of
barons attending the court. In some counties a limitation to tenants _in
capite_ would have left this important tribunal very deficient in
numbers. And as in all our law-books we find the county court composed
of freeholders, we may reasonably demand evidence of two changes in its
constitution, which the adherents to the theory of restrained
representation must combine--one which excluded all freeholders except
those who held immediately of the crown; another which restored them.
The notion that the county court was the king's court baron (Report, p.
150), and thus bore an analogy to that of the lord in every manor,
whether it rests on any modern legal authority or not, seems delusive.
The court baron was essentially a feudal institution; the county court
was from a different source; it was old Teutonic, and subsisted in this
and other countries before the feudal jurisdictions had taken root. It
is a serious error to conceive that, because many great alterations were
introduced by the Normans, there was nothing left of the old system of
society.[463]

It may, however, be naturally inquired why, if the king's tenants in
chief were exclusively members of the national council before the era of
county representation, they did not retain that privilege; especially if
we conceive, as seems on the whole probable, that the knights chosen in
38 Henry III. were actually representatives of the military tenants of
the crown. The answer might be that these knights do not appear to have
been elected in the county court; and when that mode of choosing knights
of the shire was adopted, it was but consonant to the increasing spirit
of liberty, and to the weight also of the barons, whose tenants crowded
the court, that no freeholder should be debarred of his equal suffrage.
But this became the more important, and we might almost add necessary,
when the feudal aids were replaced by subsidies on movables; so that,
unless the mesne freeholders could vote at county elections, they would
have been taxed without their consent and placed in a worse condition
than ordinary burgesses. This of itself seems almost a decisive argument
to prove that they must have joined in the election of knights of the
shire after the _Confirmatio Chartarum_. If we were to go down so late
as Richard II., and some pretend that the mesne freeholders did not vote
before the reign of Henry IV., we find Chaucer's franklin, a vavassor,
capable even of sitting in parl