All these persons, the earl included, were the barons, or formed the baronage of England. Whether the tenancy were large or small, they were all equally bound to render their service in his court when the king called upon them. The diversity of the extent of the tenure af fords a plausible discriminatory circum stance between two classes of persons who appear in early documents—the greater and the lesser barons ; but a better ex planation of this distinction may be given. In the larger tenancies, the persons who held them granted out portions to be held of them by other parties upon the same terms on which they held of the king. As they had to furnish a quota of men when the king called upon them, so they required their tenants to furnish men equipped for military service proportion ate to the extent of lands which they held when the king called upon them. As they had to perform civil services of various kinds for the king, so they ap pointed certain services of the same kind to be performed by their tenants to them selves. As they had to do homage from time to time to the king, and to attend in his court for the administration of justice and for other business touching the com mon interest, so they required the pre sence of their tenants to acknowledge their subjection and to assist in the tration of that portion of public justice which the sovereign power allowed the great tenants to administer. The castles, the ruins of which exist in so many parts of the country, were the seats of these great tenants, where they held their courts, received the homage, and ad ministered justice, and were to the sur rounding homagers what Westminster Hall, a part of the court of the early kings of England, was to the tenantry in chief. The Earl of Chester is said to have thus snbinfended only eight persons in the vast extent of territory which the Conqueror granted to him. These had, ac cordingly, each very large tracts, and they Formed, with four superiors of religious houses, the court, or, as it is sometimes called, the parliament of the Earls of Chester. These persons are frequently called the barons of that earldom ; but the number of persons thus subinfeuded was usually greater, and the tenancies conse quently smaller. They were, for the most part, persons of Norman origin, the per sonal attendants, it may be presumed, of the great tenant. There is no authentic register of them, as there is of the tenants in chief; but the names of many of them may be collected from the charters of their chief lords, to which they were, in most instances, the witnesses. These, it is presumed, constitute the class of per sons who are meant by the Lesser Barons, when that term is used by writers who aim at precision.
Many of these Lesser Barons, or Ba rons of the Barons, became the progeni tors of families of pre-eminent rank and consequence in the country. For in stance, the posterity of Nigellus, the Baron of Hal ton, one of the eight of the county of Chester, through the unexpected extinc tion of the male posterity of Ilbert de Laci, one of the greatest of the tenants in chief beneath the dignity of an earl, and whose castle of Pontefract, though in ruins, still shows the rank and importance of its early Owners, became possessed of the great tenancy of the Lacis, assumed that name as the hereditary distinction, mar ried an heiress of the Earls of Lincoln, and so acquired that Earldom ; and when at length they ended in a female heiress, she was married to Thomas, son of Ed mond, Earl of Lancaster, son of King Henry III. The ranks, indeed, of the tenants in chief, or greater barons, were replenished from the class of the lesser barons: as in the course of nature cases arose in which there was only female issue to inherit. But even their own tenancies were sometimes so extensive, that they were enabled to exhibit a minia ture representation of the state and court of their chief they affected to subinfend ; to have their tenants doing suit and service ; and in point of fact, many of the smaller manors at the present day are but tenures under the lesser barons, who held of the greater barons, who held of the king. The process of subinfeudation was checked by a wise statute of King Edward I., who introduced many salutary
reforms, passed in the eighteenth year of his reign, commonly called the statute Quid Emptores, which directed that all persons thus taking lands should hold them not of the person who granted them, but of the superior of whom the granter himself held.
The precise amount and precise na tare of the services which the king had a right to require from his barons in his court, is a point on which there seems not to be very accurate notions in some of the writers who have treated on this sub ject; and a similar want of precision is discernible in the attempt at explaining how to the great court baron of the king were attracted the functions which be longed to the deliberative assembly of the Saxon kings, and the Commune Concilium of the realm, the existence of which is recognised in charters of some of the earliest Norman sovereigns. The fact, however, seems to be admitted by all who have attended to this subject, that the same persons who were bound to suit and service in the king's court constituted those assemblies which are called by the name of parliaments, so frequently men tioned by all our early chroniclers, in which there were deliberations on affairs touching the common interest, and where the power was vested of imposing levies of money to be applied to the public ser vice. It is a subject of great regret to all who wish to see through what pro cesses and changes the great institutions of the country have become what we now see them, that the number of public re cords which have descended to us from the first hundred and fifty years after the Conquest is so exceedingly small, and that those which remain afford so little information respecting this most interest ing point of inquiry.
There is, however, no reasonable doubt that the parliament of the early Norman kings did consist originally of the per sons 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 infor mation 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 frac tion 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 re ferred 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, esta blished a principle of selection, summon ing 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 constitu tional history of the country should be left to conjecture ; and especially, as from time to time claims are presented to par liament 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 par liament 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 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. [Loans,