Richardson, Oliver Huntington: The national movement in the reign of Henry III. and its culmination in the barons' war: erster Theil (Heidelberg, 1897)

PART I INTRODUCTION: PRIMARY FORCES

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of Canterbury, was by his political genius and legal
ability to be the main force in converting a constitu-
tion largely unwritten and vague, into one written
and definite. In Magna Charta itself the liberty of
the English church is assured in the first article, and
a second guarantee for its freedom occupies the most
prominent place in the enacting clause at the end of
the document, — silent witness to its prominence in
the national movement.
While the church of England since the Conquest
had become more and more Romanized, more highly
centralized, and more independent of royal control,
— without, however, losing its national vigour, —the
political government of England had been slowly chang-
ing from an absolute to a limited monarchy. Anglo-
Saxon institutions of local self-government, depressed
by the Conquest, had been revived in proportion as the
king had found himself obliged to rely upon the support
of the native English ; the royal courts, under Henry II.,
had expanded into a kind of national assembly, and
the very machinery of government by which the king
exerted his power limited the facility of arbitrary action;
cities had been granted charters, — notably London,
which, if it did not play in England the commanding
role of Paris in France, nevertheless, in the crises under
John, Henry III., and even as late as the Wars of
the Roses, gave always a temporary and sometimes a
permanent advantage to its possessor; and finally, the
new ministerial nobility of Henry I. and Henry II.
had firmly established itself in the land. As the result