1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 257 peerage ' will not meet with the entire approval of Dr. Round. It is not denied that the parliamentary barons of the fourteenth century were peers of the realm equally with the dukes and earls, and the use of the name is indeed traced to a date (1318) three years earlier than was hitherto known, but it is regarded as resting on the old claim to indicium parium and first assuming a political colour in the baronial strife with Edward II. Of hereditary peerage in the modern sense as distinguished from suit and service in parliament Dr. Pollard sees only the beginnings in the middle ages. The writ of summons was a personal one. Even when Richard II introduces the practice of creating hereditary barons and other peers by patent ' the notion of councillorship is emphasized by the limitation of patents to heirs male. Lands might descend to females, but only males could counsel the Crown.' The controversy over ' barony by writ ' affords a good illustration of the divergence of view caused by different aspects of an institution in a state of transition. On the one side are those who lay stress upon the many cases in which the special writ of summons was withheld after being issued to one or more generations of a family, and the rarer cases, not unknown even in the fifteenth century, where the issue of the writ was suspended for a generation or two and then resumed. While the Crown retained this power of discrimination, they ask, how can we speak of hereditary baronies by writ, or see any validity in the legal doctrine of the abeyance of such dignities ? Dr. Round, on the other hand, lays most stress on the many cases in which the writ was issued without a break and continued to the husband of an heiress when the male line came to. an end. 1 This Dr. Pollard accounts for by the natural tendency of a government office to fall into routine. Apart from any difference of interpretation of the words piere de la terre, the whole issue seems to resolve itself into a question of date. On the view before us, the process of development may be said to be complete in one sense in the sixteenth century for ' when a Tudor required the absence of a lord from parliament, it was secured, not by withholding the writ of summons issued under the great seal of chancery, but by a more intimate injunction, under the privy seal or signet, not to obey it '. It is added, however, that ' the vogue of hereditary peerage as a foundation of the constitution is a modern growth born of antagonism to Stuart and then to democratic principles '. We have left ourselves no space for more than a word of appreciation of the valuable chapters in which the relations of parliament to nationalism, to liberty (mediaeval and modern), and to the church are treated, or of the demonstration that the creator of sovereignty in parliament, of parliamentary omnipotence, was Henry VIII, ' the great architect of par- liament '. Dr. Pollard's mastery of the history of his chosen century was never more evident. With his views as to the future of the great institution whose growth and supremacy he traces with such learning and insight we are not here concerned. James Tait. 1 Ante, xxxiii. 453 ff. VOL. XXXVI. — NO. CXLII.
