complaints against royal ministers and bailiffs. Parliaments were to
meet once or twice a year. It was a complete programme of limited
monarchy. But there was no reference to the commons and clergy. We are
still in the atmosphere of the Provisions of Oxford, and there is no
Earl Simon to emphasise the fuller conception of national control.

To Edward and to the barons, the penal clauses were the very essence of
the ordinances. The twentieth ordinance declared that Peter of
Gaveston, "as a public enemy of the king and kingdom, be forthwith
exiled, for all time and without hope of return," from all dominions
subject to the English king. He was to leave England before All Saints'
day, and the port of Dover was to be his place of embarkation. Other
ordinances dealt with lesser offenders. Exile was once more to be the
doom of the Frescobaldi, and the other alien merchants who had acted as
Edward's financial agents; Gaveston's kinsfolk, followers and abettors
incurred their master's fate. All Gascons were to be sent to their own
country, their allegiance to the crown in no wise saving them from the
hatred meted out to all aliens. Neither high nor low were spared: Henry
de Beaumont, the grandson of an Eastern emperor, and his sister, the
lady Vesey, were to leave the realm; John Charlton, the pushing
Shropshire squire who was worming his way by court favour into the
estates of the degenerate descendants of the house of Gwenwynwyn, was,
with the other English partisans of the favourite, to be driven from
the royal service.

Edward made a last desperate attempt to save Gaveston. He would agree
to all the other ordinances, if he were still allowed to keep his
brother Peter in England and in possession of the earldom of Cornwall.
But the estates refused to yield the root of the whole matter.
Threatened with the prospect of a new battle of Lewes, if he remained