The barbers of London were first incorporated by King Edward IV. in 1461, and at that time were the only persons who exercised surgery; but afterwards others, assuming the practice of that art, formed themselves into a voluntary asso

gible to the Greeks; and it was perhaps an imitative word intended to represent a confused and indistinct sound. (Iliad, ii. 867; and Strabo, cited and illustrated in the Philological Museum, vol. i. p. 611.) Barbaros, it will be observed, is formed by a repetition of the same syllable, bar-ciation, which they called the Company bar-os. Afterwards, however, when all the races and states of Greek origin obtained a common name, it obtained a general negative sense, and expressed all persons who were not Greeks. (Thucydides, i. 3.) At the same time as the Greeks made much greater advances in civilization, and were much superior in natural capacity to their neighbours, the word barbarus obtained an accessary sense of inferiority both in cultivation and in native faculty, and thus implied something more than the term evós, or foreigner. At first the Romans were included among the barbarians; then barbari signified all who were not Romans or Greeks. In the middle ages, after the fall of the Western empire, it was applied to the Teutonic races who overran the countries of western Europe, who did not consider it as a term of reproach, since they adopted it themselves, and used it in their own codes of law as an appellation of the Germans as opposed to the Romans. At a later period it was applied to the Moors, and thus an extensive tract on the north of Africa obtained the name of Barbary.

Barbarian, in modern languages, means a person in a low state of civilization, without any reference to the place of his birth, so that the native of any country might be said to be in a state of barbarism. The word has thus entirely lost its primitive and proper meaning of nonGrecian, or non-Roman, and is used exclusively in that which was once its accessary and subordinate sense of rude and uncivilized.

BARBER-SURGEONS. In former times, both in this and other countries, the art of surgery and the art of shaving went hand in hand. As to the barbierschirurgiens in France, see the Diction. des Origines, tom. i. p. 189. They were separated from the barbiers-perruquiers in the time of Louis XIV., and made a distinct corporation.

of Surgeons of London. These two companies were, by an act of parliament passed in the 32 Henry VIII. c. 41, united and made one body corporate, by the name of the Barbers and Surgeons of London. This act however at once united and separated the two crafts. The barbers were not to practise surgery further than drawing of teeth; and the surgeons were strictly prohibited from exercising "the feat or craft of barbery or shaving." The surgeons were allowed yearly to take, at their discretion, the bodies of four persons after execution for felony, " for their further and better knowledge, instruction, insight, learning, and experience in the said science or faculty of surgery;" and they were moreover ordered to have "an open sign on the street-side where they should fortune to dwell, that all the king's liege people there passing might know at all times whither to resort for remedies in time of their necessity." Four governors or masters, two of them surgeons, the other two barbers, were to be elected from the body, who were to see that the respective members of the two crafts exercised their callings in the city agreeably to the spirit of the act.

The privileges of this Company were confirmed in various subsequent charters, the last bearing date the 15th of April, 5th Charles I.

By the year 1745 it was discovered that the two arts which the Company professed were foreign to and independent of each other. The barbers and the surgeons were accordingly separated by act of parliament, 18th Geo. II., and made two distinct corporations.

(Pennant's London, p. 255; Stat. of the Realm, vol. i. p. 794; Edmondson's Compl. Body of Heraldry; Strype's edit. of Stow's Survey of London, b. v. ch. 12.)

BARKERS. [AUCTION.]

BARON, BARONY. Sir Henry Spelman (Glossarium, 1626, voce Baro) regards the word Baron as a corruption of

the Latin vir: but it is a distinct Latin |
word, used by Cicero, for instance, and
the supposition of corruption is therefore
unnecessary. The Spanish word varon,
and the Portuguese barão, are slightly
varied forms. The radical parts of vir
and baro are probably the same, b and v
being convertible letters, as we observe in
the forms of various words. The word
barones (also written berones) first occurs,
as far as we know, in the book entitled
De Bello Alexandrino (cap. 53), where
barones are mentioned among the guards
of Cassius Longinus in Spain; and the
word may possibly be of native Spanish
or Gallic origin. The Roman writers,
Cicero and Persius, use the word baro in
a disparaging sense; but this may not
have been the primary signification of the
word, which might simply mean man.

But the word had acquired a restricted sense before its introduction into England, and probably it would not be easy to find any use of it in English affairs in which it denoted the whole male population, but rather some particular class, and that an eminent class.

