529, 530) that the existence of the peerage, as that word is understood in the three British kingdoms, is something altogether peculiar to those kingdoms, and that it has actually hindered them from possessing a nobility of the Continental type. Before we try to trace out the history of the British peerage, it will be well to show more fully than was done in that article in what the institution consists, and in what it differs from those institutions in other countries which are most like it. And to this end we must define what we understand by the word peerage in the British sense. In its historical use it takes in all the members or possible members of the House of Lords and no other persons. But modern usage and modern decisions seem to 1imit the use of the name on one side, and to extend it on another. There is no kind of doubt that, according to the earliest precedents—precedents reaching up to the earliest official use of the word peer— the spiritual lords are equally peers with the temporal. But it has been held, at least from the 17 th century, that the spiritual lords, though lords of parliament equally with the temporal lords, are not, like them, peers. Again, in earlier times no peers were heard of except members of the House of Lords, but membership of that House, even as a temporal lord, was not necessarily hereditary. But a decision of the present reign has ruled that a life-peerage is possible, but that the holder of such a peerage has no right to a seat as a lord of parliament. And an Act of the present reign of later date has actually called into being a class of lords who, it would seem, may possibly be either lords of parliament without being peers, or peers without being lords of parliament. These doctrines, some of which trample all the facts of history under foot, but which must be supposed to declare the modern law, establish the possibility of peers who are not lords of parliament, as well as of lords of parliament who are not peers. The question whether all lords of parliament were peers has been debated for several centuries; that all peers were in esse or in posse lords of parliament, that the right to a seat in parliament was the essence of peerage round which all other rights have grown, was surely never doubted till the year 1856.

Still these later doctrines, though founded on altogether wrong historical grounds, give us a definition of peerage which is intelligible and convenient. Setting aside the possible peers who are not lords of parliament, the two decisions between them rule that the parliamentary peerage is confined to the temporal lords, and that, except in the case of the very modern official lords, their peerage is necessarily hereditary. This definition is convenient in practice, because it is the hereditary temporal peerage whose growth and constitution is of that unique kind which distinguishes it from all other bodies which bear the same name or which present any likeness to it in other ways. It will save trouble in this inquiry if we use the word peerage in what—with the possible exception of the last-created official lords—seems now to be its legal sense, as meaning the hereditary temporal peerage only.

In this sense then the peerage of England—continued after the union between England and Scotland in the peerage of Great Britain, and after the union between Great Britain and Ireland in the peerage of the United Kingdom—is 'a body of men possessing privileges which are not merely personal but hereditary, privileges which descend in all cases according to some rule of hereditary succession, but which pass only to one member of a family at a time. In this the peerage differs from nobility strictly so called, in which the hereditary privileges, whatever they may consist in, pass on to all the descendants of the person first created or otherwise acknowledged as noble. The essential and distinguishing privilege of the peer, as defined above, is that he is an hereditary lord of parliament, that he has, by virtue of his birth, a right to a summons from the crown to attend personally in every parliament and to take his seat in the House of Lords. He is thus, by right of birth, a member of the great council of the nation, an hereditary legislator, and an hereditary judge. Whatever other privileges, substantial or honorary, the peer may possess, they have all gathered round this central privilege, which is that which distinguishes the peer from all other men. The peer of parliament thus holds a different position from the lords spiritual, equally lords of parliament with himself, but holding their seats by a different tenure from that of an hereditary peerage. He holds a different position from the possible non-parliamentary peers implied in the decision of 1856. He holds a different position from the official lords of parliament created by the last Act. The number of the peerage is unlimited; the crown may raise whom it will to any of its ranks; but it is now understood that, in order to make the persons so raised peers in the full sense, to make them lords of parliament, the creation must extend to their heirs of some kind as well as to themselves.

The special character of the British peerage, as distinguished from privileged orders in any other time or place, springs directly from the fact that the essence of the peerage is the hereditary right of a personal summons to parliament. To determine the origin of the peerage is thus to determine how a certain body of men came to possess this hereditary right of summons. But, before we enter on this inquiry, one or two remarks will be needful which are naturally suggested by the definition of peerage which has just been given.

