any great council of the realm, whether for the purpose of
levying a new tax, or any other affecting the public weal. The
committee, however, laudably cautious in drawing any positive inference,
have moved step by step through this obscure path with a circumspection
as honourable to themselves as it renders their ultimate judgment worthy
of respect.

"The council of the kingdom, however composed (they are adverting to the
reign of Henry I.), must have been assembled by the king's command; and
the king, therefore, may have assumed the power of selecting the persons
to whom he addressed the command, especially if the object of assembling
such a council was not to impose any burthen on any of the subjects of
the realm exempted from such burthens except by their own free grants.
Whether the king was at this time considered as bound by any
constitutional law to address such command to any particular persons,
designated by law as essential parts of such an assembly for all
purposes, the committee have been unable to ascertain. It has generally
been considered as the law of the land that the king had a right to
require the advice of any of his subjects, and their personal services,
for the general benefit of the kingdom; but as, by the terms of the
charters of Henry and of his father, no aid could be required of the
immediate tenants of the crown by military service, beyond the
obligation of their respective tenures, if the crown had occasion for
any extraordinary aid from those tenants, it must have been necessary,
according to law, to assemble all persons so holding, to give their
consent to the imposition. Though the numbers of such tenants of the
crown were not originally very great, as far as appears from Domesday,
yet, if it was necessary to convene all to form a constitutional
legislative assembly, the distances of their respective residences, and
the inconvenience of assembling at one time, in one spot, all those who
thus held of the crown, and upon whom the maintenance of the Conquest
itself must for a considerable time have importantly depended, must have
produced difficulties, even in the reign of the Conqueror; and the
increase of their numbers by subdivision of tenures must have greatly
increased the difficulty in the reign of his son Henry: and at length,
in the reigns of his successors, it must have been almost impossible to
have convened such an assembly, except by general summons of the greater
part of the per