Original text - English - When there where no newspapers and few letters,...

When there where no newspapers and few letters, and when travel was difficult and dangerous, the King’s rigid insistence on the perpetual coming and going of ever fresh troops of knights and burghers between Westminster and their own communities began the continuous political education of Englishmen, and perhaps did more to create the unity of the nation that Chaucer or the Hundred Years’ War. Nor, without such machinery for the easy levy of taxes, could the great Scottish or French wars of the Edwardian period have been fought.