Chapter 44 directed that scutages should be taken in the future as they had been wont to be taken in the time of Henry II. Now, the rates of scutage and the procedure for levying it in that reign had been quite specific, and could still be read among the Rolls of the Exchequer recently recovered from Prince Louis. It was thus easy to define the various innovations of John’s reign, those well-hated additional burdens which had furnished the chief motive for the civil war, and which Henry III. was now made to promise should be utterly swept away. This general condemnation probably included the increased frequency of John’s exactions, the assessment of scutages on the new basis provided by the Inquest of 1212, the levy of both scutage and service cumulatively, and, above all, the exaction of the high rate of three marks per knight’s fee. The essence of the demands pressed on the government by the baronial leaders in 1217 must undoubtedly have been the return to the normal maximum rate of 20s. per knight’s fee. Henry II., we have seen, sometimes took less, but only on one occasion took more.[252] This provision, it should be needless to say, did not preclude the barons individually or collectively from volunteering to contribute at a higher rate; and the necessity of such abnormal contributions would naturally be determined at meetings of the _Commune Concilium_. ----- Footnote 252: See _supra_, p. 88. ----- The substitution of this definite stipulation of a return to the well-known usage of Henry II. in place of the discarded chapters 12 and 14 of John’s Charter (which made “common consent” necessary for _all_ scutages, whatever the rate) was a natural compromise; and the barons in agreeing to it were probably quite justified in thinking, from their own medieval point of view, that they were neither submitting to any unfair abridgments of their rights, nor yet countenancing any reactionary measures hurtful to the growth of constitutional liberty.[253] Yet when this alteration is viewed by modern eyes in the light cast by the intervening centuries of constitutional progress, and when it is remembered that the new clause formed the chief part of the concessions made in 1217 to baronial claims, the conclusion inevitably suggests itself that the new agreement is the proof of retrograde tendencies successfully at work. All mention of the _Commune Concilium_—that predecessor of the modern Parliament, that germ of all that has made England famous in the realm of constitutional laws and liberties—disappears, apparently without protest or regret. If the control of taxation by a national assembly, if the conception of representation, if the indissoluble connection of these two principles with each other, ever really found a place in Magna Carta, they were contemptuously ejected from it in 1216, and failed to find a champion in 1217 to demand their restoration. ----- Footnote 253: