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III. In 1360 they were authorized to imprison persons indicted before them for felonies, and soon after they began to be called justices of the peace.12 In 1388 they were directed to hold their sessions four times a year— the origin of the later " quarter sessions." Gradually their duties were enlarged and made administrative as well as judicial, to put down riots, to regulate wages, to supervise weights and measures, trades and industries, highways, apprentices, and paupers. They were given a police jurisdiction, and so multifarious were their duties that they have been called “the Tudor maid of all work." As an organ of the central government in all localities, they supply the place of the sheriff in his early administrative functions, for the sheriff had now become the executive officer of the courts, as he still is in the United States. As representing the medieval organization of local government, they had succeeded to many of the activities of the original town, of the private court whether domanial or franchisal, and of the ordinary hundred court. They had also inherited a considerable part of the local functions of the itinerant justices, and they supervised and controlled the parish officers.

But just before the Tudor age began, another new factor in local government had begun to be active, or perhaps we ought rather to say that an old and almost obsolete institution had awakened to new life-the parish meeting. The town assembly of original Saxon days had tended to be absorbed into the manorial court of feudal times. Its business, however, was not in all cases identical with manorial business and, as the changing economic conditions of the later middle ages, and especially the rise of the new agriculture, of grazing and enclosure, reduced the importance of the manor, the permanent interests which must be looked after by local government acted to revive something like the old township moot. But the township had long ago disappeared as a unit of real political significance, and the local unit which at the moment

12 A. and S., 127-128, 194–195, 321-324; Prothero, Documents, 144–150.

had an active existence, and which often corresponded with the township in area, the parish, stepped into its place and inherited its functions in local government. The priest, as the local leader and guide, who would naturally be looked to to assist in the difficulties of a transitional time, had very likely a good deal to do with securing this succession. At any rate the parish meeting, the assembly of the parishioners, became the local governing body, and one very much like the old township assembly, looking after both the ecclesiastical and the secular interests of the community, When towards the end of Elizabeth's reign the state awoke to the duties towards the poor which had fallen to it from the medieval church, it made the parish the unit in the administration of the poor laws which were passed, and thus gave it legal recognition and a permanent position in the state. From that time to the present, the parish with the parish meeting, or vestry, has had as large a part in the conduct of local government as the American town meeting, though under a supervision in some particulars by the justice of the peace which has nothing corresponding to it in America.

The conditions which had given character to the Tudor age began to change before the death of Elizabeth. The execution of Mary Stuart and the successful defence against the threats of Spain gave something of security against both domestic and foreign danger, though the nation was not fully conscious of how great a change in these respects had really taken place. But parliament began towards the end of the century to be somewhat restless; to show an inclination to greater independence, and a disposition to be more critical of royal methods. We seem to ourselves to detect the beginning once more of something like an organized opposition and a group of men acting together, almost like a modern party, ready with a legislative programme not foreordained by the council. There was, however, no real interference with Elizabeth's action which can be said to have amounted to a matter of principle. It was only that all things were

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ready for a new age and, if Elizabeth herself with all her political skill could have continued to reign for another twenty years, it is not likely that she could have repressed the opposition that was forming. As the history actually went, it was reserved for a new dynasty to raise for the first time in English history a square issue between two types of monarchy and two types of constitution.

To the final settlement of the problems of that new age the great contribution of the sixteenth century, based upon the earlier history, was the parliament and its position in the state. As a contemporary estimate of the place of parliament, a passage from Sir Thomas Smith's Commonwealth of England, published in 1589, to which special attention has been called by Professor Maitland, may be quoted: "The most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the parliament. . . . That which is done by this consent is called firm, stable and sanctum, and is taken for law. The parliament abrogateth old laws, maketh new, giveth order for things past and for things hereafter to be followed, changeth rights and possessions of private men, legitimateth bastards, establisheth forms of religion, altereth weights and measures, giveth forms of succession to the crown, defineth of doubtful rights, whereof is no law already made, appointeth subsidies, tailes, taxes, and impositions, giveth most free pardons and absolutions, restoreth in blood and name as the highest court, condemneth or absolveth them whom the prince will put to that trial. And to be short, all that ever the people of Rome might do either in centuriatis comitiis or tributis, the same may be done by the parliament of England which representeth and hath the power of the whole realm, both the head and body. For every Englishman is intended to be there present, either in person or by procuration and attorneys, of what preeminence, state, dignity or quality soever he be, from the prince, be he king or queen, to the lowest person of England. And the consent of the parliament is taken to be every man's consent."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.-J. F. Baldwin, The King's Council, 1913. C. A. Beard, The Justice of the Peace in England, 1904. W. Busch, England under the Tudors, Vol. 1, King Henry VII, 1895. E. P. Cheyney, England from the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth, Vol. 1, 1914. J. N. Figgis, The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings, 1914. R. B. Merriman, The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 1902. Lord Eustace Percy, The Privy Council under the Tudors, 1907. A. F. Pollard, The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources, Vol. II., 1914. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Ed. L. Alston, 1906. R. G. Usher, Rise and Fall of the High Commission, 1913.

CHAPTER XI

PARLIAMENT VERSUS THE KING

James VI of Scotland began to reign when a babe in arms and could never remember a time when he had not been a king. He was something of a student and he read, not without a natural inclination to believe, current philosophical arguments in favor of the divine right of kings, and even restated them in a book of his own writing. He was the king of a poor country, but he knew himself heir to the English crown and could look forward with pleasant anticipation to its wealthier resources and to the headship of a liberal and aristocratic church in place of the hard and narrow republicanism of the Scotch presbyterians. He knew the history of the Tudor monarchy and Elizabeth's methods of rule and her overbearing ways of dealing with individual opposition. He knew also that his right to the throne was shadowed by the provision for the succession which Henry VIII had made under the authority of parliament, by which his own elder line had been postponed in the inheritance to the younger line of the descendants of Henry VII. But he knew too, when he came to the throne with the sanction of the nation in the teeth of this arrangement, that the principle of succession by direct descent, the principle of divine right, had made no small gain over the principle of parliamentary authority. It is not at all strange that James became king of England with the determination to go on with the practical absolutism which the Tudors had exercised and indeed with clearer theoretical ideas than they had had of monarchy as the natural government intended for mankind and of his own right as the particular monarch divinely selected.

Over against the determination of the king was the deter