the struggle a bitter and fruitless character; and the national means,
which Edward employed to maintain the war, only delayed its inevitably
futile end. It was supported by wealth derived from national commerce
with Flanders and Gascony; national armies were raised by enlistment to
replace the feudal levy; the national long-bow and not the feudal war-
horse won the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; and command of the sea
secured by a national navy enabled Edward to win the victory of Sluys
and complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extra
supplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of national
taxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and then
supplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance.

Control of these supplies brought the House of Commons into
constitutional prominence. It was no mere Third Estate after the
continental model, for knights of the shire sat side by side with
burgesses and citizens; and knights of the shire were the lesser
barons, who, receiving no special writ of summons, cast in their lot
with the Lower and not with the Upper House. Parliament had separated
into two Houses in the reign of Edward II--for Edward I's Model
Parliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted by
classes--but the House of Commons represented the _communities_ of
the realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated all
these communities--shires, cities, and boroughs--and welded them into a
single community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for national
feeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and the
sectionalism of feudal society; and it developed an _esprit de
corps_ which counteracted the influence of the court. The advantages
which the crown may have hoped to secure by bringing representatives up
to Westminster, and thus detaching them from their basis of local
resistance, were frustrated by the solidarity and consistency which