More than once had they realized that their joint interests were threatened, and that their combined rights lent each other mutual support. The efforts which they had made in common, were crowned by a memorable victory, and consecrated by a solemn instrument, framed by great nobles, with careful regard to the welfare of the humble and the poor. Memories like these endure and cannot be gainsaid. The articles of the great charter have little importance as authoritative and practical provisions; they have much as the evidence and symbol of collective and national action, as a pledge given by each class to all other classes; their great strength lies in their influence on the imagination. The country troubled itself but little to inquire whether such or such clauses, those, for example, which assured to its leaders some control over the course of government, were retained or not in the confirmations of the charter. The main point was, that the charter was confirmed, and that with it was perpetuated the memory of a day when all Englishmen had made common cause against oppression. Thirty-two ratifications succeeded each other, and yet the nation was neither indifferent to nor weary of them. Legend is not an accurate reflex of the reality which it portrays, but it is in itself a reality, and is often, of all realities, the most living and the most fruitful.

The force of sentiment is, after all, the guarantee of guarantees, the only substantial and solvent surety for undertakings written upon parchment otherwise empty enough. A single day's generosity sufficed to lead the English people to place trust and hope in the English

barons, and, in a manner, to endow the latter with a conscience, external to themselves, which checked their caprice and controlled their selfishness, and which even they came to mistake for their own internal and personal convictions. The oligarchical tendencies of the English baronage in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cannot be disputed, but they were powerless to cause a rupture between the barons themselves and the rest of the nation. We see how, in spite of the official division into lords and commons, Parliament has remained for centuries an Assembly, homogeneous and national to the core, where class rivalries have been as rare as the conflicts of local ambitions; while the French States General have been nothing more than a place of meeting and contact for classes who were indifferent or hostile to each other, and for provincial delegations who with great difficulty raised themselves above the private interests of their constituents.

II

THE HIGHER BARONAGE AND THE

PEERAGE

It is now time to turn to the examination of the elements which have entered into the composition of Parliament, to observe how they are brought together there, and in what order they are distributed, what is the connection existing between the place which they fill in the nation, and the part which they play in the Chamber, and conversely, the influence thereby exercised on their mutual relations, and on their unequal growth within the body politic. A careful study of the local life of the middle ages is the only method of throwing light on these questions; England differed from the other countries of Europe, not less in her local life than in the position of her governing classes. The special feature above all that we meet with, is a rural middle class, a social force unknown in Continental states; the following stages may be noted in the process of its formation and development. The upper class gradually became divided, and the lower part moved downward for a time; it sank as it were into the nation, and mingled with the classes beneath it, then after endow

E.C.

D

ing the latter with equality in matters of law and of taxation it mounted again to a high position, carrying those lower classes upward in its train. Later we find this same class displaying more and more activity in obedience to the royal summons, and founding between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, at the expense of the ancient county administration, the local self-government of our own time; we find it again when it had become too powerful to be kept aloof, taking its place in Parliament, where, thanks to its mixed nature, and its affinities with both, it served as a link between the higher nobility and the representatives of towns; and last of all we find that when in the sixteenth century, through the extinction of the ancient baronial houses a void was created in the ranks of the Upper Chamber, the class of which we speak stood ready to fill it, and that it has formed the stock from which the modern English aristocracy springs. The development of this class is one of the main facts in the political history of England. It is necessary to dwell upon it for a

moment.

Almost immediately after the conquest, we find the Anglo-Norman baronage divided into two parts, and, so to speak, into two layers; the higher barons, barones majores, and the smaller vassals holding directly from the Crown, tenentes in capite, called also barones minores, a numerous, proud and self-reliant class. They were, it is to be noted, in the matter of tenure and jurisdiction, independent of the great barons. If they were not the equals of the latter they were not, at any rate, their subordinates; they owed them no service, they held of

the king alone. The only early marked differences between the two orders were, first, that the barones majores possessed domains considerably wider in extent (a barony containing 133 knight's fees); secondly, that they were summoned to the army and the king's council individually, while the inferior tenants were summoned in a body through the sheriff. These were differences in degree, not in kind.1

Before long the character of each of these two parts of the baronage underwent a change, and the interval between them grew visibly wider. Yet the original unity of the baronial order was never entirely lost sight of, not even at a time when the greater barons had enjoyed for more than a century an exclusive right of admission to the councils of the sovereign, and when the lesser barons, classed confusedly with the inferior vassals in the category of simple knights, were in a fair way of becoming blended with the general body of landowners. When the knights were summoned to Parliament, their first impulse was to attach themselves to the barons, the first impulse of the barons was to welcome their advances; a little later on the two groups separated, and the knights took their seats with the representatives of the towns; they not only brought to their new colleagues the loftiness, the boldness and the tenacity of an ancient military class with its timehonoured traditions of command and discipline, but they supplied them also with a natural channel of

1 See Gneist, i. 290.

2 We know that during the fourteenth century the House of