282 The Period of Constitution Making
seem never quite to have believed that Edward fully and
with no mental reservations granted what Confirmatio
stated. Edward, on his part, was piqued and hurt at
this lack of confidence, and probably used, in dodging the
spirit of the Charter, much of that " legal captiousness"
with which Stubbs has credited him. The last decade
of his reign was a period of intense charter consciousness
and controversy; bitterness and recrimination mounted,
until Edward in obtaining from Pope Clement V., in
1305, a release from the oaths taken in 1297, confirmed
the barons* suspicions. Bemont has well stated the
situation:
... at the Parliament of Lincoln (January, 1301), the
first article of the petition addressed to the king was "that
the two charters of liberty and of the forest be entirely ob-
served in all their articles from this time forward." This
precedent was fortunate: henceforth, and during the entire
fourteenth century at least, most of the Parliaments began
thus and the express consent of the king (Placet; il plet au
roy) was carefully entered upon the rolls.1 The precaution
was not unnecessary: this is seen when Edward, finally at
peace with France and Scotland, asked and obtained from
Pope Clement V. absolution from all his oaths and the annull-
ing of the charters (1305, 29 Dec. . . .)• The best king of
the thirteenth century had done then as the worst; like John
Lackland, Edward I. had avowed that he had granted the
Great Charter "voluntarily and spontaneously"; at heart
neither the one nor the other ever believed that he had abdi-
cated the least particle of his authority. This unfortunate
* Bemont cites Sir Edward Coke's reckoning that Magna Carta was
confirmed "15 times tinder Edward III., 8 times under Richard II., 6 times
tinder Henry IV., once under Henry V.; and that, to sum up, the Great
Charter and that of the forest have been expressly established, confirmed,
or promulgated by 32 acts of Parliament." He adds: "These figures can
be taken as exact; ^they show the value that the nation attached to these
repeated confirmations; but also of what little importance the king made
them.'* Translated from Chartes des Libertes Anglaises, pp. xlix., 1. Yet
whatever the king thought or did, as often as he confirmed the Charters,
so often did he in effect assent to Bracton's dictum that the king was
tinder the law._ Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
Charters were included at the beginning of the many manuscript collec-
tions of statutes which were being compiled and circulated.