of his neighbours, and exerting to the full, sometimes even beyond the limits of honesty, the rights the constitution gave him, but never wilfully transgressing what he regarded as the law. He was successful in carrying out the two first branches of his threefold policy; in the third he failed. Good government he established by a series of admirable administrative enactments, and by that power of definition which a living historian[44] has attributed to him, in spite of the difficulties presented by the independent position of the Church, and by the disorders still remaining from the late troubled times. Nationality he was able to foster both by foreign wars and by his great plan of connecting all the kingdoms of Great Britain. But in his efforts to establish an absolute monarchy, he was met by the financial difficulties into which the late reign had plunged the Crown, and by that entanglement in foreign politics which the English possessions in France, of which he was not yet quite free, continually caused. Urged by his wide schemes to have recourse to arbitrary means for replenishing his treasury, he excited again an opposition similar to that of his father’s reign, and found himself obliged to make concessions which effectually prevented any of his successors from attempting to render the Crown independent. [Sidenote: First Parliament. Statute of Westminster. 1275.] [Sidenote: Establishment of customs.] [Sidenote: His restorative measures. 1278.] The first years of the King’s reign were employed in restoring order to the government and the finances. His first Parliament met at Westminster in 1275, where was passed a great restorative measure known by the name of the First Statute of Westminster. It was so wide and far-reaching that it might be called a code rather than an Act. Its object is said by a contemporary writer to have been to “awake those languid laws which had long been lulled asleep” by the abuses of the time. It secured the rights of the Church, improved the tardy processes of law, and re-established the charters, further limiting the sums which could be demanded for the three legal aids. At the same Parliament, an export duty on wool and leather, the origin of the customs, was granted to the King, the more readily, perhaps, as his firmness had lately re-established the wool-trade with Flanders. During the next three or four years other less popular measures were taken with a view to replenish the King’s treasury. Commissions were issued to inquire into the exact limits of the grants of the late King to the clergy, and to inquire into the tenure of property throughout England, with the twofold view of establishing the rights of property disturbed by the late war, and of clearly defining the revenue due to the Crown. [Sidenote: New coinage.] [Sidenote: Statute of Mortmain. 1279.]