Twenty years later the pressures of the same Anglo-French war pro-
voked the ‘Good Parliament’ in England to make similar criticisms. In
1376 Sir Peter de la Mare, the first known ‘speaker’ for the Commons,
rehearsed before the lords the many faults they found in the ordering of
lestateof the king and the realm, putting first the separation of the
staple for the wool trade among a number of English ports, at which
Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons, a London citizen, were profiting
hugely from grants of the customs duties. Lord Latimer said that the
removal of the staple from Calais had been the decision of the king and
his council, but ‘Sir Peter replied that “this was against the law of
England and against the statute made in parliament, and what was done
in parliament by statute could never be unmade without parliament”
... And the said Sir Peter had a book of statutes by him and opened the
book and read the statute before all the lords and commons so that it
could not be denied.’^15
The binding force of statute law had been asserted in England since
at least the beginning of the century. A new clause was introduced into
the coronation oath when Edward II was crowned in 1308: the king was
asked to swear not only to confirm the laws made by his predecessors,
but also ‘to maintain and keep the laws and rightful customs which the
community of your realm shall choose, and defend and enforce them to
the honour of God, to the best of your ability’.^16 In 1322 Edward was
able to erase the Ordinances imposed on him by a faction of the
magnates in 1311, by declaring the ‘custom’ that things that were ‘to be
established for lestat’ of the king and his heirs, and for ‘lestatof the
realm and the people’, should be ‘treated, accorded [and] established, in
parliaments’, by the assent of the prelates, earls, and barons and ‘the
community of the realm’.^17 If the custom was imaginary, the growth of
confidence on the part of the Commons in petitioning for legislation on
matters affecting justice and trade was real. Though Edward III quickly
revoked and ordered to ‘lose the name of statute’ an ordinance he had
conceded in the political crisis of 1341, as ‘prejudicial and contrary to
the laws and usages of the realm, and the rights and prerogatives of the
king’ (it called for the appointment and swearing in of ministers in
parliament), he was careful to say that clauses in it which accorded with
‘law and reason’ would be renacted in a new statute by the advice of the
256 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
229 ff.; J. Krynen, L’Empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France XIII–XVsiècle(Paris
1993), 196 ff., 419–32.
(^15) The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333–1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester UP, 1927),
80–6; G. Holmes, The Good Parliament(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
(^16) Select Documents of English Constitutional History 1307–1485, ed. S. B. Chrimes and
A. L. Brown (London, 1961), 4–5; H. G. Richardson, ‘The English Coronation Oath’,
Speculum, 24 (1949).
(^17) SRi. 189–90; Select Documents,ed. Chrimes and Brown, 31–2; EHDiii. 543–4.