confined, he thinks, to the nobles who foment it, and the king of
England never raises taxes without assembling his parliament, ‘which is
equal in worth to the three estates’ of France and stands as evidence
against the opinion voiced at Tours in 1484 that calling the estates
general diminishes royal authority.^16
The juxtaposition of the universal idea of communities made up of
three estates with the fact of the representation in English parliaments
of two groups called to meet separately (the one composed of lords
summoned by individual writ, the other of knights and burgesses chosen
by shires and towns under the supervision of the sheriffs) inspired new
interpretations of the English polity in the parliamentary sermons of
English chancellors. A series of chancellors from Bishop Beaufort in
1404 to Bishop Russell in 1483 separated the ‘lords spiritual’ and the
‘lords temporal’ and made them the two arms of the body of the
commonwealth (leaving the commons to be the lower members). Bishop
Stafford in 1433 expounded from authorities, histories, and examples a
triplex regni status, which took account of people unrepresented in
parliament and attached to each estate a ‘political virtue’: to the prelates
and lay magnates ‘on the mountains’ the promotion without dissimu-
lation of peace, unity, and true concord; to the knights, squires, and
merchants, ‘the middle people... on the foothills’, the administration
of equity and simple justice, without corruption or oppression of the
poor; and to the peasants, artisans, and lowly herd, obedience to the
king’s will and laws, without deceit and murmuring. A more imagina-
tive way of producing three estates in England was to count the king in
with the lords and the commons. So, in 1401 the Commons begged
King Henry IV to settle the quarrels among the Lords, because ‘the
estates of the realm could well be likened to a Trinity, that is to say [of]
the person of the king, the lords spiritual and temporal, and the
commons. And if there was any division among these estates there
would be great desolation to the whole realm, which God forbid.’
Bishop Stillington in 1468 made it a quartet: he defined justice, on
which ‘the peace and politic rule of every realm’ depended, as ‘every
person to do his office that he is put in according to his estate or degree,
and as for this land it standeth by iii estates and above that one
principal; that is to wit, Lords Spiritual, Lords Temporal, and
Commons, and over that, State Royal above, as our Sovereign Lord
the King’.^17
The act settling the crown on Richard III in 1483 invoked ‘the
common opinion of the people, and the public voice and fame’ that ‘the
302 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^16) Philippe de Commynes, Memoires, ed. J. Calmette, 3 vols. (Paris, 1924–5), ii. 8, 218–19.
(^17) RPiii. 423, 459–60, 522, iv. 70, 419, v. 214, 622–3; S. B. Chrimes, English Constitu-
tional Ideas in the XV Century(Cambridge UP, 1936), 81–132.