ordainers had been appointed by a baronial parliament, the three
estates were summoned to hear and ratify the results of their labours.
Thirty-five more ordinances, covering a very wide field, were then laid
before them. Disorderly and disproportioned, like most medieval
legislation, they ranged from trivial personal questions and the
details of administration to the broadest schemes for the future. Many
of them were simply efforts to get the recognised law enforced. There
were clauses forbidding alienation of domain, the abuses of purveyance,
the usurpations of the courts of the royal household, the enlargement
of the forests, and the employment of unlawful sources of revenue.
Under the last head, the new custom, which Edward I. had persuaded the
foreign merchants to pay, was specifically abolished. Provisions of
such a character show that the king had made no effort to observe
either the Great Charter or the laws of Edward I. Even the recent
statute of Stamford, and the six ordinances of the previous year, had
to be re-enacted. Similar restatements of sound principles were too
common in the fourteenth century to make the ordinances an epoch. The
vital clauses were those providing for the control of the king and for
penalties against his favourites.

Under the first of these heads, the ordainers worked out to the
uttermost consequences their favourite distinction between the crown
and the king. The crown was to be strengthened, but the king was to be
deprived of every shred of power. The great offices of state in
England, Ireland, and Gascony were to be filled up with the counsel and
consent of the barons, a provision which, if literally interpreted,
meant that the barons intended to govern Gascony as well as England.
The king was not to go to war, raise an army, or leave the kingdom
without the permission of parliament. He was to "live of his own,"
however scanty a living that might be. Special judges were to hear