confirmed, and as to the protections they sought were informed that the
king ‘took all religious men under his protection’ automatically. Where
there was no possibility of prejudice to his own rights, the king con-
ceded to the Scots ‘the customs used in those parts’.^151 The English
burgesses of Roxburgh did not get the confirmation of the charters
granted them by Scottish kings they asked for; but a remedy was
ordered for the burgesses of Scotland as a whole, when they begged to
be preserved in the liberties and laws which they had used in the time of
King David, in particular freedom from tallages and customs at
Roxburgh and Berwick.^152 In the case of Wales there was the same
appeal to the king for the confirmation of the usages which had been
enjoyed under and by the grant of the Welsh princes before the conquest
of 1282–3. Even a group of bondmen are found petitioning for the
restoration of a mill, for ‘in all Wales there have been no people of so
free a condition as they were in the time of the Princes and all say thus’.
It was held that the bishop of Bangor and his free tenants could not have
been granted the monopoly of buying and selling cows, horses, and
other goods anywhere within the episcopal domains, since such free-
doms were historically ‘common right’ in Gwynedd. Certain freedoms
of every man were being derived from reason and history, and explicitly
opposed to the privileged liberty granted to a few.^153 Wilful lordship
(volountrif seigneurie) such as it was alleged that Hugh Despenser exer-
cised in Glamorgan was now condemned as the destroyer of the rights,
laws, and customs of a community ‘used from all time in antiquity’.^154
Estates of people
The legislation of increasingly assertive monarchies converted the
chartered freedoms of lordships and communes into the more passive
rights of classes of individuals. In medieval usage status meant the
standing of an individual within the commonwealth as often as it did
the condition of the commonwealth as a whole, which came to be seen
as structured by ‘estates’ of persons with the king as the head—what the
Germans have called a Standestaat.^155
The proper ordering of society and the distinctive roles and rights of
Estates of people 221(^151) Memoranda de Parliamento, ed. Maitland, nos. 276, 280, 282, 283, 285, 303, 307, 346,
373, 384, 390, 391, 394, 400.^152 Ibid.nos. 319, 333, 383.
(^153) Calendar of Ancient Petitions relating to Wales, ed. W. Rees (Cardiff, 1975), 28 (no.
187), 82–3, 99 (no. 3719), 114–15, 241 (no. 7145), 261 (no. 7785), 279 (no. 8242), 282–5,
339–40, 452; G. A. Usher, ‘English Administration in Wales as seen in the Black Prince’s Quo
Warrantoof 1348’, Welsh History Review, 7 (1974–5).
(^154) Calendar of Ancient Petitions relating to Wales,279 (no. 8242).
(^155) On the concept of the Standestaat, see G. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State:
A Sociological Introduction(London, 1978), ch. 3, esp. p. 43.