d dignity of duke, a distinct body of men
denominated peers of the land, and having distinct personal rights;
while the other tenants in chief, whatsoever their rights may have been
in the reign of John, sunk into the general mass." (p. 314.)

The appellation "peers of the land" is said to occur for the first time
in 14 Edw. II. (p. 281), and we find them very distinctly in the
proceedings against Bereford and others at the beginning of the next
reign. They were, of course, entitled to trial by their own order. But
whether all laymen summoned by particular writs to parliament were at
that time considered as peers, and triable by the rest as such, must be
questionable; unless we could assume that the writ of summons already
ennobled the blood, which is at least not the opinion of the committee.
If, therefore, the writ did not constitute an hereditary peer, nor
tenure in chief by barony give a right to sit in parliament, we should
have a difficulty in finding any determinate estate of nobility at all,
exclusive of earls, who were, at all times and without exception,
indisputably noble; an hypothesis manifestly paradoxical, and
contradicted by history and law. If it be said that prescription was the
only title, this may be so far granted that the _majores barones_ had by
prescription, antecedent to any statute or charter, been summoned to
parliament: but this prescription would not be broken by the omission,
through negligence or policy, of an individual tenant by barony in a few
parliaments. The prescription was properly in favour of the class, the
_majores barones_ generally, and as to them it was perfect, extending
itself in right, if not always in fact, to every one who came within its
scope.

In the Third Report of the Lords' Committee, apparently drawn by the
same hand as the Second, they "conjecture that after the establishment
of the commons' house of parliament as a body by election, separate and
distinct from the lords, all idea of a right to a writ of summons to
parliament by reason of tenure had ceased, and that the dignity of
baron, if not conferred by patent, was considered as derived only from
the king's writ of summons." (Third Report, p. 226.) Yet they have not
only found many cases of persons summoned by writ several times whose
descendants have not been summoned, and hesitate even to approve the
decision of the house on the Clifton barony in 1673, when it was
determined that the claimant's ancestor, by