earl of the Saxon times; and as these persons were raised above the ori tenants in dignity, so were they, for most part, distinguished by the gro extent of the lands held by them. Am those to whose names no mark of dis? tion is annexed, there was also great

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 num-versity in respect of the extent of terr ber 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.

granted to them. Some had lands exceeding the extent of entire court #s while others had but a single pars. township, or, in the language introdré t at the Conquest, but a single manor, r two adjacent manors, granted to the

All these persons, the earl ine. were the barons, or formed the bar: of England. Whether the tenancy *** large or small, they were all eq bound to render their service in his We see in this the rude beginnings of when the king called upon them. 1. the modern parliaments, assemblies in diversity of the extent of the tenure which the barons are so important a con- fords a plausible discriminatory erekt stituent. But before we enter on that stance between two classes of persons *** part of the subject, it is proper to observe, appear in early documents the gr that among the great tenants of the crown and the lesser barons; but a better there was much diversity both of rank planation of this distinction may be p and property. We shall pass over the In the larger tenancies, the persons w bishops and other ecclesiastics, only ob- held them granted out portions to serving, that when it is said that the held of them by other parties upoc bishops have seats in parliament in virtue same terms on which they held of 12 of the baronies annexed to their sees, the king. As they had to furnish a quota meaning of the expression is, that they men when the king called upon them sit there as any other lay homagers or they required their tenants to furnish met barons of the king, as being among the equipped for military service prop persons who held lands of the crown by ate to the extent of lands which the services above mentioned; which is held when the king called upon the correct as far as parliament is regarded As they had to perform civil serves as a court for the administration of jus- various kinds for the king, so they “ tice, but doubtful so far as it is an assem-pointed certain services of the same & 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 the -selves. As they had to do homage t time to time to the king, and to attend his court for the administration of **** and for other business touching the e mon interest, so they required the p sence of their tenants to acknowl dgether subjection and to assist in the aut tration of that portion of public ja which the sovereign power allowed " great tenants to administer. The cast. the ruins of which exist in so many pars of the country, were the seats of t great tenants, where they held the " 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 progeni tors 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.

There is, however, no reasonable doubt | that the parliament of the early Norman kings did consist originally of the persons who were bound to service in the king's court by the tenure of their lands. But when we come to the reign of King Edward I., and obtain some precise information respecting the individuals who sat in parliament, we do not find that they were the whole body of the then existing tenantry in chief, but rather a selection from that body, and that there were among those who came by the king's summons, and not by the election and deputation of the people, some who did not hold tenancies in chief at all. To account for this, it has been the generally received opinion, that the increase of the number of the tenants in chief (for when a fee fell among co-heiresses it increased the number of such tenants) rendered it inconvenient to admit the whole, and especially those whose tenancies were sometimes only the fraction of the fraction of the fee originally granted; and that the barons and the king, through a sense of mutual convenience, agreed to dispense with the attendance of some of the smaller tenants. Others have referred the change to the latter years of the reign of King Henry III.; when the king, having broken the strength of the barons at the battle of Evesham, established a principle of selection, summoning only those among the barons whom he found most devoted to his interest. It is matter of just surprise that points of such importance as these in the constitutional history of the country should be left to conjecture; and especially, as from time to time claims are presented to parliament by persons who assert a right to sit there as being barons by tenure, that is, persons who hold lands immediately of the king, and whose ancestors, it is alleged, sat by virtue of such tenure. The committee of the House of Lords, which sat during several sessions of parliament to collect from chronicle, record, and journal everything which could be found touching the dignity of a peer of the realm, made a very voluminous and very instructive Report in 1819. This has been followed by reports on the same subject by other committees. They all

confess that great obscurity rests upoc the original constitution of parliament, and suppose the probability that there may still be found among the unexamined records of the realm something which may clear away at least a portion of th obscurity which rests upon it. [LORDS, HOUSE OF, and PARLIAMENT.]

We are now arrived at a time whe the word baron acquired a sense still more restricted than that which has hither belonged to it. Later than the reign o Edward II. we seldom find the word baron used in the chronicles to designate the whole of that formidable body way were next in dignity to the king himseit who formed his army and his legislat assembly, and who forced the king w yield points of liberty either to themselves as a class or to the whole c munity of Englishmen. The counts or earls, from this time, stand out more pro minently as a distinct order. There were next introduced into that assembly per sons under the denomination of dukes. marquesses, and viscounts; to all of whee was given a precedence before the barons who had not any dignity, strict so called, annexed to the service wh they had to render in parliament. Th baron became the lowest denomination in the assembly of peers, possessing the same rights of discussing and voting with any other member of the house, but remaining destitute of those honorary titles and d-tinctions the possession of which entitie others to step before him. The term al ceased to be applied to those persons wh possessing a tenancy in chief, were y not summoned by the king to attend the parliament; and the right or duty f attendance, from the time of King Eward I., has been founded, not, as anciently, upon the tenure, but on the wr which the king issued commanding their attendance.

Out of this has arisen the expression barons by writ. The king issued his wr to certain persons to attend in parliament, and the production of that writ constituted their right to sit and vote there. Copers of these writs were taken, and are entered on what is called the close roll at the Tower. The earliest are in the latter part of the reign of King Henry III., in

the forty-ninth of his reign, when the king was a prisoner in the hands of Simon de Montfort, who did what he pleased in the king's name. There are many such writs existing in the copies taken of them, of the reign of Edward I., and all subsequent kings, down to the present time. They are addressed to the archbishops and bishops, the prior of Saint John of Jerusalem, many abbots and priors, the earls and peers of the higher dignities as they were introduced into the peerage, and to a number of persons by their names only, as William de Vescy, Henry de Cobham, Ralph Fitzwilliam, William la Zouch, and the like-portions of the baronage whom the king chose to call to his councils. Upon this the question arises, whether when a person who was a baron by tenure received the king's writ to repair to the parliament, the receipt of the writ, and obedience to it, created in him a dignity as a lord of parliament which adhered to him during his life, and was transmitted to his heir. Upon this question the received opinion undoubtedly has been that a heritable dignity was created; that once a baron, by sitting under authority of the king's writ, always a baron; and that the barony would endure as long as there were heirs of the body of the person to whom the king's writ had issued. Upon this, the received opinion, there have been many adjudications of claims to diguities, and yet the Lords' Committee on this subject express very strong doubts respecting the doctrine, and contend that there are persons to whom the king's writ issued, and who took their seat accordingly, to whose heirs similar writs never went forth, though there was no bar from nonage, fatuity, or attainder. On the other hand, there is the strong fact, that we do find by the writs of summons, that they were addressed to the several members of many of the great families of England, as they rose in successive generations to be the heads of their houses: that, when it happened that a female heiress occurred, her issue was not unfrequently set in the place in parliament which her ancestors had occupied; and that when the new mode arose in the time of Richard II., of ereating barons by patent, in which a

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right was acknowledged in the posterity of the person so created, the ancient barons who had sat by virtue of the king's writ to them and their ancestors did not apply for any ratification of their dignity by patent, which they would have done had they not conceived that it was a heritable dignity, as secure as that granted by the king's patent.

The doubt of the Lords' Committees, however, shows that this is one of the many points touching the baron on which there is room for question. The practice, however, has been hitherto to admit that proof of the issuing of the writ, and of obedience to it, by taking a seat in parliament, or what is technically called proof of sitting, entitles the person who is heir of the body of a person so summoned to take his seat in parliament in the place which his ancestor occupied. Nevertheless, it would seem, from the report of the Lords' Committees, that in cases in which one person only of a family has been summoned at some remote period, and none of his known posterity near his time, this was no creation of the dignity of a baron, or of a peer in parliament, which could be claimed at this distance of time by any person, however clearly he might show himself to be the heir of the body of the person so summoned. But that, in cases in which the writ and the sitting can be proved respecting several persons in succession in the same line, as in Mauley, Roos, Furnival, Clifford, and many other families, there is an heritable dignity created, liable to no defeazance, and that this dignity may be claimed by any person who at this day can show himself to be the heir of the body of the person to whom the original writ issued.

In interpreting the phrase heir of the body, the analogy of the descent of the corporeal hereditaments in the feudal times is followed. That is, if a person die seised of the dignity of baron, and leave a brother and an only child, a daughter, the daughter shall inherit in preference to the brother, though the dignity has been transmitted from some person who is ancestor to them both. This fact clearly shows how close a connexion there is between the dignity and