of the charter, and a general permission
to excommunicate all the violators of it; and he received no supply,
except a scutage of twenty shillings on each knight's fee for the
marriage of his eldest daughter to the king of Scotland; a burden which
was expressly annexed to their feudal tenures.

* M. Paris, p. 432.

Four years after, in a full parliament, when Henry demanded a new
supply, he was openly reproached with the breach of his word, and the
frequent violations of the charter. He was asked whether he did not
blush to desire any aid from his people, whom he professedly hated and
despised; to whom on all occasions he preferred aliens and foreigners,
and who groaned under the oppressions which he either permitted or
exercised over them. He was told that, besides disparaging his nobility
by forcing them to contract unequal and mean marriages with strangers,
no rank of men was so low as to escape vexations from him or his
ministers; that even the victuals consumed in his household, the clothes
which himself and his servants wore, still more the wine which they
used, were all taken by violence from the lawful owners, and no
compensation was ever made them for the injury; that foreign merchants,
to the great prejudice and infamy of the kingdom shunned the English
harbors as if they were possessed by pirates, and the commerce with all
nations was thus cut off by these acts of violence; that loss was
added to loss, and injury to injury, while the merchants, who had been
despoiled of their goods, were also obliged to carry them at their own
charge to whatever place the king was pleased to appoint them; that even
the poor fishermen on the coast could not escape his oppressions and
those of his courtiers; and finding that they had not full liberty to
dispose of their commodities in the English market, were frequently
constrained to carry them to foreign ports, and to hazard all the perils
of the ocean, rather than those which awaited them from his oppressive
emissaries; and that his very religion was a ground of complaint to his
subjects, while they observed, that the waxen tapers and splendid silks,
employed in so many useless processions, were the spoils which he had
forcibly ravished from the true owners.[*] Throughout this remonstrance,
in which the complaints derived from an abuse of the ancient right of
purveyance may be supposed to be somewhat exaggerated, there appears a
strange mixture of regal tyranny in the