e returns to it in the Rise and Progress of the English
Commonwealth, why is it "a startling paradox to deny the substantial
antiquity of the house of commons"? By this I understand him to mean
that representatives from counties and boroughs came regularly, or at
least frequently, to the great councils of Saxon and Norman kings. Their
indispensable consent in legislation I do not apprehend him to affirm,
but rather the reverse:--"The supposition that in any early period the
burgesses had a voice in the solemn acts of the legislature is
untenable." (Rise and Progress, &c., i. 314.) But they certainly did, at
one time or other, obtain this right, "or convert themselves," as he
expresses it, "into the third estate of the realm;" so that upon any
hypothesis a great constitutional change was wrought in the powers of
the commons. The revolutionary character of Montfort's parliament in the
49th of Hen. III. would sufficiently account both for the appearance of
representatives from a democracy so favourable to that bold reformer and
for the equality of power with which it was probably designed to invest
them. But whether in the more peaceable times of Edward I. the citizens
or burgesses were recognised as essential parties to every legislative
measure, may, as I have shown, be open to much doubt.

I cannot upon the whole overcome the argument from the silence of all
historians, from the deficiency of all proof as to any presence of
citizens and burgesses, in a representative character as a house of
commons, before the 49th year of Henry III.; because after this time
historians and chroniclers exactly of the same character as the former,
or even less copious and valuable, do not omit to mention it. We are
accustomed in the sister kingdoms, so to speak, of the continent,
founded on the same Teutonic original, to argue against the existence of
representative councils, or other institutions, from the same absence of
positive testimony. No one believes that the three estates of France
were called together before the time of Philip the Fair. No one strains
the representation of cities in the cortes of Castile beyond the date
at which we discover its existence by testimony. It is true that
unreasonable inferences may be made from what is usually called negative
evidence; but how readily and how often are we deceived by a reliance on
testimony! In many instances the negative conclusion carries with it a
conviction equal to a great mass