the realm had always given these aids in theory voluntarily. The king
got them together, told them what he wanted, and they granted it; but
still it had to come from them, and in the desire to get money the
Norman kings first called together the Great Council, first consulted
the parliament which afterward became their master. They made a
legislature by calling them together, although only for this purpose,
to give them the power of getting more money; but when the Great
Council was once together and the kings began to be more and more
grasping in their demands for money, the barons naturally wanted
something on their side, and they would say to them: "Well, yes--you
shall have this aid--we will vote you this tax--but the men of England
must have such and such a law as they used to under Anglo-Saxon
times." And they pretty soon got to using the word "people";
the "people" must have "the liberties they had under Edward the
Confessor"; and time after time they would wring from a Norman king a
charter, or a concession, to either the whole realm or a certain part
of the realm, of all the liberties and laws and customs that they
had under the old Saxon domination--and that ultimately resulted in
bringing the whole free English law back. Thus, early law was custom;
Anglo-Saxon law was _free_ custom; the English lost it under the
Conquest; and they got it back because the first Norman kings had to
call the council together, which grew into Parliament, which then,
in voting their aids or taxes, demanded their "old liberties"; and
finally, after getting Magna Charta, after getting all their old Saxon
liberties back, by easy transition, they began to say: "We would make
certain regulations, ordinances, laws of our own"; though we have not
yet got to the time where the notion of making _new_ law, as a statute
is now understood, existed.