Edward and the Great Charter. ] [Sidenote: Feudal powers of the king. ] Edward himself, who took for his motto the words “Pactum serva,” which may be seen upon his tomb, not unnaturally regarded the demands which were made for the re-issue of the Great Charter as a slur upon his good faith. Only once during the first half of his reign, did he undertake to re-confirm it; and when the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1279, obtained the enactment of a canon by which copies of the charter were to be affixed to the doors of the churches, the king interfered to forbid it. It is not too much, perhaps, to say that it was the legal rather than the constitutional articles of the Great Charter that he took the most pains to develop. The influence of the great lords is conspicuous in some of the provisions of his statutes, which tend to restrict the liberty of alienating lands. Jealousy of ecclesiastical aggrandizement appears in others, which forbid the acquisition of new estates by the clergy. It cannot be supposed likely that a king like Edward, would miss his opportunity of strengthening the hold which he had on both barons and prelates. The idea of constitutional liberty had now grown so powerful that he knew that he could no longer make laws, or raise taxes, or even go to war without their consent. In those respects he could not coerce them. But the legal rights which the crown had over its own vassals were a different matter. It was quite practicable for him to exact the full payment of feudal services, to prevent the impoverishment of the crown, by the transference of estates which paid a large revenue to the king on the occasion of successions or marriages of wardships, into the hands of religious corporations which neither died nor married, nor required tutelage. It was equally practicable to prevent the owners of great estates from cutting up their property, by what was called subinfeudation, into smaller holdings, which would not, any more than the church lands, render to the king the feudal services that he required. Two of Edward’s most famous statutes--the statute “De Religiosis,” in 1279, and the statute “Quia Emptores,” in 1290, were intended to secure these two points. [Sidenote: Powers of the feudal lords. ] [Sidenote: Courts of Exchequer, King’s Bench, and Common Pleas. ]