The History of England by A. E. Pollard
Yet a governing class, planted by Henry II, was striking root in English soil and drawing nourishment
and inspiration from English feelings. It was reinforced by John's loss of Normandy, which compelled
bi-national barons who held lands in both countries to choose between their French and English
sovereigns; and those who preferred England became more English than they had been before. The
French invasion of England, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened the cleavage; and
there was something national, if little that was English, in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still
more in the naval victory which Hubert and the men of the Cinque Ports won over the French in the
Straits of Dover in 1217. But not a vestige of national feeling animated Henry III; and for twenty-five
wearisome years after he had attained his majority he strove to govern England by means of alien
relatives and dependents.
The opposition offered by the great council was baronial rather than national; the revolt in which it ended
was a revolt of the half-breeds rather than a revolt of the English; and the government they established in
1258 was merely a legalized form of baronial anarchy. But there was this difference between the anarchy
of Stephen's reign and that of Henry III's: now, when the foreigners fell out, the English began to come
by their own. A sort of "young England" party fell foul of both the barons and the king; Simon de
Montfort detached himself from the baronial brethren with whom he had acted, and boldly placed
himself at the head of a movement for securing England for the English. He summoned representatives
from cities and boroughs to sit side by side with greater and lesser barons in the great council of the
realm, which now became an English parliament; and for the first time since the Norman Conquest men
of the subject race were called up to deliberate on national affairs. It does not matter whether this was the
stroke of a statesman's genius or the lucky improvisation of a party-leader. Simon fell, but his work
remained; Prince Edward, who copied his tactics at Evesham, copied his politics in 1275 and afterwards
at Westminster; and under the first sovereign since the Norman Conquest who bore an English name, the
English people received their national livery and the seisin of their inheritance.
CHAPTER III. EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
1272-1485
In 1265, simultaneously with the appearance of English townsfolk in parliament, an official document
couched in the English tongue appeared like a first peak above the subsiding flood of foreign language.
When, three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, they were noted as
exceptions; but now the vernacular language of the subject race was forcing its way into higher circles,
and even into literary use. The upper classes were learning English, and those whose normal tongue was
English were thrusting themselves into, or at any rate upon the notice of, the higher strata of society.
The two normal ranks of feudal society had in England naturally been French lords and English tillers of
the soil; but commerce had never accommodated itself to this agricultural system, and the growth of
trade, of towns, of other forms of wealth than land, tended concurrently to break down French and feudal
domination. A large number of towns had been granted, or rather sold, charters by Richard I and John,
not because those monarchs were interested in municipal development, but because they wanted money,
and in their rights of jurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a ready marketable
commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king's price was generally the local merchant
guild; and while these transactions developed local government, they did not necessarily promote popular
self-government, because the merchant guild was a wealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the
jurisdiction it had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as he had done. The
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