were actually on behalf of private clients.^139 In the ‘good parliament’
four years later they brought the collective prosecution against Lord
Latimer and others of the king’s servants which is regarded as the first
true example of impeachment, though the trial of Bishop Langton
in 1307 had shown the essential characteristics of the process: the
presentation of petitions and the trial of the accused by his peers, which
gave commons and lords complementary functions in a bicameral
assembly.^140
Statute-making
The presentation on behalf of the community of bills which the king
might turn into statutes was, however, the function which made the
representatives of the shires and boroughs an essential element of parlia-
ment. Though the king could always make law by simple ordinance,
royal assent to collective petitions from the commons became the
normal form of legislation, and the great majority of the earliest statutes
made this way concerned the administration of justice. The first English
collections classify as ‘provisions’, not ‘statutes’, the articles of Magna
Carta (the provisiones de Runnymede), the legislation of King Henry
and his council at Merton in 1236 on the rights of widows and other
feudal matters, and the baronial reforms of 1259 also directed at the
concerns of landholders as they were re-enacted in the king’s name at
Marlborough in 1267.^141 Statute-making as the essential and continuous
activity of the king was recognized to have begun in England only
in 1275 ‘with the établissements made by King Edward the son of
King Henry at Westminster at his first general parliament after his
coronation, out of his great concern for the state of his realm and the
state of holy church, by [the advice of] his Council, and with the assent
of the Archbishops, Bishops, Priors, Earls, Barons, and the Community
of the land there summoned’. The significance of the occasion was not
missed by the chronicler Thomas Wykes, who writes that Edward
wished to restore the laws which had long been dormant through the
impotence of his predecessors, or had languished because of the tumult
in the country, and therefore sought the advice of legal experts on the
drafting of statutes which would remedy the situation and yet be con-
sonant with existing law. Ten years later, Wykes tells us, there had to
186 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^139) RPii. 310 (no. 13), 323 ff.
(^140) Ibid. ii. 323 ff.; Harding, ‘Plaints and Bills’, 78–9.
(^141) SRi. 1, 7, 8, 12, 19; Close Rolls, 1254–6, 429; Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench,
iii, pp. xi ff.; V. H. Galbraith, ‘Statutes of Edward I’, in Essays in Medieval History presented
to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969), 177–8, 182,
184.