly, because there had been some late
infringements of it, which gave umbrage to the commons.[****]

* 4 Edward III. cap. 14.

** 36 Edward III. cap. 1. 37 Edward III. cap. 1, etc.

*** 28 Edward III. cap. 3.

**** They assert, in the fifteenth of this reign, that there
had been such instances. Cotton's Abridg. p. 31. They repeat
the same in the twenty-first year. See p. 59.

But there is no article in which the laws are more frequently repeated
during this reign, almost in the same terms, than that of purveyance
which the parliament always calls an outrageous and intolerable
grievance, and the source of infinite damage to the people.[*] The
parliament tried to abolish this prerogative altogether, by prohibiting
any one from taking goods without the consent of the owners,[**] and by
changing the heinous name of purveyors, as they term it, into that of
buyers;[***] but the arbitrary conduct of Edw