During the first ten years of the reign the Welsh war and rumors of war were the chief matters that distracted Edward from the scarcely less congenial work of legislation and political organization. The age was one of great lawgivers. Frederick II. had set the example in Naples, and his minister Peter de Vineis had codified there the laws and constitutions of the Norman kings of Sicily. Lewis IX. had in his “Etablissements” created a body of law for France; and Alfonso the Wise in the “Siete Partidas,” or seven divisions of a system of universal law, had tried to do the same for Spain. Law had become a chief subject of study in the universities, and Englishmen, especially clergymen, had been used for a century to go to Bologna to read the canon and civil law under the great professors there. In England the expansion of judicial machinery and judicial business, which followed the reforms of Henry II., had worked, out of old and new materials, a body of customs which became known as the common law; and one great summary of the hitherto unwritten law of England had been published towards the end of the last reign by Henry Bracton, one of the judges of the king’s court. Men’s minds had been invited by these and the like influences to this study. The nation, awaking to political work, began to see the necessity of changing or amending the existing system of law. [Sidenote: Probable plan for the codification of the law. ] In undertaking the work of a lawgiver, Edward I was simply approaching one part of his duty as a king; but his own mind had, as has been said, a legal bent; his chief minister Robert Burnell, was a great lawyer; in his journey through Italy, he had engaged the services of Francesco Accursi, an eminent jurist of Bologna, whose father had written a body of explanatory glosses on the Roman law. It is probable that the king had set before himself the codification of the law as one great object. The work of Britton, another eminent judge of his time, which is written in French, and contains much that is not in Bracton, was published in Edward’s name; and some of his longer Acts of Parliament contain provisions so varied and full, as almost to constitute codes in special departments of law. But the English nation seems to have had a dread of too elaborate systems, and the whole of the national law has never yet been under supreme authority embodied in a single compilation. [Sidenote: Principles of Edward’s legislation. ] The legislation of Edward I. must be sought in the statute books. It may be generally described as an attempt to develop and apply the principles which had been conceded in Magna Carta and to adapt them to the changed circumstances of his time. That document had now become, what the laws of Edward the Confessor had been in the reign of Henry I., and the laws of Henry I. under John, the watchword of the party which was bent on preventing any increase or abuse of royal power. [Sidenote: