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     [* Camd. in Chesh. Spel. Gloss, in verb. Comes
     Palatinus.]

     [** Brady’s Hist. p. 198, 200.]

     [*** Order Vitalia.]

William, earl Warrenne, two hundred and ninety-eight, besides twenty-eight towns or hamlets in Yorkshire: Todenei, eighty-one: Roger Bigod, one hundred and twenty-three: Robert, earl of Eu, one hundred and nineteen: Roger Mortimer, one hundred and thirty-two, besides several hamlets: Robert de Stafford, one hundred and thirty: Walter de Eurus, earl of Salisbury, forty-six Geoffrey de Mandeville, one hundred and eighteen Richard de Clare, one hundred and seventy-one: Hugh de Beauchamp, forty-seven: Baldwin de Rivers, one hundred and sixty-four: Henry de Ferrers, two hundred and twenty? two: William de Percy, one hundred and nineteen:[*] Norman d’Arcy, thirty-three.[**] Sir Henry Spelman computea that, in the large county of Norfolk, there were not, in the Conqueror’s time, above sixty-six proprietors of land.[***] Men possessed of such princely revenues and jurisdictions could not long be retained in the rank of subjects. The great Earl Warrenne, in a subsequent reign, when he was questioned concerning his right to the lands which he possessed, drew his sword, which he produced as his title; adding, that William the bastard did not conquer the kingdom himself; but that the barons, and his ancestor among me rest, were joint adventurers in the enterprise.[****]

     [* Dugdale’s Baronage, from Domesday-book, vol. i.
     p. 60, 74; iii. 112, 132, 136, 138, 156, 174, 200, 207, 223,
     254, 257, 269.]

     [** Ibid. p. 319. It is remarkable that this
     family of D’Arcy seema to be the only male descendants of
     any of the Conqueror’s barons now remaining among the peers.
     Lord Holdernesse is the heir of that family.]

     [*** Spel. Gloss, hi verb. Domesday.]

     [**** Dug. Bar. vol. i. p. 79. Ibid. Origines
     Juridicales p. 13,]
     before the king had made him restitution of his
     temporalities; and during the vacancy of a see, the guardian
     of the spiritualities was summoned to attend along with the
     bishops.

The supreme legislative power of England was lodged in the king and great council, or what was afterwards called the parliament. It is not doubted but the archbishops, bishops, and most considerable abbots were constituent members of this council. They sat by a double title: by prescription, as having always possessed that privilege, through the whole Saxon period, from the first establishment of Christianity; and by their right of baronage, as holding of the king in capite by military service. These two titles of the prelates were never accurately distinguished. When the usurpations of the church had risen to such a height, as to make the bishops affect a separate dominion, and regard their seat in parliament as a degradation of their episcopal dignity, the king insisted that they were barons, and, on that account, obliged, by the general principles of the feudal law, to attend on him in his great councils. Yet there still remained some practices, which supposed their title to be derived merely from ancient possession.

The barons were another constituent part of the great council of the nation These held immediately of the crown by a military tenure: they were the most honorable members of the state, and had a right to be consulted in all public deliberations: they were the immediate vassals of the crown, and owed as a service their attendance in the court of their supreme lord. A resolution taken without their consent was likely to be but ill executed: and no determination of any cause or controversy among them had any validity, where the vote and advice of the body did not concur. The dignity of earl or count was official and territorial, as well as hereditary; and as ali the earls were also barons, they were considered as military vassals of the crown, were admitted in that capacity into the general council, and formed the most honorable and powerful branch of it.

But there was another class of the immediate military tenants of the crown, no less, or probably more numerous than the barons, the tenants in capite by knights’ service and these, however inferior in power or property, held by a tenure which was equally honorable with that of the others. A barony was commonly composed of several knightsr fees: and though the number seems not to have been exactly defined, seldom consisted of less than fifty hides of land:[*] but where a man held of the king only one or two knight’s fees, he was still an immediate vassal of the crown, and as such had a title to have a seat in the general councils. But as this attendance was usually esteemed a burden, and one too great for a man of slender fortune to bear constantly, it is probable that, though he had a title, if he pleased, to be admitted, he was not obliged by any penalty, like the barons, to pay a regular attendance.

     [* Four hides made one knight’s fee: the relief of
     a barony was twelve times greater than that of a knight’s
     fee; whence we may conjecture its usual value. Spel. Gloss,
     in verb. Feodum. There were two hundred and forty-three
     thousand six hundred hides in England, and sixty thousand
     two hundred and fifteen knights’ fees; whence it is evident
     that there were a little more than four hides in each
     knight’s fee.]

All the immediate military tenants of the crown amounted not fully to seven hundred, when Domesday-book was framed; and as the membeirs were well pleased, on any pretext, to excuse themselves from attendance, the assembly was never likely to become too numerous for the despatch of public business.

So far the nature of a general council or ancient parliament is determined without any doubt or controversy, The only question seems to be with regard to the commons, or the representatives of counties and boroughs; whether they were also, in more early times, constituent parts of parliament. This question was once disputed in England with great acrimony; but such is the force of time and evidence, that they can sometimes prevail even over faction; and the question seems, by general consent, and even by their own, to be at last determined against the ruling party. It is agreed, that the commons were no part of the great council till some ages after the conquest; and that the military tenants alone of the crown composed that supreme and legislative assembly.

The vassals of a baron were by their tenure immediately dependent on him, owed attendance at his court, and paid all their duty to the king, through that dependence which their lord was obliged by his tenure to acknowledge to his sovereign and superior. Their land, comprehended in the barony, was represented in parliament by the baron himself, who was supposed, according to the fictions of the feudal law, to possess the direct property of it; and it would have been deemed incongruous to give it any other representation. They stood m the same capacity to him, that he and the other barons did to the king: the former were peers of the barony; the latter were peers of the realm: the vassals possessed a subordinate rank within their district: the baron enjoyed a superior dignity in the great assembly: they were in some degree his companions at home; he the king’s companion at court: and nothing can be more evidently repugnant to all feudal ideas, and to that gradual subordination which was essential to those ancient institutions, than to imagine that the king would apply either for the advice or consent of men who were of a rank so much inferior, and whose duty was immediately paid to the mesne lord that was interposed between them and the throne.[*]