judges.^18 In 1355 the whole corps of judges of king’s bench and
common pleas, barons of the exchequer and the king’s serjeants-at-law
advised that a statute then under discussion could not be changed
except in parliament.^19 An apparent attempt in 1377 to drop from
Richard II’s coronation oath the clause to uphold the laws which the
people would ‘justly and reasonably choose’ did not succeed, and legis-
lation in Richard’s parliaments regularly began with confirmations of
‘the common law, and also the special laws, statutes and ordinances
of the land made before this time, for the common profit and good
governance of the realm’.^20 The need to periodically reissue statutes was
not (as is often said) a token of their ineffectiveness but of the fact that
they registered the political experience of the commonwealth and were
the permanent underpinning of its structure.
‘the state of the king’ and government for
the common goodThe resolution to preserve ‘the state of the realm’ belonged to lawyers
and politicians: theorists talked for the most part of the pursuit of the
‘common good’, or the ‘public good’, or else of the best ‘policy’.
(Politeiawas the Aristotelian term for any constitution, and sometimes
for the ideal constitution in which the people as a whole ruled in the
interests of everyone, as opposed to democratiain which the masses
ruled in their own interest.) Statuswas used by political commentators
primarily of the standing of individuals and groups of persons, the great
issues of politics being seen as the establishment of the best of regimes
and the definition of ‘the estate of the king’ (status regis, status regalis,
‘estate royal’) in its relation to the other estates, especially in the making
of laws in parliament or estates-general.^21
The crucial work of Aquinas and his circle in distilling from
Aristotle’s Politicsa set of precepts for The Rule of Princesreflected the
thirteenth-century acceleration of governmental activity. Aquinas’s De
regno(on ‘how the name of king should be understood’), a work
addressed to ‘the king of Cyprus’ which stands at the beginning of the
De regimine principum completed by his pupil Ptolemy of Lucca,
The common good 257(^18) W. M. Ormrod, ‘Agenda for Legislation, 1322–c.1340’, EHR106 (1990); RPii. 139
(23), 253 (42), 254 (1), 257 (16); SRi. 295–7; Select Documents, ed. Chrimes and Brown,
64–7.
(^19) Select Documents, 81–2.
(^20) RPiii. 6 (20); SRii. 1, 17; N. Saul, Richard II(New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997),
25–6.
(^21) M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999); for the use of status regalisin the later middle ages, see W. Mager,
Zur Entstehung des modernen Staatsbegriffe(Wiesbaden, 1968), 41–82.