Popular Law-making | Page 8

a Council when they sought for popular support; and yet it was through the fact that they so regarded Parliament that Parliament was enabled ultimately to acquire the law-making or the legislative power which exists in all our legislatures to-day. The king, in those days, derived his revenue mainly from his own land. It was not necessary for the government to have any revenue except for what we should call the king's private purse. What was wanted for public expense was for two or three well-recognized purposes, all purposes of defence. The old English taxation system was in a sense no system. There wasn't any such thing as taxation. There was the "threefold necessity" as it was called. It was necessary for the king to have money, horses, grain, supplies, etc., to defend the kingdom, and to build forts, and to maintain bridges or defensive works; and that was the only object of taxation in those times. Those were the only "aids"--they were called "aids"--those were the only aids recognized. The first word for tax is an "aid", granted voluntarily, in theory at least, by the barons to the king, and for these three purposes only. The king's private purse was easily made up by the enormous land he held himself. Even to-day the crown is probably the largest land-owner in the kingdom, but at the time of the Conquest, and for many years afterward, he certainly owned an hundredfold as much, and that gave him enough revenue for his purse; of course, in those days, money for such things as education, highways, police, etc., was entirely out of their mind. They were not as yet in that state of civilization. So the king got along well enough for his own income with the land he owned himself as proprietor. But very soon after the Norman Conquest the Norman kings began to want more money. Nominally, of course, they always said they wanted it for the defence of the realm. Then they wanted it, very soon, for crusades; lastly, for their own favorites. They spent an enormous amount of money on crusades and in the French wars; later they began to maintain--always abroad--what we should call standing armies, and they needed money for all those purposes. And money could yet be only got from the barons, the nobility, or at least the landed gentry, because the people, the agricultural laborers or serfs, villeins, owned no land. Knights and barons paid part of the tax by furnishing armed men, but still, as civilization increased, there was a growing demand on the part of the Norman kings for money. Now this money could be got only from the barons, and under the Constitution--and here we first have to use that phrase--it could only be got from the barons by their consent. That is, the great barons of the realm had always given these aids in theory voluntarily. The king got them together, told them what he wanted, and they granted it; but still it had to come from them, and in the desire to get money the Norman kings first called together the Great Council, first consulted the parliament which afterward became their master. They made a legislature by calling them together, although only for this purpose, to give them the power of getting more money; but when the Great Council was once together and the kings began to be more and more grasping in their demands for money, the barons naturally wanted something on their side, and they would say to them: "Well, yes--you shall have this aid--we will vote you this tax--but the men of England must have such and such a law as they used to under Anglo-Saxon times." And they pretty soon got to using the word "people"; the "people" must have "the liberties they had under Edward the Confessor"; and time after time they would wring from a Norman king a charter, or a concession, to either the whole realm or a certain part of the realm, of all the liberties and laws and customs that they had under the old Saxon domination--and that ultimately resulted in bringing the whole free English law back. Thus, early law was custom; Anglo-Saxon law was free custom; the English lost it under the Conquest; and they got it back because the first Norman kings had to call the council together, which grew into Parliament, which then, in voting their aids or taxes, demanded their "old liberties"; and finally, after getting Magna Charta, after getting all their old Saxon liberties back, by easy transition, they began to say: "We would make certain regulations, ordinances, laws of our own"; though we have not yet got to the time where the notion of making new law, as a statute is now understood, existed.

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