imply a much larger attendance. When, for example, the Great Charter was confirmed in the ninth year of Henry's reign, the roll informs us that at the same time a fifteenth had been granted in return by the bishops, earls, barons, knights, free tenants, and all of the kingdom (et omnes de regno nostro Angliæ); and when a fortieth was granted seven years later, there is put forth as having concurred in the grant the strange and ominous combination of bishops, earls, barons, knights, freemen and villeins. This was indeed a fiction, but with an expanding germ of truth. The consent of particular classes was to be understood, as a matter of course, to be included in that of others. But the very emptiest acknowledgment of a right is precious. The right itself waits only its due occasion to assume the substance and importance of reality.

Nor had the English freeman, even under his earliest Norman kings, been wholly without the means of knowing what representation meant. When the Conqueror or his sons had any special reason to make inquiry into their own rights; when particular wrongs of the people reached them, or when peculations were charged against their barons or officers; nothing was more common than a commission of knights in each shire, not simply named by the Sovereign (as when the Conqueror issued an inquiry into the details of the Saxon law), but quite as frequently elected in the County Court, whose business it was to proceed from hundred to hundred, to make the investigation upon oath, and to lay its result before the King in council. The Great Charter contained a provision for the election of twelve knights in the next court of each county, to inquire into forest abuses. In the seventh year of the reign now under notice, every sheriff was ordered to inquire, by means of twelve lawful and discreet knights, what special privileges existed in his shire on the day of the first outbreak between John and his barons. And in the year of the assembling of the Great Council to which these remarks apply, a commission of four knights

in each county received it in charge to inquire into certain excesses committed by men in authority. In relation to the levy of subsidies also, the same rule came to be adopted. The most ancient example on record of a subsidy (that of 1207) is found to have been collected by the itinerant judges; but only thirteen years later, the office of collection is seen to be deputed to the sheriff, in conjunction with two knights to be chosen in a full court of the county, with the consent of all the suitors.

Was it not obvious that such usage as this must grow as the people grew? Were not the collection of taxes, and reports of grievances, manifest steps to a power over the money collected, and to a right of petition against the grievances exposed? Is it difficult to discern, throughout these efforts of Norman royalty to check the excess of its ministers and obtain the co-operation of its people, the vague formation of that authority and house of the Commons, which was to prove more formidable than either of the powers it was called into existence to control?

Soon what was vague became more distinct. It wanted yet two years of the date of the Great Charter, when a writ was issued marking the first undoubted transition towards the change so vast and so memorable. This contained a summons for military service, with an order that four discreet knights of the county should be sent to Oxford without arms to treat with the King concerning the affairs of the kingdom. In other words, it was a summons to Parliament, in terms the same as those of a later period; and it was followed, after an interval of forty years, by another and more decisive instance. While Henry III was on the continent in 1254, his Queen and Regents summoned the tenants in chief to sail to his assistance; and gave order, in the summons, that "besides these, two lawful and discreet knights should "be chosen by the men of every county, in the place of "all and each of them, to assemble at Westminster, and "to determine with the knights of the other counties

"what aid they would grant to their Sovereign in his present necessity, so that the same knights might be "able to answer, in the matter of the said aid, for their "respective counties."

Of the meaning of such a writ and its return, there cannot surely be a question; nor is it easy to understand the discussion it has provoked. Call it singular, anomalous, or by what name may most suitably express its irregular character; except it from ordinary parliaments, and call it a convention; still the undeniable fact remains, that it was a scheme to obtain money from the Commons of the various counties, and that to this end it prescribed the election of representatives whose deliberation and assent should control those of their constituents. The language of the writ connects itself undoubtedly with that of its predecessor in the fifteenth of John; and it is quite immaterial whether or not the barons, and higher tenants in chief, were summoned to sit with these knights. Enough that the Commons of the shires were thus admitted to a co-ordinate share in the imposition and voting of taxes; for, whatever antiquarians may urge as to Parliament's use of one chamber at Westminster up to the middle of the third Edward's reign (abundant proof exists of separate sittings in other parts of England), it is sufficiently clear that the voting must always have been by each order separately, and without interference from each other. The mere circumstance of the different proportions of taxation would establish this.

In the thirty-eighth of Henry III, then, the principle of a real representation had become part of the constitution of England, and the third estate of the realm took a direct share in its government. Yet, momentous as the concession was, it had been obtained by no violent effort, but as the mere unavoidable result of the increasing importance of the people. From lesser they had risen quietly to higher duties. The knight, whose business it had been to assess subsidies, had found gradual admission

by the side of the earls and barons, to help in the disposition and distribution of the money obtained; and that he and his fellows were so received distinctly as the deputies of others, appeared even in the remuneration set apart for them. Great men, such as earls and barons, who attended in their own right, paid their own charges; but men of smaller substance, who had undertaken merely to transact business for others, were held to have a title to compensation from those in whose behalf they acted. As they were paid for their labour in assessment, so for their sacrifice of time and labour in representation they were paid. Wherefore a rate levied on the county discharged their expenses for so many specified days, in going, staying, and returning."

On another branch of this inquiry, too, which has been sadly encumbered with needless learning and misplaced vehemence of discussion, the county rate would seem to have an important bearing. It has been assumed, by those antiquarians who would narrow as much as possible the basis on which our freedom is built, that the representative knights, as representing simply the inferior tenants in chief from whose reluctance to attend in Parliament they first derived importance, are not to be taken to have had relation to the county at large. But this assumption is negatived by every reasonable supposition. The wages of the knights were levied on the whole county (de communitate comitatus); and the mesne tenant could hardly have been denied a right, to the support of which he was obliged to contribute. That what concerned all should be approved by all, was a maxim not unused by even Norman kings. The language of the writs of election, also, cited with pardonable exultation by Prynne in the early sittings of the Long Parliament, is clear and specific. The tenants in chief are never mentioned in them; while tenants of the Crown implied tenants both by free and by military service. The condition required of the candidate, was to be discreet and lawful; of the electors, to be suitors of the county; and of the election, to be made in

a full court. A full County Court was always the least feudal of the modified feudality that lingered in England. It comprised all freeholders; whether of the King, of a mesne lord, or by military or any free service; and in the reign of Henry III therefore, not less certainly than in that of Victoria I, the knights of the shire represented, without regard to the quality of tenure, the whole body of freeholders.

Still, they were knights. Their station associated them with the earls and barons. They were part of what in feudal institution was held to be a lower nobility. They ranked above the ordinary burgess or citizen. They represented the power of the Commons, but they were not commoners; even when the commoners sat apart, they continued to sit with the barons; and as yet no man seems to have dreamt that the class lower than they, could ever be raised to the national councils, whether in separate, coordinate, or subordinate rank. Though the principle which by easiest pressure expanded to admit them, had been winning its gradual way for centuries to the acknowledgment it had at last obtained, yet that lower class were still shut out. But what ages and generations are needed to prepare, the man and the hour accomplish; and both were at hand when the Great Council, having met at Westminster on the 2nd of May, 1258, yielded to the demand of Simon de Montfort that a parliament should meet at Oxford in June. The struggle which then began filled more than six eventful years, but at last the day arrived, never to be forgotten in English story, and on the 14th December, 1264, writs went forth calling together representatives from the counties, cities, and boroughs, to meet the prelates and great lords; and the first enactment of that most memorable assemblage, giving solemn confirmation to charters and ordinances, ran as by common consent "of the King, his son Edward, the prelates, earls, barons, "and commonalty of the realm."

That from the position thus gained the commonalty never again were dislodged, is the sufficient answer to