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

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confess that great obscurity rests upon 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 the obscurity which rests upon it. [LORDS, HOUSE OF, and PARLIAMENT.]

We are now arrived at a time when the word baron acquired a sense still more restricted than that which has hitherto belonged to it. Later than the reign of Edward II. we seldom find the word baron used in the chronicles to designate the whole of that formidable body who were next in dignity to the king himself, who formed his army and his legislative assembly, and who forced the king to yield points of liberty either to themselves as a class or to the whole community of Englishmen. The counts or earls, from this time, stand out more prominently as a distinct order. There were next introduced into that assembly persons under the denomination of dukes, marquesses, and viscounts; to all of whom was given a precedence before those barons who had not any dignity, strictly so called, annexed to the service which they had to render in parliament. The 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 distinctions the possession of which entitled others to step before him. The term also ceased to be applied to those persons who, possessing a tenancy in chief, were yet not summoned by the king to attend the parliament; and the right or duty of attendance, from the time of King Edward I., has been founded, not, as anciently, upon the tenure, but on the writ which the king issued commanding their attendance.

Out of this has arisen the expression barons by writ. The king issued his writ to certain persons to attend in parliament, and the production of that writ constituted their right to sit and vote there. Copies 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 dignities, 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 creating barons by patent, in which a

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

the lands, the descent of both being regulated by the same principle. The consequence of this principle is, that through a portion of the baronage there has been an introduction of new families into the peerage without the sanction of the crown; for the heiress of one of these baronies may now bestow herself in marriage at her pleasure: and though it is not held that the husband can claim the benefit of the tenancy by courtesy principle (though doubts are entertained on this point), yet the issue of the husband may undoubtedly, whoever he may be, take his place in parliament in the seat which his mother would have occupied had she been a male. Practically, the effect of this upon the composition of the House of Peers has been very small indeed.

The case of co-heiresses demands a distinct notice, because it will lead to the explanation of a phrase which is often used by persons who seem not to have very distinct notions concerning what is implied by it. Lands may be divided, but a dignity is by its very nature indivisible. Thus, if the representative of one of the ancient barons of parliament die, leaving four daughters and no son, his lands may be divided in equal portions among them, and would be so divided according to the principle of the feudal system. But the dignity could not be divided; and as the principle of that system was against any distinction among co-heiresses (reserving the occurrence in the course of nature of persons dying leaving no son but several daughters, to be the means of preventing the too great accumulation of lands in the same person, and of breaking up from time to time the great tenancies), it made no provision that either the caput baronic or a dignity that was indivisible should descend to the eldest or any daughter in preference to her sisters. It therefore fell into abeyance. [ABEYANCE.] It was not extinguished or destroyed, but it lay in a sort of silent partition among the sisters; and in this dormant, but not dead state, it lay among the posterity of the sisters. But if three of the four died without leaving issue, or if after a few generations the issue of three of them became utterly extinct, the barony would then revive, and the surviving sister, if

alive, or the next heir of her body, would become entitled to the dignity, and might, on proof of the necessary facts, claim a writ of summons as if there had been no suspension. Again, it is a part of the royal prerogative to determine an abeyance; that is, the king may select one of the daughters, and give to her the place, state, and precedency which belonged to her father; and then the barony will descend to the several heirs in succession of her body, as entire as if there had never been any state of abeyance. But this does not interfere with the rights of the other co-heirs, who, and whose posterity, remain in precisely the same position in which they stood before the king determined the abeyance in favour of a particular branch. In this way the barony of Clifford, which has several times fallen into abeyance, has been lately given by the king to a co-heir. The same was the case with the baronies of Roos and Berners, and indeed it is in a great measure to the exercise of this prerogative of the crown that we owe the presence in the House of Peers of barons who take their seats at the head of the bench, and date their sittings from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries.

The principle of the feudal law, which was favourable to the claims of females, was fraught with ruin to noble houses. The great family which springs from Hugh Capet, and a few other great families of the Continent, have had the address to escape from the operation of the principle by availing themselves of what is called the Salic Law; and to this is owing that they still hold the rank in which we now see them, a thousand years after they first became illustrious. This must have been early perceived in England, and it was probably this consideration which led to the introduction of a class of barons, the descent of whose dignity should not be regulated by the principle of the feudal descent of hereditaments, but should be united inseparably with the male line of persons issuing from the stock of the original grantee. This innovation is believed to have first taken place in the reign of King Richard II., who in his eleventh year created John Beauchamp of Holt a baron, not merely

1. The chief citizens of London, York, and of some other places in which the citizens possess peculiar franchises, are called in early charters not unfrequently by the name of "the barons" of the place. This may arise either from the circumstance of the persons only being intended who were the chief men of the place; or that they were, in fact, barons, homagers of the king, bound to certain suit and service to the king, as it is known the citizens of London were and still are.

2. The Barons of the Cinque Ports are so called, probably for the same reasons that the citizens of London and of other privileged places are so called. The Cinque Ports, which were Hastings, Dover, Hythe, Romney, and Sandwich (to which afterwards Rye and Winchilsea were added), being ports opposite to France, were regarded by the earlier kings as places of great importance, and were consequently put under a peculiar governance, and endowed with peculiar privileges. The freemen of these ports were barons of the king, and they had the service imposed upon them of bearing the canopy over the head of the king on the day of his coronation. Here was the feudal service which marked them as persons falling within the limits of the king's barons. Those sent of themselves to parliament, though sitting in the lower house, might be expected to retain their appellation of barons.

3. The Barons of the Exchequer. The four judges in that court are so called, and one of them the Chief Baron. The court was instituted immediately after the Conquest, and it is probable that the judges were so denominated from the beginning. They are called barons in the earliest Exchequer record, namely, the Pipe Roll of 31 Henry 1. It may here mean no more than the men, that is, the chief men, of the Exchequer. For their functions and duties see EXCHEQUER.

BA'RONAGE. This term is used, not so much to describe the collective body of the barons in the restricted sense which now belongs to the word as signifying a component part of the hereditary nobility of England, but the whole of that nobility taken collectively, without regard to the distinction of dukes, marquesses,

earls, viscounts, and barons, all of whom form what is now sometimes called the baronage.

In this sense the term is used in the title of one of the most important works in the whole range of English historical literature, for the sake of giving a short notice of which, we have introduced an article under this word. We allude to the Baronage of England,' by Sir William Dugdale, who was the Norroy King at Arms, and one of the last survivors of one of those eminent antiquarian scholars who, in the seventeenth century, raised so high the reputation of England for that particular species of learning.

Sir William Dugdale was the author of many other works, but his history of the baronage of England is the one to which reference is more frequently made; and there is this peculiarity belonging to his labours, that the Baronage' is quoted by all subsequent writers as a book of the highest authority; and it has, in fact, proved a great reservoir of information concerning the families who, from the beginning, have formed the baronage of England, from which all later writers have drawn freely.

The first volume was published in 1675; the second and third, which form together a volume not so large as the first, in 1676. The work professes to contain an account of all the families who had been at any period barons by tenure, barons by writ of summons, or barons by patent, together with all other families who had enjoyed titles of higher dignity, beginning with the earl of the Saxon times.

But Sir William Dugdale has collected from the chronicles, from the chartularies of religious houses, with which he became acquainted while preparing his great work on the history of the monasteries, from the rolls of parliament, in his time only to be perused in manuscript, and from the public records, which he could consult only in the public repositories, or in the extracts made from them by his fellow-labourers in historical research, and finally from the wills in the various ecclesiastical offices throughout the kingdom, the particulars of the lives of the most eminent men of our nation.