COMMONS, HOUSE OF. 



COMMONS, HOUSE OF. 



the popular representation, especially of the borough portion of it. 

 were, the Jteri/i of the several eountie* returning members, of which, 

 in the time of Edward I., there were thirty-seven ; Durham and 

 Cheshire having then palatinate parliament* of their own, and Mon- 

 mouthshire being part of Walei. which wa* not yet legislatively incur- 

 porated with England, nor eren effectively subjected to the English 

 crown. It was as the king'* bailif, that is, as local sti|>?rintendent and 

 collector of the crown revenue*, that the precept* for election of knights, 

 citizens, and burgeon were addressed to this officer ; he was to make 

 returns for erery city and borough in his tailitfiet another mark of 

 the original purpose for which the popular representatives were con- 

 vened, that of taxation only. So long as this continued to be the sole 

 object of their convocation, and so long u the delegated burgesses 

 themselves had little voice in fixing the rate of impost to be levied on 

 their constituents, it is not surprising that the smaller boroughs in 

 particular should often have petitioned to be excused from the sending 

 of delegates on these occasions, which added to their share of the 

 public burden, the expense, to them considerable, of the wages which 

 by royal writ they were to pay their representatives during their absence 

 on this parliamentary service, and which were fixed at two shilling* 

 each per day, being one half the amount appointed to be paid by the 

 county freeholders on the like occasion to a knight of the shire. As 

 the king's writ addressed to the sheriff specified no particular city or 

 borough, but required him in general terms " to cause to be elected 

 two citizens for each city, and two burgesses for each borough in your 

 bailiwick," a sort of discretionary power seems to have rested with the 

 sheriff of determining what towns were qualified to send representative*. 

 Thus we find the returns made by these officers concluding sometimes 

 with the words " there are no more cities or boroughs in my bailiwick," 

 though there were in fact more boroughs ; and sometimes ending with 

 " there are not any other cities or boroughs within the county from 

 which any citizens or burgesses can or are accustomed to be sent to 

 the said parliament, by reason of their decay or poverty." Immaterial 

 as this circumstance in the original framing of the parliamentary writ* 

 might appear at the time, its results have been momentous. It must 

 have been remote indeed from the contemplation both of Simon de 

 Hontfort and of Edward I., that in convoking so large a number of 

 delegates from towns, in order to tax them with greater facility and 

 uniformity, they were laying the foundation of a separate house of 

 legislature, wherein the representatives of that part of the population 

 most alien to the feudal organisation should vastly preponderate. They 

 evidently looked not so far, nor suspected any latent danger in the 

 generality of the terms in which these precepts were couched. But 

 when the commons came to assert and establish their claim to a 

 full and free Initiative voice, and it consequently became of the 

 highest importance to the crown to secure to itself any and every 

 means of influencing the composition of that assembly, there was one 

 expedient to which it was too late to resort, that of singling out 

 boroughs for representation, or omitting them at pleasure. The con- 

 trary precedent was firmly established that, through the sheriff, 

 every city and borough was to be summoned ; the original terms of 

 the writ were grown into an inviolable constitutional maxim ; and in 

 the fifth of Richard II., the Commons were already sufficiently 

 powerful to procure statutory enactments imposing a fine on any 

 sheriff who should not literally obey the writ, and subjecting citizens 

 and buryatet, as well as others having parliamentary summons, to be 

 " amerced or otherwise punished " for non-attendance. And although 

 notorious inability, from devastation by war or other calamity, to pay 

 the parliamentary wages of representatives, continued long after to be 

 admitted as a valid plea of exemption from electing in the case of in- 

 dividual boroughs, the great principle of the right of every municipal 

 town to be summoned, and its duty to return members, if capable, was 

 constantly and firmly maintained. 



In like manner, statutes were passed in the three following reigns to 

 restrain the corrupt and irregular proceedings of the sheriffs both in 

 county and in borough elections. 



Hitherto, however, the parliamentary determinations of the com- 

 mons, as regarded the constitution of their own house, had constantly 

 tended to maintain the political rights of their constituents against 

 invasion on the part of the crown. But that firm and lasting esta- 

 blishment of their own power as a distinct legislative body, which may 

 be dated from the great revolution that first brought the house of 

 Lancaster to the throne, seems, by that very additional security winch 

 it gave them against royal encroachment, to have tended to embolden 

 the bouse, not, as formerly, to maintain the elective franchise to the 

 utmost with the same zeal with which they upheld their mm interest 

 and independence u a legislative chamber, but to commence a sort of 

 reaction against the constituent bodies by narrowing the basis of the 

 suffrage itself. The earliest of these disfranchising enactments, and 

 one of the most remarkable, is that of the 8th Henry VI., restricting 

 the county franchise, formerly possessed by all freeholders, to such 

 only whose freeholds were worth clear forty shillings a year, a sum 

 at least equal to twenty pounds of the present day. The next remark- 

 able instance, though very different in iU nature, of legislative enact- 

 ments respecting the constitution of the commons' house, appears in 

 the parliamentary incorporation of Wales and Cheshire in the reign of 

 Henry VIII.. which brought an accession of sixteen county and fifteen 

 borough members. 



