270 The Period of Constitution Making
without the consent of the vassals. They did not mean
to deny the principle of scutage or say that consent was
necessary to normal commutation of bona fide feudal
service; later dealings between king and barons make
this plain. What they did mean was that John's per-
versions of scutage must be brought under control and
that no "gracious aid/' i.e. an aid beyond the three
allowed in feudal custom, should be taken without con-
sent. That the "common counsel" referred to was
simply that which the king found in Ms feudal court is
made certain by the detailed description, in article four-
teen, of how such counsel was to be taken.x But in the
period following the Charter, feudal ideas and practices
were rapidly disappearing; taxation developed along
several lines; the Charter, though, with this, among
other articles, omitted, was frequently confirmed, and
the contract idea running throughout it was thus kept
alive—and that in a period when people were not scien-
tific in their use of history and did not enquire what the
contract covered or meant at an earlier time. The result
was that, whereas in 1215, in this matter of aids and
scutages, the king's vassals held him to the feudal law,
at the end of the century the nobles, assuming to speak
for the nation, said that the king should not levy taxes
without general consent.
A completer illustration is found in article sixty-one.
This article sets forth the contract principle in more
general terms. It says, in effect, that there were recog-
nised customs and laws, such as those just set down,
which the king was bound to keep, and that if he did not
his people could compel him to keep them; and it pro-
vided the clumsy machinery of the twenty-five barons
to this end. Feudalism was clearly the source of this
idea. The feudal contract was the formal ground for this
whole baronial movement, that which saved it from
1 For a discussion of the famous phrase commune consitium, especially
as to whether or not it was an assembly name, see American Historical
9 xxv., 1-17.