check such arbitrary misgovernment as had prevailed during the last twenty
years. By the "Provisions of Oxford" it was agreed that the Great Council
should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned by the king or no; and
on each occasion "the Commonalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall
come to the Parliaments, and at other times when occasion shall be when the
King and his Council shall send for them, to treat of the wants of the king
and of his kingdom. And the Commonalty shall hold as established that which
these Twelve shall do." Three permanent committees of barons and prelates
were named to carry out the work of reform and administration. The reform
of the Church was left to the original Twenty-four; a second Twenty-four
negotiated the financial aids; a Permanent Council of Fifteen advised the
king in the ordinary work of government. The complexity of such an
arrangement was relieved by the fact that the members of each of these
committees were in great part the same persons. The Justiciar, Chancellor,
and the guardians of the king's castles swore to act only with the advice
and assent of the Permanent Council, and the first two great officers, with
the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at the end
of the year. Sheriffs were to be appointed for a single year only, no doubt
by the Council, from among the chief tenants of the county, and no undue
fees were to be exacted for the administration of justice in their court.


[Sidenote: Government of the Barons]

A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in that tongue since
the Conquest which has reached us, ordered the observance of these
Provisions. The king was in fact helpless, and resistance came only from
the foreign favourites, who refused to surrender the castles and honours
which had been granted to them. But the Twenty-four were resolute in their
action; and an armed demonstration of the barons drove the foreigners in