when well kept and not distorted or destroyed by falsehood, is capable of bringing liberty and happiness to the world. The temporary destruction of such balance, either by the imprudent action of the king and his officials in the attempt to make adjustment of new conditions and to provide for emergencies, or by the attempts by great or rich men to create an opposition to the Crown which would enable them to enlarge their possessions or to dictate public policy, makes up the bulk of what is called constitutional history.

Disraeli, speaking in 1845 with reference to an entirely different set of conditions, used language which emphasised the good points of the English system where it existed under a central government strong enough to repress disorders. "You have thrown upon the land the revenues of the Church, the administration of justice and the estate of the poor; and you value that territorial constitution, not as serving to gratify the pride or pamper the luxury of the proprietors of the land, but because in that constitution you and those you have succeeded have found the only security for self-government; and more than that, the only barrier to that system of centralisation which has taken root in and enslaved the energies of surrounding nations."

The balance swings alternately backwards and forwards as events in Europe, as well as events in the islands, foreign alliances, popular and unpopular, of kings, as well as home coalitions of nobles leading to baronial aggrandisement or quarrels, exceptional needs for money as well as increased revenues which were the result of commerce, tell for the strength of the Crown or of its opposers. The advantage leans to the leaders of either side who are quickest to see the tendencies of contemporary movement.

When Edward I., after the experience of the barons' wars, comes back from the East with the prestige of a Crusader, he is assisted in upholding the supremacy of the Crown not only by the tendencies of the time but by wide experience gained from his administration during his father's lifetime of his outlying dominions. Besides drawing revenue from the Peak and Bristol, he had ruled over Ireland, the Channel Islands and Aquitaine, using the revenue from

either to meet emergencies in the other as occasion required, and moving his officials and his feudal tenants as soldiers from the one to the other.

His letters in 1283 from Aberconway in Snowdon to divers people in Guienne and other parts of the Continent show the close connection between the different parts under his control and the use of the moneys raised in one part for necessities in another. He gained special experience of the necessity for strict economy and avoidance of war, for his revenues from the different appanages never met expenses, leaving him to sponge on his father for funds to make up the deficiency.9

He is careful not only to avoid war with his French suzerain, but to set the example to his independent nobles by an exaggerated obedience to his own feudal lord in France.

Still throughout his reign the swing has set in in the opposite direction; the baronial opposition, headed by his own blood, grows ever more restive; the great lords become stronger, the towns more mutinous under repeated demands for money and men; by the time his son Edward comes to reign, the Crown, ever on the edge of bankruptcy, has lost its position of superiority. The king's own kinsmen either dictate policy or thwart political or military operations; they curry favour with the moneyed commercial classes, bitterly opposing the foreign ability which is the only check on their coalitions of power. In the end they depose Edward and murder him.

It is a system of checks, but of checks which to be safe must balance, a system of checks which may be easily upset ; yet so long as there is a society there can be no liberty within it without the quiet given by the firm control of a ruler.

If the Edwards had been successful in putting the stamp of the English feudalism on the Scottish regalities; if their justices had continued circuits in Moray and Galloway; Scotland, then at Alexander's death at the height of her progress and prosperity, might have gone forward with England and shared in her advance.

But after Bannockburn the country not only retrograded in material ways but became the prey of factions of nobles

wholly independent of the Crown and often fighting one another for the possession of the king's person. The earlier Stuarts, who all with the exception of James V. met violent deaths, when they had struggled into a perilous supremacy over their Lowland nobility, exercised their Divine Right by enforcing continental feudalism on the men of the West and North, replacing the kinsman chief of custom by the independent feudal earl.

This whole process in Scotland of gradual absorption of the communal societies by the feudal kingship has owed its comparatively peaceful course to local conditions.

The king, though often weak in military power, was present in the islands, seated on the great waterways, and possessing and controlling the most fertile arable lands; his immediate dangers from Norway, Ireland, and England compelled him always to regard military efficiency as his first duty at home; his authority increased by the pressure of such competition in warlike usage; unlike the English king, he is not distracted from the union of Scotland by the loadstone France as a near enemy; if Rome interferes either by help or hindrance, her influence was against the scattered communities of the West, or it can be easily bought.