The IxiniH'i/t representation in general was still the great object of 

 attention to the Crown in undermining the independence of the House 

 .ii' '1111111 nm. The development of that part of it* policy was diligently 

 pursued under thn later reigns of the Tudors, and curled to the utmost 

 limit l.y the Stuart* ; 1st, by creating or reviving parliamentary 

 boroughs, and at the same time remoulding tlirir munici|>al constitu- 

 tions according to the views of the court ; '2nd, by proceeding to 

 assimilate the municipal constitutions of the old parliamentary 

 boroughs to those of this newly-created elms The last addition to the 

 English representation previous to the change* made by the Reform 

 Act, was, under Charles II., the enfranchisement by statute of the county 

 and city of Durham, and the creation by charter of the parliamentary 

 borough of Newark. Nor must we forget to mention that .lame* I., by 

 virtue of his royal prerogative, had conferred the right of electing two 

 members upon each of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 

 quite independent of the city and borough representation of those 

 places already existing : thus introducing an anomaly, as well as 

 novelty, into the representative system, a sort of forced alliance 

 between learning anil politics, emanating from the peculiar mental 

 constitution and training of that pi-inn-. 



Those who conducted the revolution of 1688 made much more effec- 

 tual provision against the return of Roman Catholic ascendancy than 

 they did for the purification of the representative system. The Bill of 

 Rights does, indeed, express, " that the election of members of par- 

 liament ought to be free ;" but this vague declaration seems to have 

 amounted to nothing more than on indication of the prevailing public 

 opinion on the subject. We find another strong proof that the public 

 attention had now begun to be directed, not merely, as in former times, 

 to upholding the authority of the Commons' House as constituted in 

 parliament, but to the nature of the relations, on the one hand between 

 the house and the constituent body of the nation, on the other between 

 the several members and their individual constituencies, in the enacting 

 of the statute commonly called " the Triennial Act," which deprived 

 the crown of the power of continuing the same House of Commons for 

 a longer period than three years. The Triennial Act of 6 t 7 William 

 and Mary, c. 2, was an enactment wholly on the side of electoral free- 

 dom. The discretionary power previously exercised by the crown, not 

 only of dissolving, but of continuing at pleasure, was highly favourable 

 to any such view, on the part of the crown, an that of forming a t.-ic -it 

 compact with a corrupt or servile majority of the Commons' House, 

 and was therefore, as had been lately seen under Charles II., exceed- 

 ingly convenient both to king and commons, when the latter happened 

 to be sufficiently pliant. So strongly, however, was the popular 

 opinion on this point expressed at the period in question, that it com- 

 pelled the commons to persist in the measure in spite of King William's 

 refusal of assent to the bill after its first passing the two houses, so that 

 on the second occasion his assent was reluctantly yielded. The same 

 activity of the public opinion of that day respecting the composition of 

 the commons, produced the several Acts of that reign which disqualify 

 various classes of placemen for seats in the house. 



In this place we must notice the legislative union with Scotland, 

 effected in 1707 by statute 6 Anne, c. 8, only to mention that it 

 brought an accession to the English (which thereby became the British) 

 House of Commons, of thirty members for counties, and exactly half 

 that number for cities and boroughs; exhibiting between the nume- 

 rical amount of the county and that of the borough representation a 

 proportion quite the reverse, not only of that which existed in England, 

 but of that which had previously appeared in the Scottish parliamen- 

 tary representation. 



The some reign presents us with an enactment of the British House 

 of Commons respecting its own future constitution, totally different in 

 character from those of William III.'s time just referred to. This is 

 the very important Act (9 Anne, c. 5), which established the qualifi- 

 cation of landed property for English members, whether for counties 

 or boroughs. In the reign of Henry VI., which gave birth to the 

 enactment disfranchising the smaller county freeholders, was passed an 

 Act, in the same spirit, restricting the choice of those freeholders who 

 still retained the franchise. The very terms of this statute imply, th.it 

 in the case of the counties, as in that of the boroughs, there was 

 originally no legal distinction between the qualification of the electors 

 and that of the elected, but that the former were simply called upon to 

 return two of their own number according to their own best discretion. 

 Tin' circumstance, too, of the daily expenses uniformly paid und. 

 obligation by the constituents to each representative whi! 

 parliamentary duty, may in this place be properly mentioned as a 

 striking evidence of the fact, that the qualification of considerable 

 property, how nruch soever it might be regarded in the judgment of 

 the constituents, was, originally, not at all contemplated by the law. 

 The statute in question (23 Henry 6, c. 14) declares, that theii'-e- 

 forward the county representatives Khali be ' notable knighte of the 

 same counties, or shall be able to be knights," that is, shall have free- 

 hold to the amount of 401. per annum, and that no man shall be 

 eligible " that stands in the degree of a yeoman or under." (in this 

 legal footing the county representation remained until the ninth year of 

 Queen Anne, when not only wa* the landed prop. -ity qualification re- 

 enacted for the counties on a scale nearly proportioned to the decrease 

 in the nominal value of money, but an unprecedented step was taken, 

 by including in the very same claxtse of the same Act a provision, 



