[Edward III, 1327-1377] The reign of Edward III dates from the 24th January, 1327. He was crowned five days later at the age of fourteen and took the same stringent oath as that which had failed to bind his father. Parliament appointed a council of government which was to be in constant attendance upon the king; but the queen and her familiar, Mortimer, assumed so dominant a control over the young king that the influence of the Council was nil. Edward went through the formality of confirming the charters and forbidding illegal assessment of aids. His rule really did not begin until November, 1330, when Mortimer was killed. Edward III, being no statesman, but a warrior, energetic, without scruple, lavish, and ambitious, was not a figure designed to loom large in constitutional history. He did not mould events as did his grandfather; he watched them move. As a matter of fact there was advance. Tallage was prohibited and there came, too, the abolition in law of other forms of arbitrary taxation. [Tallage of 1332 and its withdrawal] Edward had in mind in 1332 the reduction of Scotland.[209] To that end he revived a financial expedient which had not been exercised since his father’s embarrassment in 1312, and tallaged the demesne cities and boroughs, and the rural demesne. On the 25th June, he sent out orders for the collection of a fourteenth of movables and a ninth of rents.[210] Parliament met three months later, on the 9th September, and a request formulated by the prelates, earls, barons, and the knights of the shires, was addressed to the king praying the recall of the commission for the tallage; Parliament offered as a substitute a fifteenth from the shires and a tenth from the towns. Just why a Parliament in which the Rolls do not note the inclusion of the burgesses should accomplish such a substitution, which obviously benefited the townsmen, is not clear, unless a considerable portion of the knights dwelt within the royal demesne or in small towns formerly subjected to the exaction of tallage. In his acceptance of the grant Edward promised for the future that he would not lay such a tallage, “Except as was customary in the time of our ancestors, and as he might rightly do.”[211] It was not, however, until the sweeping legislation of 1340 that tallage became illegal. [New Customs become a regular means of revenue] In parallel to the struggle against tallaging the royal demesne was the contest with the king in the matter of the custom on wool. Edward in 1328 confirmed the reëstablished scale of 1322 which his father in his hour of supremacy had laid upon the alien merchants, in amount equal to the “nova custuma” of Edward I. From this time the New Customs became a part of the regular revenue of the crown, though Parliament did not yield its sanction until a time some fifty years after the first levy, when, in 1353, it gave its assent to the Statute of Staples.