256 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April of the other contents of the earliest and best manuscript, 1 is confirmed when it is noted that the tract on the steward which immediately follows it, and contains the same extraordinary expedient for resolving difficult cases in parliament, was composed to bolster up the claims of Thomas of Lancaster. 2 The connexion is ominous, and Dr. Pollard, it seems to us, has involved himself in serious inconsistencies by accepting on such dubious authority the doctrine that in the reign of Edward III ' the commons shared with the crown the privilege of being one of the two indispensable elements in a valid parliament '. According to the Modus there can be no parliament without the presence of the communitates, because they represent the nation, 3 while the magnates (if duly sum- moned) may all absent themselves without invalidating the parliament, because they speak only for themselves individually. Unluckily, Dr. Pollard has failed to notice that among the communitates the Modus includes the proctors of the clergy, and as he accepts the general view that they slipped out of parliament long before the end of the fourteenth century he has on his hands a good many parliaments that were invalid on the principles of the Modus. Nor is it consistent to accept without reserve a source which lays down that ' the two knights of any shire have a greater voice in parliament than the greatest earl of England ', and elsewhere to state that the commons' position in parliament before 1350 was still com- paratively so humble that, though the opening of parliament was often adjourned owing to the non-arrival of prelates and magnates, the atten- dance of the commons was never insisted on. This is not strictly the fact, 4 but the prominence given to the magnates is hard to reconcile with their position in parliament as described in the Modus. The official use of this ambiguous treatise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (p. 68) may have been due more to its clear statement of the superiority of the commons over the lords than to its positive value as an accurate guide to the holding of parliaments. The house of commons grew up out of their separate deliberations, but it is contended that these were private and out of parliament until the removal of the'knights and burgesses from the chapter house of the abbey to St. Stephen's Chapel and the beginning of their Journals in the reign of Henry VIII. The argument is not wholly safe in view of the close con- nexion of the abbey with the palace, which is attested by its use as a royal treasury. The parliament chamber in which the commons reported the results of their deliberations, and took part in the formal enactment of legislation, did not merge its original dignity in the name of house of lords until the sixteenth century, and of course has remained the scene of all the common functions of parliament. Dr. Pollard does good service in pointing out that our premature use of the narrower name, however much the facts anticipated the change, disguises the original constitution of parliament as a single chamber. We fear that his exposure of the ' fiction of the Ante, xxxiv. 215. 2 L. W. Vernon Harcourt, His Grace the Steward, pp. 147 ff., 164 ff. 3 Yet in the chapter on the six degrees the presence of none of them (save the king) is regarded as necessary. 4 Rot. Pari. ii. 107, and cf. p. 135.
