Ever keeping in mind the needs of foreign trade and the merchants, Edward, in the Statute of Merchants, or of Acton-Burnell, sought to remedy a widespread evil. Such a thing as credit in business had not yet come into existence, and there existed no way whereby merchants (and merchants were generally aliens') could compel the payment of a debt. As "credit is the life-blood of commerce," Edward knew that trade would be strangled if some remedy, other than compulsion, were not provided. So at Acton-Burnell, in 1283, he promulgated a statute allowing a merchant to summon his debtor before the mayor of a chartered borough, there to acknowledge the debt, and to sign a bill promising to pay it. If the debtor did not pay, the mayor had authority to imprison him or to seize his goods. This simple remedy proved of the greatest value and was widely employed, and it placed commerce and trade on a new footing in England.

By an interpretation of this statute the entire property of a wealthy lord could be seized for the debts of an eldest son. The barons, already discontented by the inquiry into their privileges, seem to have joined forces and compelled Edward to make a concession that would save them from this danger. Class feeling and family pride were still so strong that the nobility would not let their lands be seized for debt and their sources of revenue destroyed, without making a protest. To prevent such a disaster they demanded the right to hand down their estates in unbroken succession, from eldest son to eldest son, so that henceforth no heir could pledge the estate for debt. Edward, probably unwillingly, granted this demand in the Second Statute of Westminster, the first chapter of which is commonly called the Statute of Entails. Thus arose the entailed estates of England. Though popular during the two centuries following, they afterwards went out of favor, and since the fifteenth century the statute, though never repealed, has been successfully evaded.

The remaining chapters of the Second Statute of Westminster dealt with very different matters. They provided for a more vigorous correction of abuses of the feudal lords and royal officials and thus supplemented the First Statute of Westminster. They regulated also the conduct of lawsuits, in order to prevent collusion, fraud, and delay; and commanded the chancellor, who issued writs authorizing a suit to be brought to the royal courts, to act not according to precedent, but according to the principle involved in the case. In this as in other particulars the statute, full to the brim of dry and technical details, was simply a splendid effort on the part of the king to substitute his law for time-honored custom, and to bring into royal hands a great deal of business that had hitherto been controlled by the church, lords, boroughs, and the courts of the county and the hundred. But in reality it was to be two centuries before this was accomplished.

The attempt to centralize justice would have had little result had not Edward already (1278) strengthened the royal courts and made them more accessible. In so doing he merely completed the work of his predecessors. He organized more definitely the King's Bench, the court that in theory, though not in fact, always sat in the king's presence; and confirmed the independence of the other court, which Magna Carta had said should sit permanently at Westminster, there to hear the common pleas. Thus out of the old curia regis three common law courts had been created : the King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Exchequer, the last of which really developed its judicial functions at a later time. The king did not give up his judicial functions, for any one deeming that he had not received justice might petition the king through the chancellor. Out of this practice arose the Court of Chancery, an equity court; while higher still, the king sat at the head of his council and acted as a supreme court.

Organization of the Militia and Local Police

We are not yet done with the legislation of these two great years. Thus far Edward had dealt with the royal officials, the feudal landowners, and the merchants. But in the autumn of 1285 he turned to the people at large, and in the Statute of Winchester sought to make out of every freeholder a soldier and an orderly citizen, ready to aid in the preservation of the peace.

This statute declared that the people of each hundred should be responsible for the robberies committed in that hundred, and that the people of each town should keep watch and ward in that town and deliver suspicious strangers and actual criminals to the sheriff, and in case of resistance should raise the line and cry and pursue the offender from town to town, until he should be captured. Landholders were to widen highways that ran from market town to market town through their estates and to keep the adjoining land, for two hundred feet on each side, cleared of thickets where thieves might lurk. Every man between fifteen and sixty years of age was to have armor in his house according to his property, and twice every year was to present himself at the "view of armor " held in his hundred, where two constables were to inspect the array and to present to the justices all defaults of armor, highways, and watches.

Three things are especially noteworthy in this statute : no man was to be excused because of ignorance of the law; the constable appears for the first time in the service of the crown; and lastly, the act, by a special provision, commanded that all who did not have armor or weapons should provide bows and arrows. Edward, like Henry II before him, knew the value of infantry and improved on the Assize of Arms by the addition of the bowmen. Yet it must be remembered that this militia was still a local levy, supplied and equipped by the vicinity. The idea of a national army paid by the state belongs to modern times.