or the testimony of liars, not as under English law by the verdicts of
juries carefully chosen by the sheriffs. Alone of countries, England
possesses the institution of the jury to search out the truth, because its
fertility leaves yeomen, and for important cases knights and squires, free
from the cares of agriculture and able to exercise their judgment and
public spirit in the courts. The villages and towns of regally-ruled
France are potentially richer even than England’s, but the people are
burdened by the quartering of royal troops and by the salt-tax; they are
rustics wearing the poorest clothes, their women going barefoot except
on feast-days; in contrast to Englishmen they are condemned for crimes
without due process of law and drowned in rivers by night.^14
The Governance of Englanddraws out the social and political impli-
cations of these differences. The French king can rule as he does because
the commons of France are too cowed to resist (criminals even rob in a
less manly fashion than in England), and the nobles do not seek to
restrain the king because they are exempt from tax. What parliament
needs to do to mend the political and regal rule of England is not so
much grant subsidies as restore the king’s permanent endowment by
passing acts of resumption of the royal lands and revenues which have
been given away—the policy actually pursued by the Yorkists from
- The shires should be administered by local men who are the
servants of the king not of the magnates, and royal officers and
ministers should be rewarded by grants for life only. There should be a
reconstituted royal council, its lay members, lacking the support of
ecclesiastical benefices, receiving proper salaries as in the French parle-
ment. And the councillors should ‘continually, at such hours as shall be
assigned to them, commune and deliberate upon the matters of difficulty
that fall to the king, and then upon the matters of the policy of the
realm’—how money may be stopped from going out, bullion brought
in, and trade increased; how ‘also the laws may be amended in such
things as they need reformation in; whereby through the parliaments
more good may be done in a month to the mending of the law, than they
shall be able to do in a year, if the amending thereof be not debated, and
by such counsel ripened to their hands.’^15
From the French side Philippe de Commynes, Fortescue’s contempo-
rary, gives a detailed account of the vicissitudes of English politics
within a wider comparison of princely government, and expresses an
admiration for England as the one among ‘all the seigneuriesof the
world’ known to him where ‘the chose publicqueis best handled, and
there is least violence to the people’. The pain of domestic war is
Comparing and criticizing states of commonwealths 301(^14) Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ed. and tr. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge UP,
1942), 24–5, 30–3, 42–113.
(^15) The Governance of England, 141–57.