Wales or "in any other place where the King's writ be not current the King 
who is sovereign lord of all shall do right to those who complain." los This 
announcement is hardly to be restrained to the circumstances which appear to 
have induced it. In the light of what had been done before and what was to be 
done thereafter, it stands as a formal statement that the King's remedial prerogative 
is available, even as against one otherwise immune from royal 
process. Coming as it does at the opening of a period of sustained legislative 
activity touching the dominions and the realm alike, it signifies an accretion 
to the conventional legal theory of lordship beyond anything theretofore admitted. 

The area in which Edward's advanced views of his remedial prerogative was 
brought to bear in most novel and effective form may be described as that of 
law improvement. This was accomplished by institutionalizing the petitionary 
device and by a certain crowding of the remedy beyond the expectations of 
the petitioners. An aura of ostensible compliance with accepted ideas about 
the law-speaking function was achieved through the medium of council— 
small, great, or, in its ultimate and most exalted shape, the Parliament. 
It is easy to be misled by Whiggish raptures over the growth of government 
by representation and consent within the realm into supposing that the 
dominions were equally blessed. 109 The truth is that they were not. The parliaments 
were for them a remote stage upon which they rarely played even a 
walking-on part, however much their petitions may have contributed to the 
script of what others were enacting. In so far as statutes directly affecting the 
dominions are concerned, these were done in pursuance of the ordaining 
power of the crown, for, as to them the ancient paraphernalia for making definitions 
of the law affecting the whole community was abandoned. The conclusions 
of English parliaments on imperial business were made colorable by 
the mechanics for the reception and audition of petitions upon which the 
crown was to act after due conciliar advice. There inhered in such petitions 
an implicit estoppel on the supplicant's questioning the jurisdiction besought. 
And although this could scarcely be supposed to extend to the community at 
large, it did not mean that the effects of parliamentary or conciliar recourse 
could be escaped. For if the response involved a remedy of general application, 
it could be thrust upon all by the formula of grant out of special grace and 
168 I Statutes of the Realm, 31. 
169 Schuyler, Parliament and the British Empire, 
33, refers to the fact that from the earliest 
times parliaments were imperial in the scope 
of their authority. His emphasis is upon the indurated 
conciliar quality of these assemblages, 
and he is not concerned with the issue of represervation. 
As a matter of legal theory, the 
persistence of the curial fiction respecting Parliament 
assured the maintenance of a jurisdiction 
once successfully asserted and exercised even in 
the face of the political doctrine of representation 
as it developed in the fourteenth century.