Thomas tried before the Witan;
William before the Theningmannagemót. special summons. I am inclined therefore to see, both in the case of Anselm and in the case of Thomas, a true gathering of the Witan of the realm. Thomas comes, like Strafford or Hastings, to answer a charge before the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament,[1] that court, which from an assembly of the whole nation, gradually shrank up into an assembly of the present peerage. In the case of Anselm I see the same body acting, not strictly as a court, but rather as the great inquest of the nation, but at the same time fluctuating somewhat, as was but natural in that age, between its judicial and its legislative functions. But in the tribunal which sat on William of Saint-Calais I am, as I have already said, inclined to see, not the Mickle Gemót of the whole nation, but rather the King's court in a narrower sense, the representative of the ancient Theningmannagemót, the more strictly official body.[2] Here we have no division of chambers; the proceedings are strictly those of a court trying a charge, and the King, as chief judge, is present throughout.
- ↑ The distinction between the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament and the Court of the Lord High Steward is most clearly brought out in Jardine's Criminal Trials, i. 229. Lord Macaulay (iv. 153) is less accurate. He speaks of the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament as one form of the Court of the Lord High Steward. But in truth, the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament is simply the Witan sitting for a judicial purpose. The Lords alone sit, because the Commons have never attained to a share in the judicial functions of the Witan. The right to be tried before the Witan thus sitting judicially is naturally confined to those classes of persons who have kept or acquired the right to the personal summons, that is, to the peers. If it should be objected that this privilege does not now extend to the spiritual peers, the reason is most likely to be found in the fact that for some ages a bishop would not be tried before any temporal court at all. When such trials began again in the sixteenth century, the later notion of peerage had grown up, and those peers whose holding was still strictly official was looked on as in some measure less fully peers than those whose peerage was "hereditary" in the modern sense.
- ↑ See N. C. vol. v. pp. 423, 878.
