It was not till the summer of 1274 that the king reached England.

But he had already planned the work he had to do, and the measures which he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the spirit in which he was to set about it.

The First Statute of Westminster was rather a code than a statute.

It contained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was an attempt to summarize a number of previous enactments contained in the Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the Statute of Marlborough, as well as to embody some of the administrative measures of Henry the Second and his son.

But a more pressing need than that of a codification of the law was the need of a reorganization of finance.