941 



BARON, BARONY. 



BARON, BARONY. 



943 



household, to execute certain duties on the day of his coronation, to 

 keep a certain number of horses, hounds, or hawks for the king's use, 

 and the like. But, besides these honourable services, they were bound 

 to personal attendance in the king's court when the king should please 

 to summon them, to do homage to him (homage from homo, to acknow- 

 ledge themselves to be his homines, or baronet), and to assist in the 

 administration of justice, and in the transaction of other business 

 which was done in the court of the king. 



AVe see in this the rude beginnings of the modern Parliaments, 

 assemblies in which the barons are so important a constituent. But 

 before we enter on that part of the subject, it is proper to observe, 

 that among the great tenants of the crown there was much diversity 

 both of rank and property. We shall pass over the bishops and other 

 ecclesiastics, only observing, that when it is said that the bishops have 

 seats in Parliament in virtue of the baronies attached to their sees, the 

 meaning of the expression is, that they sit there as other lay homagers 

 or barons of the king, as being among the persons who held lands of 

 the crown by the services above mentioned ; which is correct as far as 

 Parliament is regarded as a court for the administration of justice, but 

 doubtful so far as it is an assembly of wise men to advise the king in 

 matters touching the affairs of the realm. Amongst the other tenants, 

 we find some to whose names the word vicecomts is annexed. On 

 this little has been said by the writers on English dignities ; and the 

 title viscount can scarcely have been used in ' Domesday ' as an heredi- 

 tary title, but more probably as a title of office answering to the present 

 sheriff. There is indeed no reason to believe that this title was an 

 hereditary dignity in this country before the reign of Henry VI. The 

 office of sheriff in some counties was hereditary, but it was not a title 

 of nobility. Some we find in ' Domesday ' who have indisputably a 

 title, in the proper sense of the word, annexed to their names, and 

 which we know to have descended to their posterity. These are the 

 comttes of ' Domesday Book,' where, by the Latin word comes, they have 

 represented the earl of the Saxon times ; and as these persons were 

 raised above the other tenants in dignity, so were they, for the most 

 part, distinguished by the greater extent of the lands held by them. 

 Among those to whose names no mark of distinction is annexed, there 

 was also great diversity in respect of the extent of territory granted to 

 them. Some had lands far exceeding the extent of entire counties, while 

 others had but a single parish or township, or, in the language intro- 

 duced at the Conquest, but a single manor, or two adjacent manors, 

 granted to them. 



All these persons, the earls 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 o the tenure 

 affords a plausible discriminatory circumstance between two classes of 

 persons who appear in early documents the greater and the lesser 

 barons ; but a better explanation 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 proportionate to the extent of the 

 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 appointed 

 certain services of the same kind to be performed by their tenants to 

 themselves. 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 common interest, BO they required the 

 presence of their tenants to acknowledge their subjection and to assist 

 in the administration of that portion of public justice which the sove- 

 reign 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 administered justice, and were to the surrounding 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 

 subinfeudated to only eight persons the vast extent of territory which 

 the Conqueror granted to him. These vassals had accordingly 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, and are frequently called the barons of that earldom. 

 These persons were for the most part persons of Norman origin, the 

 personal 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 thought, constitute the class- of persons who are meant by the 

 lesser barons, when that term is used by writers who aim at 

 precision. 



Whether these tenants, or vassals of the crown vassals, had right of 

 seat and vote in the great council of the king, is another and a difficult 

 question. The proceedings of the Council of Northampton, in 1164, as 

 stated by Fitz Stephen, lend some colour to the notion of two classes 

 of barons being there present. But it may be doubted whether such 

 a distinction as that here lu'nted at can justify the expressions "barones 

 majores " and " barones minores," for unless all tenants in capite by 

 knight's service are to be deemed " barones," there is little, if any 



authority in ancient documents for assuming the existence of the 

 " barones minores " as a recognised class in the councils of the realm. 



Many of what we have called (following popular usage) the lesser 

 barons, or barons of the barons, became the progenitors of families of 

 pre-eminent rank and consequence in the country. For instance, the 

 posterity of Nigellus, the baron of Halton, one of the eight of the 

 county of Chester, through the unexpected extinction 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 Laeis, assumed that name as the 

 hereditary distinction, married 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 Edmund, 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 miniature representation of the 

 state and court of their chief : they granted lands to be held of them- 

 selves ; had 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 18th 

 year of his reign, commonly called the statute Quid, Emptores, tkc., 

 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 nature 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 subject ; and a similar want of pre- 

 cision is discernible in the attempt at explaining how to the great court 

 baron of the king were attracted the functions which belonged to the 

 deliberative assembly of the Saxon kings, and the Commune Concilium 

 of the fealm, 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 per- 

 sons who were bound to suit and service in the king's court constituted 

 those assemblies which are called by the name of Parliaments, so fre- 

 quently mentioned 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 service. It is a subject of great regret to all who wish to see 

 through what processes and changes the great institutions of the 

 country have become what we now see them, that the number of 

 public records 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 interesting 

 point of inquiry. 



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) ren- 

 dered 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 confess that great 

 obscurity rests upon the original constitution of Parliament, and sup- 

 pose the probability that there may still be found among the unex- 

 amined records of the realm something which may clear away at least 

 a portion of the obscurity which rests upon it. To us it appears that 

 the principle of selection above alluded to, which probably was admitted 