It has been said above that the holder of a peerage as defined is a lord of parliament in esse or in posse. It has become necessary during the present and last centuries to add these last words to the definition. For it is plain that, since the successive unions of England and Scotland and of Great Britain and Ireland, an hereditary peerage has not always in practice carried with it a seat in the House of Lords (cf. the Lords’ Report on the Dignity of a Peer, ii. 16). For since those unions certain persons, namely those peers of Scotland and Ireland who are not representative peers and who do not hold peerages of England, of Great Britain, or of the United Kingdom, have been undoubted peers, they have enjoyed some or all of the personal privileges of peerage, but they have had no seats in the House of Lords. But this is a modern accident and anomaly. The persons spoken of hold peerages which entitled their holders to seats in the parliaments of Scotland and Ireland as long as those parliaments were distinct bodies. And their present holders, if not members of the House of Lords in esse, are such in posse. They have a capacity for being chosen to seats in that House which is not shared by other persons. Their membership of the House is rather suspended than altogether taken away. Their rather anomalous case hardly affects the general principle that, as far as the hereditary peerage is concerned, peerage and membership of the House of Lords are the same thing.

A few words are also needed as to the effect of the earlier doctrine which rules that peerage is an attribute of the lords temporal only and not of the lords spiritual (see Lords' Report, i. 323, 393; ii. 75). This is doubtless meant to imply a certain inferiority on the part of the spiritual lords, as not sharing in that nobility of blood which is looked on as the special attribute of the hereditary peerage. But the inferiority thus implied, as it has nothing to do with parliamentary powers, has also nothing to do with precedence. The lords spiritual as a body are always mentioned first; one class of them, namely the archbishops, take precedence of all temporal peers who are not of the royal family, as the other bishops take precedence of the temporal barons. What the distinction is concerned with is simply certain personal privileges, such as the right of being tried by the court of our lord the king in parliament, that is by the House of Lords or some part of it, instead of in the ordinary way by a jury. The doctrine which denies “peerage” to the spiritual lords is altogether contrary to earlier precedents; but the way in which it came about is one of the most curious parts of our inquiry. It was the natural result of the ideas under whose influence the temporal peerage grew up and put on its distinguishing character.

The use of the word peers (pares) to denote the members of the House of Lords first appears in the 14th century, and it was fully established before the end of that century. The name seems to be rather a direct importation from France than anything of natural English or even Norman growth. In the 12th and 13th centuries the great men of the realm appear under various names, English, Latin, and French, witan, sapientes, magnates, proceres, grantz, and the like; they are pares only incidentally, as other men might be. In the Great Charter the word pares, in the phrase judicium parium, has simply the general meaning which it still keeps in the rule that every man shall be tried by his peers, the peer (in the later sense) by his peers and the commoner by his. In the 13th century this seems to have still been the only meaning of the word in England. This is illustrated by the story of Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester (see R. Wendover, iv. 277; M. Paris, ed. Luard, iii. 252; Stubbs, Const. Hist., ii. 48, 183), when in 1233 the right of being tried by their peers was asserted on behalf of Richard earl Marshall, and others. The bishops and other lords exhort the king to make peace with certain of his nobles and other subjects, “quos absque judicio parium exsulaverat,” &c. The Poitevin bishop, either through ignorance or of set purpose, misunderstood the phrase, and answered that in England there were no peers (pares) as there were in France, and that therefore the king might deal with all his subjects as he chose by means of his own justices only. The word pares is here clearly used in one sense and understood in another. The English lords used the word in its older general sense; Peter des Roches used it in the special sense which it bore in France. Neither used it in the sense which it took in the next century. It was perfectly true that there was in England no body of men answering to the peers of France, of whom we shall speak presently. But there is every likelihood that the name, as describing a particular body of men in England, was borrowed from the peers of France.

But the thing is more important than the name. Whatever view may be taken of the constitution of the ancient Witenagemót, we may safely assume that that assembly, with whatever change in its constitution, is personally continued in the House of Lords. That house consists of two classes of men who have never lost their right to a personal summons, together with certain other classes who have acquired that right in later times. Two classes of men, namely earls and bishops, have, with a certain interval in the 17 th century, sat continuously in the councils of the nation from the earliest times. These two classes are those whose presence connects the earliest and the latest English assemblies. From the time when the House of Lords began to take anything like its present shape, other classes of men, spiritual and temporal, were summoned as well as the bishops and earls, but not with the same regularity as they were. Some abbots were always summoned from the beginning, and a few other churchmen afterwards obtained the same right. But, while every bishop—except in a few cases of personal enmity on the part of the king—was summoned as a matter of course, there was great irregularity in summoning of abbots. So some barons were always summoned as well as the earls; but, while every earl was—with a few such exceptions as in the case of the bishops—summoned as a matter of course, there was great irregularity in summoning the barons. The bishops and earls in short were personages too great to be left out; so were a few of the greatest abbots. Lesser men, spiritual σr temporal, might be summoned or not according to a hundred reasons of convenience, caprice, or accident. But it is only the common tendency of things that the occasional summons should grow into the perpetual summons, and that the perpetual summons should, wherever it was possible, that is, in the case of the temporal lords, grow into the hereditary summons. In other words, the doctrine was gradually established that, when a man was once summoned, a right of summons was created for him and his heirs for ever. The establishment of this doctrine called into being a new order of men, of lower rank than the bishops and earls but of equal parliamentary power, namely the class of barons having an hereditary right to seats in parliament. Presently, in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, the ranks of the temporal peerage were increased by the invention of new orders, those of duke, marquess, and viscount, the two former classes taking precedence of the ancient earls.

