Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 4.djvu/706

684 APPENDIX H as the reign of Edward 1. In another place, however, their comments on a document which has acquired great importance in the eyes of lawyers favour the proposition that a baron enjoyed a dignity apart from the lands of his barony in the i 3th century. This document consequently deserves close consideration. In the 20th year of his reign Edward I, as overlord of Scotland, was called upon to decide the succession to the Crown of that kingdom, to which there were several claimants, and he consulted with the Prelates, Earls, Barons, and other magnates of the realm. This assembly advised him that " the right of succession to the Kingdom of Scotland was to be decided as the right of succession to earldoms, baronies, and other impartible tenures {a/iis tenuris impartibilibus) was to be decided." On this answer Lord Redesdale's Committee commented as follows: If by the words earldoms and baronies had been meant lands having those appellations, it was clear that such lands were at that time in England partible inheritances, as appears not only from various documents, but from the very words of the charters of John and Henry the Third in provisions respecting reliefs. The question being put with a view to a decision on the right to the Kingdom of Scotland, the answer must be considered as applicable to the royal dignity and office of King; and if the words earldoms and baronies were intended to be applied to the dignities of Earl and Baron, it is equally clear that a title of dignity was never considered as a partible inheritance. This seems to show that, in the 20th of Edward the First, both earldoms and baronies were considered as dignities; and that the persons then styled Barons, and particularly those styled Barons in Parliament then assembled, were so styled as having a name or title of dignity not partible, though the lands which any of them might hold respectively under the name of barony, or as part of a barony, were partible. Those who gave the answer to the King's question must therefore have considered the dignity as something distinct from the land; the land was certainly partible, and it must have been the dignity which they conceived to be impartible. Their answer must therefore have applied to something distinct from the land, which could only have been the dignity of Earl or Baron; and that many of the persons whose names afterwards appear on record, summoned to Parliament by special writs, and who were ordinarily described under the appellation of Barons, had not any barony, or only part of a barony, will appear in another Report which the Committee propose to offer to the House. Whatever therefore may have been in former times the opinion on this subject, this statement, as well as many other circumstances which occurred in the reign of Edward the First, induces the Committee to conceive that the dignities of Earl and Baron were then considered (generally at least) as mere dignities, which the dignities subsequently created by letters patent of the King were always esteemed to be.(^) The arguments of the Committee are calculated to give strong support to those who would have us believe that the baron of Edward I's day was a peer, and they are doubtless coloured by the modern doctrine as to baronies by writ from which the Committee could not escape. The result is that the meaning of the answer given to the King by his counsellors is completely obscured. If by the words " earldoms and baronies " we are to (") Lordi' Reports, vol. i, p. 207.