historic beast. At such meetings, in Winchester and Westminster, or other antique place, foreign wars and home grievances were discussed; the wardships of rich damsels were begged from the king's grace; a new earl was solemnly invested-per cincturam gladii-by the girding of the sword. The barons and king between them were, unknown to themselves, laying the foundations of our constitution.

At home, in his county, among his knights and tenants, our baron was a still greater personage. He held periodically his curia baronis to try cases, where he exercised, if of the higher class, his privilege of sacha, and socha, and thol, and them, and infangthefe.' He had a petty regal state of his own, with his dapifer or seneschal, chamberlain, and other officers. In some cases, his chief tenants were called barons and chivaliers, and these carried his coat-armour (with a difference of tincture), or some part of it, on their shields. The lords and gentlemen of later ages were derived in great number from the chief vassals of those primeval barons, those men whose function in life was to give to the king advice to the people, leadership and control; those ancient heroes of English nobility, under whose protection good men lived, and under whose banners brave men died.

Life in those days was not systematic, but various and vigorous. It abounded in strong contrasts. Powerful chiefs stripped themselves of their coats of mail or their ermine, and retired to religious houses to die monks. You wandered out from a hall where minstrels were singing to lords and ladies drinking out of gold, and were startled in a wood by the tinkling of a leper's bell. In the same social state where a De Belesme rode out at the head of his followers to steal cattle, preparatory to fortifying his castle, a De Braose 'would salute any children that he met

. . . to the end he might have a return of the benediction of the Innocents.' One lord enters the village, on his return to the castle from the Holy Land, with the whole neighbouring convent in procession, singing Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Another invades the grounds of the Bishop of Ely at the head of a troop of rascals, kills his game, breaks open his cellars, and allows all his men to get drunk. There was great stateliness and splendour, and reverence both inward and outward, for rank; but when Fulk Fitz-Warine was playing chess with Prince John, in the time of Henry II., the Prince broke his head with the chessboard, and Fulk gave him a blow which nearly killed him. The same baron, who in some causes would face the king in open war, paid a fine for having a good pipe of wine over from France, or coaxed his sovereign with a batch of lampreys to get him a

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manor at farm from some opulent earl, or, with a score of palfreys, to induce him to procure him Eleanor de Bisset for a wife. Dark and deep superstitions brooded over men's hearts, and filled earth and sky with terror and mystery; and yet there was no lack of fun either. Jolly fellows, like Walter de Mapes, sang out their drinking catches; minstrels wandered about the country; buffoons, jongleurs, and such like, swarmed in the halls of the great. In one sense, life was rude and violent. The Barons' Wars caused great miseries, during which, that castles might be fortified, the houses of the poorest agricultural labourers' (says Matthew Paris) were rummaged and plundered even of the straw that served for beds.' The ignorance of economic science was such that a bad harvest generally produced something like a famine. The disturbance of life was so great from turbulence, that in 1216, as we learn from Roger of Wendover, markets and traffic ceased, and goods were exposed for sale only in churchyards.' Yet there was abundance of charity from the noble mediæval church. The poor were not huddled out of sight as offensive objects: they were recognised as having a sacred right to help in the name of the Redeemer; and it is characteristic of the solemn way in which this was publicly affirmed that there were processions of poor men at every gentleman's funeral. Heavy was the baron's mailed hand, but he had a great heart too. When was domestic affection ever more deeply, more sacredly felt, than in the feudal days, when a De Beauchamp left his heart wheresoever the Countess, his dear consort, should resolve herself to be interred'? It is strictly consistent with this warmth of feeling, and not inconsistent, as may superficially appear, that the same kind of man was somewhat hasty in asserting his dignity, and that his hand flew quickly to his sword-hilt. Henry III. called Hugh Bigod a traitor. Hugh instantly told him that he lied, adding, 'if you do nothing but what the law warranteth, you can do me no harm.' 'Yes,' the King said, 'I can thrash your grain, and so humble you.' 'If you do,' replied the Earl (he was Earl of Norfolk), I will send you the heads of your thrashers!' Stormy men! But the age wanted such, and they were full of an energy which overflowed into passion in this way. public life established a check on the Crown; their private life was the foundation of that great system of order, that body of sentiment and opinion, which lasted in England, in one shape or another, for centuries, and is really at the bottom (we speak deliberately) of whatever is most beautiful and generous in our social institutions still.

Their

This same Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was one of the celebrated

brated twenty-five barons appointed to enforce the observance of Magna Charta early in the thirteenth century. Before proceeding to that next stage in peerage history, when barons by tenure were superseded by barons by writ, let us give the names of these old worthies. They were William de Albini, Roger Bigod, Hugh Bigod, Henry de Bohun, Richard de Clare, Gilbert de Clare, William de Fortibus, Robert Fitz-Walter, John Fitz-Robert, Geoffrey Fitz-Piers alias Mandeville, William de Huntingfield, John de Lacy, William de Launvallei, Richard de Montpiliet, William Makt, Roger de Mowbray, William de Mowbray, William Marshal, Richard de Percy, Saier de Quincy, Robert de Roos, Geoffrey de Say, Robert de Vere, and Eustace de Vesci. All these nobles were Normans, four of them were earls, and they may no doubt be taken generally to have been the greatest potentates of their day. It is therefore to be remarked, as illustrative of the mutability of fortune, that there is not a male descendant of one of them in the English Peerage, and that only two of the names occur in the present Upper House. Those names are of course Percy and de Roos (how came the lastnamed family to call themselves de Ros?), both through females, the last through a co-heiress. There are, however, some descendants through females besides these among their Lordships, as Lord Hereford from Henry de Bohun, the Howards from Roger de Mowbray, Lord Say and Sele from Geoffrey de Say, the Duke of St. Alban's from Robert de Vere-all more or less directly. But our fair readers must pardon us for giving the due feudal preference to the male line,-though we do not defend it on the ground taken by an old writer, that no woman can keep a secret, whereas, to keep the lord's secrets was one of the duties imposed on every man to whom was granted a fief. The truth is, that unless we take the male line as the general standard of genealogical rank (with descent through heiresses as the next best), we shall find ourselves in a hopeless state of confusion. Everybody of 'good blood' has some in his veins far higher than that of the name which he bears; and once let loose on a great stream, with its endless tributaries, we can sail almost where we please.

