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Malcolm of Scotland invaded Northumberland once more, and harried that long-suffering region, but without result; and an army of English barons, led by the king's son Robert, which returned the invasion soon after, was easily able to force the king of the Scots to renew his acknowledgment of subjection to England.
The claim had at any rate seemed good enough to Louis VII while he was still the husband of the heiress to be pushed, but he had not succeeded in establishing it. The rights of Eleanor were now in the hands of Henry and, after consulting with his barons, he determined to enforce them in a military campaign in the summer of 1159. By the end of June the attacking forces were gathering in the south.
The king of Pegu has one principal wife, who lives in a seraglio along with 300 concubines, and he is said to have 90 children. He sits every day in person to hear the suits of his people, yet he nor they never speak together. The king sits up aloft on a high seat or tribunal in a great hall, and lower down sit all his barons round about.
The Great Council of the Barons became the Parliament of the Realm. Every order of the state found itself represented in this assembly, and took part in the grant of supplies, the work of legislation, and in the end the control of government.
Secure of his subjects' support, the frivolous king largely employed his resources in the chivalrous pageantry which stirred up the martial ardour of his barons and made the war popular. It was then that he resolved to set up a "round table" at Windsor after the fabled fashion of King Arthur.
He had been wounded in every point in which a ruler is open to offence; for the leaders of the barons, though related to him by marriage, were yet the allies of his foreign enemies. Extreme measures became part of his daily policy.
'Then, said the Barons, 'let the day be the fifteenth of June, and the place, Runny-Mead.
To-morrow resume thy labours; but this day, at least, thou must feast with me." And at his banquet that day, among the knights and barons, and the abbots and the warriors, Adam sat on the dais near the earl, and Sibyll at "the mess" of the ladies of the Duchess of Clarence. And ere the feast broke up, Warwick thus addressed his company:
Saint Louis himself organized industry, and divided the trades into brotherhoods, put under the protection of the saints from the tyranny of the barons and of the feudal system which had weighted all industry. Reform began in the year 1257, in the "Institutions" of Saint Louis, a set of clear and definite rules for the development of public wealth and the general good of the people.
Half a century later we find sturdy barons setting up their tumbrils and gallows. In the reign of Edward I. there were still thirty-five private gallows in Berkshire alone, and when one of them was by chance or age broken down, and the people refused to set it up again, the baron could still make shift with the nearest oak.
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