360 WRITS OF ASSISTANCE, 1558-1700 July also used to attend the house of peers, and have to this day their regular writs of summons issued out at the beginning of every parliament : but, as many of them have of late years been members of the house of commons, their attendance is fallen into disuse. 1 This account is in the main correct, although the evidence supplied by the Parliament Pawns enables us to modify it in some of its details. The persons summoned by writs of assistance may be divided into six classes : 2 (a) the judges, (6) the master of the rolls, (c) the attorney and solicitor general, (d) the king's Serjeants, (e) the secretaries of state, and (/) occasional members of the privy council. Before these different groups are considered separately, it should be noticed that they all belong to the council of the king — not the privy council, but that wider and very ill-defined body, the ordinary council — that they are all men whose special obligation it is to advise the Crown when called upon to do so ; hence, while the peers are summoned to confer with the king and other peers, the members of the ordinary council are called to advise the Crown 3 and are really in attendance upon the king alone and not upon the peers at all. But with the development of the house of lords in the fifteenth century these advisers of the Crown gradually fall into a position of subordination to the peers, and, by the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, it was pretty well recognized that they were merely attendants or assistants 4 to the upper house, with no lot or share in the privileges of that body, though occasionally a bill might be sent to a committee on which the justices 5 or the attorney and solicitor general 6 or even a serjeant-at-law 7 sat side by side with lords of parlia- ment, or even though, as happened in one debate at least, a secretary of state might intervene in the discussion in support of the bill that was before the house. 8 These are mere # survivals 1 Blackstone, Commentaries (ed. of 1765), i. 162. 2 See also p. 372, n. 2. 3 See p. 357, n. 1. 4 D'Ewes makes a* distinction between ' Assistants ' and ' Attendants ' : the judges he calls f assistants ' (e. g. p. 99), the attorney and solicitor general and the Serjeants ' meer Attendants upon the Upper House ' (pp. 99, 142) ; this may imply a certain difference in status, but it was a distinction that was certainly not universally made even in the early seventeenth century, e. g. Chief Baron Fleming and Baron Snigg are said to be ' Attendants as Judges in the Higher House ' (Commons' Journals, i. 257, 9 November 1604), while a master of the chancery is called an assistant to this house (Lords Journals, iv. 565, 7 February 1642). 5 Lords' Journals, i. 586, 26 January 1563 ; i. 606, 20 March 1563 ; D'Ewes, pp. 99, 142, 143, 3 October and 5 October 1566, 5 April and 9 April 1571. 6 Lords' Journals, i. 586, 26 January 1563 ; D'Ewes, p. 142, 6 April 1571 ; Lords' Journals, i. 691, 21 May 1571. 7 D'Ewes, p. 99, 3 October 1566. In these cases the bills committed dealt with legal matters. 8 The debate on the Sacrament on 14-18 December 1548, printed in appendix v of Gasquet and Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer.