There is great difficulty in ascertaining the details of that change which substituted baronage by writ for baronage by tenure, and we should be sorry to pronounce judgment on points on which Mr. Hallam may have differed with the Lords' Committee on the Dignity of a Peer. We have seen that the earliest form of aristocracy after the Conquest was a system of feudal tenures, under which the great tenants per baroniam constituted the king's barons, and attended his council, which council some antiquaries have called the Great Court Baron of the Realm.

No

No writer of authority attributes the right of attending such councils to any but the higher tenants and prelates; and many men were called barones who, in a general sense, had no such privilege. In fact, before the time of John, even, (and the date cannot be more accurately fixed,) a regular distinction, quite practical in those days, though not altogether intelligible to us, had grown up between Greater and Lesser Barons-barones majores and barones minores. The turbulence of the greater class shook their power, by shaking their possessions; they alienated their tenures, and so increased the number of those who held of the king instead of holding of themselves.

Hence,' says Sir Harris Nicolas, the principle that had governed the assembly of the Great Council of the kingdom from the Conquest until the time of King John ceased to exist; the alienation by the barons of their knights' fees increased the number of those who held of the King in capite; but as they increased in number, so did they decrease in wealth and power; and it resulted that either in the reign of King John [1199-1216] or in that of his son King Henry the Third [1216-1272], the King obtained a discretionary power of calling to his Great Council only such persons as he thought fit so to summon, and the Great Council of the Realm came to be divided between those whose great possessions and known fidelity to the Crown procured them a writ, and those who not holding per baroniam were yet summoned at the King's pleasure, and by a writ similar to that addressed to the tenants per baroniam . . . . proof of tenure per baroniam became no longer necessary, and the record of the writ of summons came to be sufficient evidence to constitute a Lord of Parliament.'-Observations on Dignities, p. 19.

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Here, then, we have the constitution of the Peerage assuming a more modern form. From the 23rd Edward I. [1295] when the change had become consolidated, the right to be summoned to Parliament emanated, alone, from the King's writ, and only those so summoned were held to be parliamentary barons of the realm. The terms peers [pares] and peerage illustrate this state of things. They are first used in the instrument which banished the Despencers in 14th Edward II [1321]. Peerage,' observes Madox, was the state or condition of a peer. It consisted chiefly in that relation which the barons or peers of the King's court bare to one another.' 'The word peers or pares,' Chancellor West says, 'is altogether feudal, signifying nothing but men equal as to their condition, con-vassals in the same court, and liegemen of the same lord.' 'The Curia Regis,' states Cruise, was the original of our parliament . . . Peers were pares in the Curia Regis.'

Here, too, our aristocratic system began to assume that

peculiar

peculiar mixed character which distinguished it, in such a marked manner, from that of the Continent. While the baronage and peerage were confined to a comparatively small body created by the King, all the rest of the landholders of the kingdom became mere gentlemen and their order that of the gentry. Families once baronial by tenure, merged into 'commoners'; and the cases are frequent of families being summoned' for a generation or so, becoming baronial by the process, and again relapsing into mere gentry from discontinuance of summons. We have already instanced the Blounts, Malets, Pomerays, Luttrells, Corbets, Gresleys, as coming under the former description; and cases of the latter are not wanting. A Baldwin de Maners was summoned to parliament, in October, 1309, several generations before that ancient and honourable family attained the peerage, and was never summoned again. A William Devereux was summoned in 1299, his descendants were passed over till 1384; while the present Devereuxes, Premier Viscounts, did not become peers (however ancient and Norman) till 1461, when Walter Devereux married the heiress of the great house of Ferrers.

In

The term gentleman signified nothing, originally, but man of family,' though by the courtesy of England it has come to be applied to all who share the position, manners, cultivation, &c. of men of family, and by popular license, confusion of idea, and ignorance of antiquity, to a vast number more. early times, the terms nobility and gentility were certainly synonymous, here, as abroad; so much is clear from what Selden tells us in the Titles of Honour,' and from other authorities. The families whose constitutional rank was below that of the peerage became the knights of the shire in the House of Commons as is obvious from the old lists. The more honourable and powerful part of that House was thus of aristocratic origin (the true reason why our liberties have been based on constitutional and not on democratic principles), and we do not believe that there was a single case of any one but a county member being Speaker of the Commons before the time of Philip and Mary. In fact, the English gentry were originally the Lower Nobility, many of them being absolutely of the same blood in point of descent; and in Scotland, where all sat in the same House, the gentry were formally registered in the proceedings, as the Small Barrounis.'

Nothing is more remarkable than the apparent want of system in the first working of the Writs of Summons. The first writ extant is that of the 49th Henry III. [1265], when the King was in the hands of the barons, which makes it im

possible