laws and customs relating to
parliament, considered as one aggregate body. We will next proceed to

IV. THE laws and customs relating to the house of lords in particular.
These, if we exclude their judicial capacity, which will be more
properly treated of in the third and fourth books of these
commentaries, will take up but little of our time.

ONE very antient privilege is that declared by the charter of the
forest[p], confirmed in parliament 9 Hen. III; viz. that every lord
spiritual or temporal summoned to parliament, and passing through the
king's forests, may, both in going and returning, kill one or two of
the king's deer without warrant; in view of the forester, if he be
present; or on blowing a horn if he be absent, that he may not seem to
take the king's venison by stealth.

[Footnote p: cap. 11.]

IN the next place they have a right to be attended, and constantly
are, by the judges of the court of king's bench and commonpleas, and
such of the barons of the exchequer as are of the degree of the coif,
or have been made serjeants at law; as likewise by the masters of the
court of chancery; for their advice in point of law, and for the
greater dignity of their proceedings. The secretaries of state, the
attorney and solicitor general, and the rest of the king's learned
counsel being serjeants, were also used to attend the house of peers,
and have to this day their regular writs of summons issued out at the
beginning of every parliament[q]: but, as many of them have of late
years been members of the house of commons, their attendance is fallen
into disuse.

[Footnote q: Stat. 31 Hen. VIII. c. 10. Smith's commonw. b. 2. c. 3.
Moor. 551. 4 Inst. 4. Hale of parl. 140.]

ANOTHER privilege is, that every peer, by licence obtained from the
king, may make another lord of parliament his proxy, to vote for him
in his absence[r]. A privilege which a member of the other house can
by no means have, as he is himself but a proxy for a multitude of
other people[s].

[Footnote r: Seld. baronage. p. 1. c. 1.]

[Footnote s: 4 Inst. 12.]

EACH peer has also a right, by leave of the house, when a vote passes
contrary to his sentiments, to enter his dissent on the journals of
the house, with the reasons for such dissent; which is usually stiled
his protest.

ALL bills likewise, that may in their consequences any way affect the
rights of the peerage, are by the custom of parliament to have their
first rise and beginning in