recognition, not only of baronial tenure as the foundation of a right to
sit in parliament, but of its alienability by the tenant.[469]

If it be asked whether the posterity of a baron aliening the lands which
gave him a right to be summoned to the king's court would be entitled to
the privileges of peerage by nobility of blood, it is true that,
according to Collins, whose opinion the committee incline to follow,
there are instances of persons in such circumstances being summoned. But
this seems not to prove anything to the purpose. The king, no one
doubts, from the time of Edward I., used to summon by writ many who had
no baronial tenure; and the circumstance of having alienated a barony
could not render any one incapable of attending parliament by a
different title. It is very hard to determine any question as to times
of much irregularity; but it seems that the posterity of one who had
parted with his baronial lands would not, in those early times, as a
matter of course, remain noble. A right by tenure seems to exclude a
right by blood; not necessarily, because two collateral titles may
coexist, but in the principle of the constitution. A feudal principle
was surely the more ancient; and what could be more alien to this than a
baron, a peer, an hereditary counsellor, without a fief? Nobility, that
is, gentility of birth, might be testified by a pedigree or a bearing;
but a peer was to be in arms for the crown, to grant his own money as
well as that of others, to lead his vassals, to advise, to exhort, to
restrain the sovereign. The new theory came in by degrees, but in the
decay of every feudal idea; it was the substitution of a different pride
of aristocracy for that of baronial wealth and power; a pride nourished
by heralds, more peaceable, more indolent, more accommodated to the
rules of fixed law and vigorous monarchy. It is difficult to trace the
progress of this theory, which rested on nobility of blood, but yet so
remarkably modified by the original principle of tenure, that the
privileges of this nobility were ever confined to the actual possessor,
and did not take his kindred out of the class of commoners. This
sufficiently demonstrates that the phrase is, so to say, catachrestic,
not used in a proper sense; inasmuch as the actual seisin of the peerage
as an hereditament, whether by writ or by patent, is as much requisite
at present for nobility, as the seisin of an estate by barony was in the
reign of Henry