The false air of romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn.

Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity.

"Knight without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common robber.
[Sidenote: Influence of Legality] The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power over Edward's mind than the French conception of kingship, feudality, and law.

The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties such as commendation into a definite vassalage.
But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St.Lewis and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman Law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the time.

When the "sacred majesty" of the Caesars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage every constitutional relation was changed.