Of these by far the most important is the class of persons who held lands of a superior by military and other honourable services, and who were bound to attendance in the courts of that superior to do homage, and to assist in the various business transacted there. The proper designation of these persons was the Barons. A few instances selected from many will be sufficient to prove this point. Spelman quotes from the Book of Ramsey a writ of King Henry I., in which he speaks of the Barons of the honour of Ramsey. In the earliest of the Pipe Rolls in the Exchequer, which has been shown by its late editor to belong to the thirty-first year of King Henry I., there is mention of the barons of Blithe, meaning the great tenants of the lord of that honour, now call the honour of Tickhill. Selden (Titles of Honour, 4to. edit. p. 275) quotes a charter of William, Earl of Gloucester, in the time of Henry II., which is addressed "Dapifero suo et omnibus baronibus suis et hominibus Francis et Anglis," meaning the persons who held lands of him. The court itself in which these tenants had to perform their ser

vices is called to this day the Court Baron, more correctly the court of the Barons, the Curia Baronum.

What these barons were to the earls, and other eminent persons whose lands they held, that the earls and those eminent persons were to the king: that is, as the earls and bishops, and other great landowners, to use a modern expression, had beneath them a number of persons holding portions of their lands for certain services to be rendered in the field or in the court, so the lands which those earls and great people possessed were held by them of the king, to whom they had in return certain services to perform of precisely the same kind with those which they exacted from their tenants; and as those tenants were barons to them, so were they barons to the king. But, inasmuch as these persons were, both in property and in dignity, superior to the persons who were only barons to them, the term became almost exclusively, in common language, applied to them; and when we read of the barons in the early history of the Norman kings of England, we are to understand the persons who held lands immediately of the king, and had certain services to perform in return.

Few things are of more importance to those who would understand the early history and institutions of England, than to obtain a clear idea of what is meant by the word baron, as it appears in the writers on the affairs of the first two centuries and a half after the Conquest. They were the tenants in chief of the crown. But to make this more intelligible, we may observe that, after the Conquest, there was an actual or a fictitious assumption of absolute property in the whole territory of England by the king. The few exceptions in peculiar circumstances need not here be noticed. The king, thus in possession, granted out the greatest portion of the soil within a few years after the death of Harold and his own establishment on the throne. The persons to whom he made these grants were, 1. The great ecclesiastics, the prelates, and the members of the monastic institutions, whom probably, in most instances, he only allowed to retain, under a different species of tenure, what had been settled

and to bring with him to the royal army a certain quota of men, corresponding in number to the extent and value of his lands; and, secondly, civil services, which were of various kinds, sometimes to perform certain offices in the king's household, to execute certain duties on the day of his coronation, to keep a certain number of horses, hounds, or hawks for the king's use, and the like. But, besides these honourable services, they were bound to personal attendance in the king's court when the king should please to summon them, and to do homage to him (homage from homo), to acknowledge themselves to be his homines, or barones, and to assist in the administration of justice, and in the transaction of other business which was done in the court of the king.

earl of the Saxon times; and as these persons were raised above the other tenants in dignity, so were they, for the most part, distinguished by the greater extent of the lands held by them. Among those to whose names no mark of distinction is annexed, there was also great diversity in respect of the extent of territory granted to them. Some had lands far exceeding the extent of entire counties, while others had but a single parish or township, or, in the language introduced at the Conquest, but a single manor, or two adjacent manors, granted to them.

All these persons, the earl included, were the barons, or formed the baronage of England. Whether the tenancy were large or small, they were all equally bound to render their service in his court when the king called upon them. The diversity of the extent of the tenure affords a plausible discriminatory circumstance between two classes of persons who appear in early documents-the greater and the lesser barons; but a better explanation of this distinction may be given. In the larger tenancies, the persons who held them granted out portions to be held of them by other parties upon the same terms on which they held of the king. As they had to furnish a quota of men when the king called upon them, so they required their tenants to furnish men equipped for military service proportionate to the extent of lands which they held when the king called upon them. As they had to perform civil services of various kinds for the king, so they ap

