View of the state of Europe during the Middle ages. With additions from recent writers by W. Smith

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Page 378 - No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed ; nor will we pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.
Page 464 - ... guess at the power which a king may exercise with respect to the laws and the subject. For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their lives, properties, and laws ; for this very end and purpose he has the delegation of power from the people, and he has no just claim to any other power but this.
Page 563 - I should find it difficult to resist the conclusion, that, however the labourer has derived benefit from the cheapness of manufactured commodities, and from many inventions of common utility, he is much inferior in ability to support a family to his ancestors three or four centuries ago.
Page 377 - Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William, Earl of Pembroke. To their temperate zeal for a legal government, England was indebted during that critical period for the two greatest blessings that patriotic statesmen could confer ; the establishment of civil liberty upon an immovable basis, and the preservation of national independence under the ancient line of sovereigns, which rasher men were about to exchange for the dominion of France.
Page 378 - Charta arc those which protect the personal liberty and property of all freemen, by giving security from arbitrary imprisonment and arbitrary spoliation.
Page 502 - VI. Moreover, we have granted for us and our heirs, as well to archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, and other folk of holy Church, as also to earls, barons, and to all the commonalty of the land, that for no business from henceforth will we take such manner of aids, tasks, nor prises, but by the common assent of the realm, and for the common profit thereof, saving the ancient aids and prises due and accustomed.
Page 390 - It confers not, it never did confer, those unjust immunities from public burthens, which the superior orders arrogated to themselves upon the continent. Thus while the privileges of our peers, as hereditary legislators of a free people, are incomparably more valuable and dignified in their nature, they are far less invidious in their exercise than those of any other nobility in Europe.
Page 502 - And that all archbishops and bishops shall pronounce the sentence of great excommunication against all those that by word, deed, or counsel do contrary to the foresaid charters, or that in any point break or undo them. And that the said curses be twice a year denounced and published by the prelates aforesaid. And if the same prelates or any of them be remiss in the denunciation of the said sentences, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York for the time being, as is fitting, shall compel and distrein...
Page 467 - ... ranks flourished remarkably, not only in commercial towns, but among the cultivators of the soil. " There is scarce a small village," says Sir J. Fortescue, " in which you may not find a knight, an esquire, or some substantial householder, (paterfamilias,) commonly called a frankleyn,1 possessed of considerable estate ; besides others who are called freeholders, and many yeomen of estates sufficient to make a substantial jury.
Page 90 - In every age and country, until times comparatively recent, personal servitude appears to have been the lot of a large, perhaps the greater, portion of mankind. We lose a good deal of our sympathy with the spirit of freedom in Greece and Rome, when the importunate recollection occurs to us of the tasks which might be enjoined, and the punishments which might be inflicted, without control either of law or opinion, by the keenest patriot of the Comitia, or the Council of Five Thousand.

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