se assistance he might so soon be again obliged to
have recourse. The commons, however, were still much below the rank
of legislators.[*] [4] Their petitions, though they received a verbal
assent from the throne, were only the rudiments of laws: the judges were
afterwards intrusted with the power of putting them into form. and
the king, by adding to them the sanction of his authority, and that
sometimes without the assent of the nobles, bestowed validity upon
them. The age did not refine so much as to perceive the danger of these
irregularities. No man was displeased that the sovereign, at the desire
of any class of men, should issue an order which appeared only to
concern that class; and his predecessors were so near possessing the
whole legislative power, that he gave no disgust by assuming it in this
seemingly inoffensive manner. But time and further experience gradually
opened men's eyes, and corrected these abuses. It was found that no laws
could be fixed for one order of men without affecting the whole; and
that the force and efficacy of laws depended entirely on the terms
employed in wording them. The house of peers, therefore, the most
powerful order in the state, with reason, expected that their assent
should be expressly granted to all public ordinances:[**]

* See note D, at the end of the volume.

** In those instances found in Cotton's Abridgment, where
the king appears to answer of himself the petitions of the
commons, he probably exerted no more than that power, which
was long inherent in the crown, of regulating matters by
royal edicts or proclamations.

But no durable or general statute seems ever to have been made by the
king from the petition of the commons alone, without the assent of the
peers. It is more likely that the peers alone without the commons, would
enact statutes, and in the reign of Henry V., the commons required,
that no laws should be framed merely upon their petitions, unless the
statutes were worded by themselves, and had passed their house in the
form of a bill.[*]

But as the same causes which had produced a partition of property
continued still to operate, the number of knights and lesser barons, or
what the English call the gentry, perpetually increased, and they sunk
into a rank still more inferior to the great nobility. The equality of
tenure was lost in the great inferiority of power and property; and the
house of representatives from the coun