had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as he
had done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town
democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there
had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to
oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were
English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their
experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that
share in national government which the development of taxation made
almost necessary.

Henry II's scheme of active and comprehensive administration, indeed,
led by a natural sequence to the parliament of Edward I and further.
The more a government tries to do, the more taxation it must impose;
and the broadening of the basis of taxation led gradually to the
broadening of the basis of representation, for taxation is the mother
of representation. So long as real property only--that is to say, the
ownership of land--was taxed, the great council contained only the
great landowners. But Henry II had found it necessary to tax personalty
as well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors in
the thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes on
personalty to the great council. This representative system must not be
regarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self-
government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted a
popular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance and
muttered, "_C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer_"; and
Edward I's people would have been justified in entertaining the
suspicion that it was their money he wanted, not their advice, and
still less their control. He wished taxes to be voted in the royal
palace at Westminster, just as Henry I had insisted upon bishops being
elected in the royal chapel. In the royal presence burgesses and