Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/484

462 PEERAGE The barons. Greater and lesser barons. The greater barons sum moned person ally. Irregu larity of the sum mons. memorial body which, whatever was its constitution, was certainly not representative in the sense of being elective. Alongside of this older body grew up that newer repre sentative and elective body which became the House of Commons. We may best place the beginnings of the peerage at the point when we can distinctly see that barons are personally summoned to the one House, while knights find their way into the other only by election. It hardly needs to be explained that the word baron, originally meaning simply man, has in itself nothing to do with peerage or with seats in parliament. Survivals of its earlier and wider meaning may still be traced in the titles of the Barons of the Exchequer and the Barons of the Cinque Ports, and in other uses of the word, more common perhaps in Scotland and Ireland than in England. Baro often translates the older English thegn, and perhaps neither of these names is very easy to define. By the 1 3th century the name baron had come specially to mean the highest class among the king s lay tenants-in-chief under the rank of earl ; the baron was the holder of several knight s fees. In a wider and vaguer sense, the word often takes in both the earls and the spiritual lords. In its narrower sense it means those who were barons and not more than barons. As the practice of personal summons to parliament came in, the barons formed a class of men who might reasonably hope or fear, as the case might be, that the personal summons might come to them ; and to many of them it did come. And its coming or not coming established a distinction between two classes of barons. A distinction between greater and lesser barons is implied in the Great Charter (c. xiv.), which asserts the right of the "majores barones " to a personal summons along with the arch bishops, bishops, abbots, and earls, while the other tenants- in-chief among them by implication such barons as did not come under the head of majores were to be summoned generally by the sheriff. And this ordinance must be taken in connexion with the earlier writ of 1215 (Selden, Titles of Honour, 587 ; Stubbs, Select Charters, 278, and Const. Hist., i. 568), in which the sheriff is bidden to summon the knights in arms, and the barons without arms, and also four discreet men from each shire, "ad loquendum nobisciim de negotiis regni nostri," that is, in other words, to a parliament. The Charter thus secures to the greater barons, as a separate class, the right of. being personally summoned by the king, and not by the sheriff along with other men. It parts them off from other tenants-in-chief and puts them along side of the prelates and earls. These two documents be tween them may be taken as giving us at once the first distinct approach to the notion of peerage and the first distinct approach to the notion of representation. The " majores barones " are not defined ; but the summons sup plied the means of defining them, or rather it became a means of making them the only barons. As the summons became hereditary, barons came more and more to be looked on simply as a class of men who had seats in the House of Lords. The word came to mean a rank in the peerage, and it was gradually forgotten that there ever had been territorial barons who had no claim to seats in parliament. But it was only by slow degrees that the hereditary summons, or even the necessary summons of every man who had once been summoned, became the established rule. Throughout the 13th century the language in which the national assembly is spoken of is wonderfully shifting. Sometimes its constitution seems more popular, sometimes less so. Sometimes its more dignified members are spoken of vaguely under such names as magnates, without dis tinction into particular classes. But, when particular classes are reckoned up, the barons always form one class among them ; but the number of barons summoned varies greatly. The Charter gives the majores barones the right of personal summons ; but the majores barones are not as yet a defined and undoubted class of men like the bishops and earls. None but the holder of a barony in the territorial sense was likely to be summoned ; but the king still had a wide choice as to whom among the holders of such baronies he would acknowledge as majores barones ; and we find that dissatisfaction was caused by the way in which the king exercised this power. In 1255 there is a remarkable notice in Matthew Paris (v. 520, ed. Luard ; cf. Hallam, Middle Ages,i. 153) where the "magnates "complain that all of their number had not been summoned according to the Charter, and they therefore decline to grant an aid in the absence of their peers. 1 It is possible that some bishops or earls may, for some personal reason, have been left unsummoned, but the complaint is far more likely to haye come from the barons specially so called. Here the word pares is still used in its more general sense, but it is used in a way that might easily lead to its special use. On the other hand, it has been alleged that, by a statute of the later years of Henry III., it was formally ordained that no barons, or even earls, should come to parliament, except those whom the king should specially summon (see Selden, Titles of Honour, 589; Hallam, Middle Ages, ii. 142; Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii. 203). The existence of such a statute may be doubted ; but, as far as the barons are concerned, the story fairly expresses the facts of the case. Under First Edward I. an approach, to say the least, is made to the si s ns ( creation of a definite class of parliamentary barons. Dr ^l 16 Stubbs marks the year 1295 as "the point of time f rom simim( which the regularity of the baronial summons is held to involve the creation of an hereditary dignity, and so to distinguish the ancient qualification of barony by tenure from that of barony by writ" (Const. Hist., iii. 437). In another passage (ii. 183) he thus marks the general result of Edward s reign " The hereditary summoning of a large proportion of great vassals was a middle course between the very limited peerage which in France coexisted with an enormous mass of privileged nobility, and the unmanageable, ever-varying assembly of the whole mass of feudal tenants as prescribed in Magna Carta." It may be thought that the hereditary nature of the barony is here put a little too strongly for the days of Edward I. One may certainly doubt whether Edward, when he summoned a baron to parliament, meant positively to pledge himself to summon that baron s heirs for ever and ever, or even necessarily to summon the baron himself to every future parliament. The facts are the other way ; the summons still for a while remains irregular (see Nicolas, Historic Peerage, xxiv., xxv., ed. Courthope ; Lords Report, ii. 29, 290). But the perpetual summons, the hereditary summons, gradually became the rule, and that rule may in a certain sense be said to date from 1295. That is, from that time the tendency is to the perpetual summons, to the hereditary summons; from that time anything else gradually becomes exceptional (cf. Const. Hist., ii. 203 with iii. 439) ; things had reached a point when the lawyers were sure before long to lay down the rule that a single summons implied a perpetual and an hereditary summons. It is not too much to fix the reign of Edward I. as the time when the hereditary parliamentary baronage began, without rigidly ruling that the king could not after 1295 lawfully refuse a summons to a man who had been summoned already. From this time then we may look on the class of par- Growtl liamentary barons with succession as beginning arid steadily of H 16 growing. And the admission of the barons had a great ^^ 1 " Responsum fuit, quod onmes time temporis non fuerunt jnxta tenorem magnse carte SUSP, et ideo sine paribus suis tune absentibus mi Hum responsum dare vocati auxilium concedere aut prrestare." baroM