were combined with monarchy, Walter maintained, when ‘the king con-
vokes parliament for conducting difficult affairs’—apparently the first
reference to the English parliament in a work of political theory.^35
The idea has been advanced that England was converted in these
years from a ‘law-state’ into a ‘war-state’, in which the kings were
related to parliaments primarily by their need for money.^36 But it was
rather that achievement in war enabled Edward III (1327–77), like
Edward I before and Henry V after him, to exploit to the full his
inheritance of a well-developed polity which had a system of justice as
its central pillar. Successful kings happily promised their people to
preserve ‘the state of the crown’ and attend to the condition of the royal
household as long as they got from parliaments the taxes they needed to
wage war. Weak kings were more vulnerable and more sensitive to
criticism. The magnates could seek to compel the weak Edward II
(1307–27) to reform ‘the state of his household and realm’ and ulti-
mately depose him: kings were not to be created and discarded by their
own parliaments, but a special assembly of representatives of all the
estates of the kingdom might witness and legitimize a forced abdication
and accept the dynastic claims of the new king.^37 At the height of his
powers in 1353, Edward III was content that ordinances ‘touching the
estate of the king and common profit of his realm’ should be recited at
his next parliament and thus enrolled as a statute; and in 1376, with
the king in his dotage and his son, the Black Prince, on his death-bed,
the king’s ministers were attacked in the ‘Good Parliament’ on the
authority of such statutes.^38
The contested state of Richard II
The ‘state of the king’ in terms of the quality of royal government was
the concern of the whole community. Without a king to appeal to,
Scottish abbeys, towns, and lay lords were compelled in 1305 to peti-
tion for the confirmation of their liberties to their English conqueror,
Edward I, who claimed the right to ensure the ‘stability of the land
of Scotland’. In this situation a sense of nationhood did assume
The contested state of Richard II 263(^35) L. J. Daly, ‘Some Notes on Walter Burley’s Commentary on the Politics’, in Essays in
Medieval History presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. Sandquist and Powicke (Toronto, 1959),
270–81; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 225–6.
(^36) The thesis of R. W. Kaeuper on the war-state, in War, Justice and Public Order: England
and France in the Later Middle Ages(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), is criticized by
G. Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, Past
and Present, 138 (1993).
(^37) Richardson, ‘The English Coronation Oath’, 50; C. Valente, ‘The Deposition and
Abdication of Edward II’, EHR113 (1998), 867.
(^38) RPii. 253 (42).