ent authority of
the nobles. This authority went down in the struggles of the Lancastrians
and Yorkists.

"The bloody faction fights known as the Wars of the Roses brought the
Plantagenet dynasty to a close, weeded out the older nobility, and cleared
the way for a new form of monarchy."[23]

"The high nobility killed itself out. The great barons who adhered to the
'Red Rose' or the 'White Rose,' or who fluctuated from one to the other,
became poorer, fewer, and less potent every year. When the great struggle
ended at Bosworth, a large part of the greatest combatants were gone. The
restless, aspiring, rich barons, who made the civil war, were broken by it.
Henry VII. attained a kingdom in which there was a Parliament to advise,
but scarcely a Parliament to control."[24]

It is important to note the ascendancy of the barons in the medieval
Parliaments, and their self-destruction in the Wars of the Roses. Unless we
realise how very largely the barons were the Parliament, it is difficult to
understand how it came about that Parliament was so utterly impotent under
the Tudors. The Wars of the Roses killed off the mighty parliamentarians,
and it took a hundred years to raise the country landowners into a party
which, under Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, was to make the House of Commons
supreme.

"The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so
say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were its
most potent members, tired the small nobility and gentry, and overthrew the
aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual resistance to the
sovereign had been based."[25]

To get an idea of the weakness of Parliament when the Tudors ruled, we have
but to suppose at the present day a Parliament deprived of all front-bench
men on both sides of the House, and of the leaders of the Irish and Labour
parties, and a House of Lords deprived of all Ministers and ex-Ministers.

THE MEDIEVAL NATIONAL ASSEMBLIES

Before passing to the Parliamentary revival of the seventeenth century,
there still remain one or two points to be considered relating to the early
national assemblies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

(1) _Who were the electors in the Middle Ages?_--In the counties, all who
were entitled to attend and take part in the proceedings of the county
court had the right of electing the knight of the shire; and "it is most
probable, on the evidence of records, on the analogi