The English Crisis of 1297 in the Light of French Experience

Among the familiar sights crowding the landscape of English history from the dooms of Ine to that crown plucked from a hawthorn bush at Bosworth, none is more deeply cherished than the crisis of 1297 and the “Confirmation of the Charters” to which it gave rise. For, despite all the sharp differences over detail that the documentation for this crisis has engendered, scholars have shown remarkable agreement in seeing it as the one defeat suffered by Edward I in a long and notably successful reign. And to that defeat they have attributed great constitutional significance. Stubbs set the pattern, calling the “result singularly in harmony with what seems from history and experience to be the natural direction of English progress,” and Wilkinson is only one among the many who have recently elaborated on that theme: The crisis of 1297 ... placed a definite check on the tendencies which Edward I had shown, to ignore the deep principles of the constitution under stress of the necessities which confronted the nation ... It was a landmark in the advance of the knights ... toward political maturity. It helped to establish the tradition of co-operation and political alliance between the knights and the magnates, on which a good deal of the political future of England was to depend .... What the opposition achieved, in 1297, was a great vindication of the ancient political principle of government by consent

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