We see in this the rude beginnings of the modern parliaments, assemblies in which the barons are so important a constituent. But before we enter on that part of the subject, it is proper to observe, that among the great tenants of the crown there was much diversity both of rank and property. We shall pass over the bishops and other ecclesiastics, only observing, that when it is said that the bishops have seats in parliament in virtue of the baronies annexed to their sees, the meaning of the expression is, that they sit there as any other lay homagers or barons of the king, as being among the persons who held lands of the crown by the services above mentioned; which is correct as far as parliament is regarded as a court for the administration of justice, but doubtful so far as it is an assem-pointed certain services of the same kind bly of wise men to advise the king in matters touching the affairs of the realm. Amongst the other tenants we find some to whose names the word vicecomes is annexed. On this little has been said by the writers on English dignities, and it is doubtful whether it is used in Domesday' as an hereditary title, or only as a title of office answering to the present sheriff. But we find some who have indisputably a title, in the proper sense of the word, annexed to their names, and which we know to have descended to their posterity. These are the comites of 'Domesday-Book,' where, by the Latin word comes, they have represented the

to be performed by their tenants to themselves. As they had to do homage from time to time to the king, and to attend in his court for the administration of justice and for other business touching the common interest, so they required the presence of their tenants to acknowledge their subjection and to assist in the adminis tration of that portion of public justice which the sovereign power allowed the great tenants to administer. The castles, the ruins of which exist in so many parts of the country, were the seats of these. great tenants, where they held their courts, received the homage, and administered justice, and were to the sur

rounding homagers what Westminster | that they were enabled to exhibit a miniaHall, a part of the court of the early ture representation of the state and court kings of England, was to the tenantry in of their chief: they affected to subinfeud; chief. The Earl of Chester is said to to have their tenants doing suit and have thus subinfeuded only eight persons service; and in point of fact, many of the in the vast extent of territory which the smaller manors at the present day are Conqueror granted to him. These had, ac- but tenures under the lesser barons, who cordingly, each very large tracts, and they held of the greater barons, who held of formed, with four superiors of religious the king. The process of subinfeudation houses, the court, or, as it is sometimes was checked by a wise statute of King called, the parliament of the Earls of Edward I., who introduced many salutary Chester. These persons are frequently reforms, passed in the eighteenth year of called the barons of that earldom; but the his reign, commonly called the statute number of persons thus subinfeuded was Quia Emptores, &c., which directed that usually greater, and the tenancies conse- all persons thus taking lands should hold quently smaller. They were, for the most them not of the person who granted them, part, persons of Norman origin, the per- but of the superior of whom the granter sonal attendants, it may be presumed, of himself held. the great tenant. There is no authentic register of them, as there is of the tenants in chief; but the names of many of them may be collected from the charters of their chief lords, to which they were, in most instances, the witnesses. These, it is presumed, constitute the class of persons who are meant by the Lesser Barons, when that term is used by writers who aim at precision.

Many of these Lesser Barons, or Barons of the Barons, became the progenitors of families of pre-eminent rank and consequence in the country. For instance, the posterity of Nigellus, the Baron of Halton, one of the eight of the county of Chester, through the unexpected extinction of the male posterity of Ilbert de Laci, one of the greatest of the tenants in chief beneath the dignity of an earl, and whose castle of Pontefract, though in ruins, still shows the rank and importance of its early owners, became possessed of the great tenancy of the Lacis, assumed that name as the hereditary distinction, married an heiress of the Earls of Lincoln, and so acquired that Earldom; and when at length they ended in a female heiress, she was married to Thomas, son of Edmond, Earl of Lancaster, son of King Henry III. The ranks, indeed, of the tenants in chief, or greater barons, were replenished from the class of the lesser barons: as in the course of nature cases arose in which there was only female issue to inherit. But even their own tenancies were sometimes so extensive,

The precise amount and precise nature of the services which the king had a right to require from his barons in his court, is a point on which there seems not to be very accurate notions in some of the writers who have treated on this subject; and a similar want of precision is discernible in the attempt at explaining how to the great court baron of the king were attracted the functions which belonged to the deliberative assembly of the Saxon kings, and the Commune Concilium of the realm, the existence of which is recognised in charters of some of the earliest Norman sovereigns. The fact, however, seems to be admitted by all who have attended to this subject, that the same persons who were bound to suit and service in the king's court constituted those assemblies which are called by the name of parliaments, so frequently mentioned by all our early chroniclers, in which there were deliberations on affairs touching the common interest, and where the power was vested of imposing levies of money to be applied to the public service. It is a subject of great regret to all who wish to see through what processes and changes the great institutions of the country have become what we now see them, that the number of public records which have descended to us from the first hundred and fifty years after the Conquest is so exceedingly small, and that those which remain afford so little information respecting this most interesting point of inquiry.