before the twelfth century, seldom convened, sparsely attended, and
generally ignored by the greater feudatories, a conference of partisans
rather than a parliament. In England the Great Council of the Norman
dynasty, inheriting the prestige and the claims of the Anglo-Saxon
Witenagemot, held from the first a more respectable position. Even a
William I or a Henry II scrupulously adhered to the principle of
consulting his magnates on projects of legislation or taxation; under
the sons and grandson of Henry II the pretensions of the assembly were
enlarged and more pertinaciously asserted. The difficulties of the Crown
were the opportunity of Church and Baronage. The Great Council now
claimed to appoint and dismiss the royal ministers; to withhold
pecuniary aid and military service until grievances had been redressed;
to limit the prerogative, and even to put it in commission when it was
habitually abused. In fact the English nobility of this period, thwarted
as individuals in their ambitions of territorial power, found in their
collective capacity, as members of the opposition in the Council, a new
field of enterprise and self-aggrandisement. In France there was no such
parliamentary movement, because the fundamental presupposition of
success was wanting; because it was hopeless to appeal to public
opinion, against a successful and venerated monarchy, in the name of an
assembly which had never commanded popular respect. Under these
circumstances it was natural that very different consequences should
ensue in the two countries, when the reformation of their national
assemblies was taken in hand by Edward I and his contemporary, Philippe
le Bel. The problem before the two sovereigns was the same--to create an
assembly which should be recognised as competent to tax the nation. The
solutions which they adopted were closely alike; representatives of the
free towns were brought into the Etats Generaux, of free towns and
shires into the English Parliament; in each case a Third Estate was
grafted upon a feudal council. But the products of the two experiments