The relation to the king of the great holders of regalities, who were the king's outposts in the struggle, the Norman and Saxon grantees, the chieftains transformed into earls and sheriffs, was that of continental feudalism; they dealt with him almost on the terms of independent sovereignty; but he was near them : his force could reach them both for castigation and for help; in time of need they could have his present support at all times against the North-West, and were able to return him assistance in his disputes with his foreign enemy.

Above all, the Western communities were poor and scattered, divided by deep waters and high mountains, cut off from agriculture by rainfall, and from the shifting routes of distant commerce by the stormy passages of Sumburgh Roost, Fair Isle, or the Scillies. Their absorption, so far as it was in accordance with economic causes, was a matter of time only.

NOTES. Skene, Celtic Scotland, vol. iii. 2 R.S., No. 98, edited by F. W. Maitland. 3 See Appendix E, The Laws of Galloway. 4 Husbandorum Regis, No. 400. 5 Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland, vol. iv. p. 400. 6 Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland, vol. iii. p. 213. 7 See Appendix F, The Government of Gascony. 8 See Appendix G, Baronial Combinations. 9 His revenues from Gascony, for instance, were, says M. Bemont, outside the revenues of the royal demesnes, "Les droits de circulation et d'entrée dans certaines villes, et avant tous les autres les coutumes grande et petite de Bordeaux." He also levied throughout the land "un fouage, un impôt réel et proportionnel sur l'agriculture."

CHAPTER XXVIII

COMMUNAL AND FEUDAL SOCIETY IN IRELAND TO 1367

WHEN we pass over to Ireland the conditions are reversed.

The king is absent, always separated by contrary winds and a stormy channel from his great vassals. After Henry's first coming and the two expeditions of John, the English kings cease to set foot in Ireland. The only exceptions are the attempt of Edward II. to cross, frustrated by contrary winds; and the two crossings of Richard II., unfortunate precedents owing to the results of his absence from England.1

In Ireland the absence of the king has always prevented any but a continental feudalism, the only check on the mutual destruction of the great lords being their weakness in the presence of the communal society, which they were unable to destroy and with which in each successive generation they tended to coalesce. The help which they received from England was very small indeed in proportion to the exhausting levies of men and money made on Ireland by the English king, often at critical junctures of the feudal fortunes, for his expeditions against Scotland and France.

This might not have mattered if the Anglo-Irish had been in sufficient strength among themselves to complete the absorption, or had been united in their efforts against the communal societies, which it was not humanly possible that they should be.

Mr Bagwell, in his Ireland under the Tudors and Stuarts,

like many other equally noted historians, scornfully gibes at the Irish for "their total incapacity for anything like national organisation." Such a lack had nothing to do with the Irish, but was the weak point of their form of society. However, the gist of the sarcasm lies in the fact that it was the total incapacity of the Anglo-Irish barons to combine or organise warfare which prevented their success.

Mageoghegan is nearer the truth when in the Annals of Clonmacnois, writing of an expedition in 1311, he tells us that he gathers from his MS. that "there reigned more dissensions between the Englishmen themselves in the beginning of the conquest of this kingdom than between the Irishmen, as by perusing the wars between the Lacies of Meath, John de Courcy Earl of Ulster, William Marshall and the English of Meath and Munster, MacGerald, the Burkes, Butlers, and Cogans may appear."

But above all it was the strength of the communal society of Ireland, the reality of the social ideas which underlay the archaic forms of its fast decaying civilisation, the ethical value of its ancient customary law, the fertility of the soil and the high state of cultivation, the strength and unity from every standpoint so far as communal society permits of unity, which prevented any success of the English or Scots in Ireland and led on to the devastation of the country through the centuries by successive groups of aliens.

The contrast with Western Scotland in soil, in climate, in ease and nearness of communications, is enormous. The fertile soil of Ireland becomes the granary (as it might be at this day) for England's troops in their Scottish and French wars. In 1296 Edward draws for his forces in Scotland 8000 quarters of wheat, 10,000 quarters of oats, 10,000 casks of wine, besides beef and pork. It is the fertility of Ireland and her great agricultural resources which have brought her sorrow.

It is the recruiting ground as well. In his expeditions to Scotland in 1296, 1302, and 1303, Edward draws from Ireland without any return the men and the leaders there so much needed.

There is no room in this book for a history of Ireland,