At Oxford the parliament met on June 11, and the barons presented a long list of grievances which they insisted should be reformed. If this list be compared with the list of grievances on which Magna Carta was drawn up, it will be found that many points are common to the two documents. We may thus infer that notwithstanding the constant confirmations of the charters which were issued by the king, the observance of them was evaded by violence or by chicanery; that the king enforced some of the most offensive feudal rights, and that his officers found little check on their exactions. Castles had been multiplied, the itinerant judges had made use of their office to exact large sums in the shape of fines, and the sheriffs had oppressed the country in the same way. English fortresses had been placed in the hands of foreigners, and the forest laws had been disregarded. A great number of other evil customs are now recounted. But, strange to say, there is no proposal to restore the missing articles of the Charter of Runnymede, by which taxation without the consent of the national council is forbidden. [Sidenote: Provisions of Oxford. ] These grievances were to be redressed before the end of the year; and the aliens were to be removed at once from all places of trust. But this was not the most critical part of the business. The Provisions of Oxford, as they were called, were intended to be much more than an enforcement of Magna Carta; a body of twenty-four was chosen, twelve by the king, twelve by the earls and barons, to reform the grievances; of the king’s twelve the most eminent were his three half-brothers, the Lusignans, his nephew Henry of Cornwall, and the Earls of Warenne and Warwick; of the baronial twelve the chief were the Bishop of Worcester, the Earls of Leicester, Gloucester, and Hereford, Roger Mortimer, Hugh Bigot, and Hugh le Despenser. A next step was to restore the three great dignities of the administration which had been so long in abeyance; Hugh Bigot was made justiciar, but the great seal still remained in the hands of a keeper who must be supposed to have taken the oath of chancellor. The king was then provided with a council of fifteen advisers; each of the two twelves selected two out of the other twelve, and these four nominated the fifteen, subject to the approval of the whole twenty-four. The chiefs of this permanent council were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Worcester, and the Earls of Gloucester, and Leicester. The fifteen were to hold three annual sessions, or parliaments, in February, June, and October; and with them the barons were to negotiate through another committee of twelve. There was another body still, also consisting of twenty-four members, who had the special task of negotiating the financial aids; and the original twenty-four were empowered to undertake the reform of the Church. Of course these several committees contained very much