ons, though legally general, may
never have been generally exercised.

The committee seem to have been perplexed about the word _magnates_
employed in several records to express part of those present in great
councils. In general they interpret it, as well as the word _proceres_,
to include persons not distinguished by the name "_barones_;" a word
which in the reign of Henry III. seems to have been chiefly used in the
restricted sense it has latterly acquired. Yet in one instance, a letter
addressed to the justiciar of Ireland, 1 Hen. III., they suppose the
word _magnates_ to "exclude those termed therein 'alii quamplurimi;' and
consequently to be confined to prelates, earls, and barons. This may be
deemed important in the consideration of many other instruments in which
the word _magnates_ has been used to express persons constituting the
'commune concilium regni.'" But this strikes me as an erroneous
construction of the letter. The words are as follows:--"Convenerunt apud
Glocestriam plures regni nostri magnates, episcopi, abbates, comites, et
barones, qui patri nostro viventi semper astiterunt fideliter et devote,
et alii quamplurimi; applaudentibus clero et populo, &c., publice fuimus
in regem Angliae inuncti et coronati." (p. 77.) I think that _magnates_
is a collective word, including the "alii quamplurimi." It appears to me
that _magnates_, and perhaps some other Latin words, correspond to the
witan of the Anglo-Saxons, expressing the legislature in general, under
which were comprised those who held peculiar dignities, whether lay or
spiritual. And upon the whole we may be led to believe that the Norman
great council was essentially of the same composition as the witenagemot
which had preceded it; the king's thanes being replaced by the barons of
the first or second degree, who, whatever may have been the distinction
between them, shared one common character, one source of their
legislative rights--the derivation of their lands as immediate fiefs
from the crown.

The result of the whole inquiry into the constitution of parliament down
to the reign of John seems to be--1. That the Norman kings explicitly
renounced all prerogative of levying money on the immediate military
tenants of the crown, without their consent given in a great council of
the realm; this immunity extending also to their sub-tenants and
dependants. 2. That all these tenants in chief had a constitutional
right to attend, and ought to be summone