d
legislative assembly.

The vassals of a baron were, by their tenure, immediately dependent on
him, owed attendance at his court, and paid all their duty to the
king, through that dependence which their lord was obliged by HIS
tenure to acknowledge to his sovereign and superior. Their land,
comprehended in the barony, was represented in Parliament by the baron
himself, who was supposed, according to the fictions of the feudal
law, to possess the direct property of it; and it would have been
deemed incongruous to give it any other representation. They stood in
the same capacity to him, that he and the other barons did to the
king. The former were peers of the barony; the latter were peers of
the realm. The vassals possessed a subordinate rank within their
district; the baron enjoyed a superior dignity in the great assembly:
they were in some degree his companions at home; he the king's
companion at court: and nothing can be more evidently repugnant to all
feudal ideas, and to that gradual subordination which was essential to
those ancient institutions, than to imagine that the king would apply
either for the advice or consent of men, who were of a rank so much
inferior, and whose duty was immediately paid to the MESNE lord that
was interposed between them and the throne [t].
[FN [t] Spellm. Gloss. in verb. BARO.]

If it be unreasonable to think that the vassals of a barony, though
their tenure was military, and noble, and honourable, were ever
summoned to give their opinion in national councils, much less can it
be supposed, that the tradesmen or inhabitants of boroughs, whose
condition was so much inferior, would be admitted to that privilege.
It appears from Doomsday, that the greatest boroughs were, at the time
of the Conquest, scarcely more than country villages; and that the
inhabitants lived in entire dependence on the king or great lords, and
were of a station little better than servile [u]. They were not then
so much as incorporated; they formed no community; were not regarded
as a body politic; and being really nothing but a number of low
dependent tradesmen, living, without any particular civil tie, in
neighbourhood together, they were incapable of being represented in
the states of the kingdom. Even in France, a country which made more
early advances in arts and civility than England, the first
corporation is sixty years posterior to the Conquest under the Duke of
Normandy; and the erecting of these