of the Exch, p, 168.] Henry III borrowed five thousand marks from the earl of Cornwall; and for his repayment consigned over to him all the Jews in England.

The revenue arising from exactions upon this nation was so considerable, that there was a particular court of exchequer set apart for managing it.
We may judge concerning the low state of commerce among the English, when the Jews, notwithstanding these oppressions, could still find their account in trading among them, and lending them money.

And as the improvements of agriculture were also much checked by the immense possessions of the nobility, by the disorders of the times, and by the precarious state of feudal property, it appears that industry of no kind could then have place in the kingdom.
It is asserted by Sir Harry Spelman,[*] as an undoubted truth, that, during the reigns of the first Norman princes, every edict of the king, issued with the consent of his privy council, had the full force of law.

But the barons surely were not so passive as to intrust a power, entirely arbitrary and despotic, into the hands of the sovereign.

It only appears, that the constitution had not fixed any precise boundaries to the royal power; that the right of issuing proclamations on any emergence, and of exacting obedience to them,--a right which was always supposed inherent in the crown,--is very difficult to be distinguished from a legislative authority; that the extreme imperfection of the ancient laws, and the sudden exigencies which often occurred in such turbulent governments, obliged the prince to exert frequently the latent powers of his prerogative; that he naturally proceeded, from the acquiescence of the people, to assume, in many particulars of moment, an authority from which he had excluded himself by express statutes, charters, or concessions, and which was, in the main, repugnant to the general genius of the constitution; and that the lives; the personal liberty, and the properties of all his subjects were less secured by law against the exertion of his arbitrary authority than by the independent power and private connections of each individual.
[* We learn from the extracts given us of Domesday by Brady in his Treatise of Boroughs, that almost all the boroughs of England had suffered in the shock of the conquest, and had extremely decayed between the death of the Confessor and the time when Domesday was framed.