THE years subsequent to 1297 up to the time of the Tudors comprise a period of differentiation within Parliament itself. Save for the event of the year 1340, when the statute was passed which completed the movement punctuated by Confirmatio Cartarum, to the effect that every form of taxation must have the sanction of Parliament in order to be legal, the three centuries showed greater progress inside the walls of Parliament than beyond them. Struggles there were in plenitude between king and Parliament to secure adherence in practice to the theory enunciated in 1340, but the great question was that of the ruling power within Parliament. It is during this period that the Commons come forward as the sole initiators of taxes, leaving to the Lords merely the coördinate power of consent. In close interrelation with this monopoly of power over the public purse, comes, in consequence of the theory that supplies must wait upon redress of grievances, the advance toward control by the House of Commons of the entire machinery of government, legislative and executive. It is a period of confusion and contradiction. Time and again constitutional life seems to be dead. War, disputed succession to the crown, tyranny, slip-shod government,--these and more tend to make the years 1297-1461 a bundle of scenes ill-bound together. The Wars of the Roses, the struggles with France for various causes and with varied consequences, the doting of monarchs upon foreign favorites, all contribute toward popular distraction from that interest in government, that keen hostility to maladministration, which makes for constitutional progress. There was no leader to prick the public conscience; no Simon de Montfort or Edward Plantagenet to inaugurate reforms in the great matters of government. [The Parliament of Lincoln, 1301]