It is easy to see how the growth of these several classes of hereditary lords of parliament tended to strengthen the notion of the temporal peerage as a body by itself, apart from all other men, even from those lords of parliament whose seats were not hereditary. Here were five classes of men who were not peers in the sense of strict equality among themselves, for they were divided by rigid rules of precedence, but who were peers in the sense of having each of them an equal right to something peculiar to themselves, something which was so far from being shared with any who were not lords of parliament that it was not shared by all who were. The archbishop took precedence of the duke, the bishop took precedence of the baron; but duke and baron alike shared in something which archbishop and bishop had not, the hereditary right to a summons to parliament. The peerage of the temporal lord came to be looked on as something inherent in the blood, something which could not, like the official seat of the churchman, be resigned or lost by any means except by such legal processes as involved “corruption of blood.” The parliamentary powers, the formal precedence, of the spiritual lords were not touched, but the idea silently grew that they were not the peers of the hereditary members of the House. In short, the doctrine grew that the temporal lords alone were peers, as alone having their blood “ennobled,” which is the herald’s way of saying that they held their seats by hereditary right. The extinction of so many temporal peerages in the Wars of the Roses, the creation of so many new peerages under the Tudors, while in one way they lowered the strength and dignity of the order, in another way helped more and more to mark it out as a separate order, distinct from all others.

But the spiritual lords were not the only class that lost by the growth of the doctrine of hereditary peerage. No doctrine about blood or peerage could get rid of the fact that the parliamentary position of the bishops and the greater abbots was as old as that of the earls, far older than that of the barons, to say nothing of the ranks more lately devised. But there was another body of men whom the growth of the hereditary doctrine hindered from becoming peers, and from becoming lords of parliament in any full sense. These were the judges. As the judges grew to be a distinct and recognized class, they came to be summoned to parliament like the barons. The same reason which made it expedient to summon bishops, earls, and barons, made it expedient to summon judges also. It wou!d not have been unreasonable if, in the many shiftings and experiments which took place before the constitution of the two Houses finally settled itself, the judges had come to hold official seats in the House of Lords in the same way as the bishops. But the growth and strengthening of the hereditary doctrine hindered the judges as a body from ever winning the same position in parliament as the bishops and abbots. They had not the same antiquity; they had not the same territorial position; their tenure was less secure; the spiritual lord might lose his office by resignation or by a legal process; the judge might lose his by the mere arbitrary will of the sovereign. The bishops then could be denied the right of personal peerage; they could not be denied their full parliamentary position, their seats and votes. But the same feeling which deprived the bishop of his personal peerage hindered the judge from ever obtaining the personal peerage, and even from obtaining a full seat and vote in parliament. Owing to these influences, the judges have ever held an anomalous position in parliament; they came to be in a manner in the House of Lords but not of it, to be its counsellors and assessors, but not its members.

The growth of the hereditary doctrine pressed hardly, we must allow, on both bishops and judges. But its working on either of those classes has been of small moment indeed compared with the effect on the nation at large. There is no institution for which England has greater reason to be thankfu1 than for her hereditary peerage; for, as we began by saying, it has saved her from the curse of a nobility. Or rather, to speak more accurately, the growth of the peerage with its comparatively harmless privileges hindered the real nobility from keeping or wdnning privileges which would have been anything but harmless. If the word nobility has any real meaning, it must, according to the analogy of lands where there is a real nobility, take in all who bear coat-armour by good right (see Nobility). It is a remark which has been made a thousand times, and no remark can be truer, that countless families which would be reckoned as noble anywhere else are not reckoned as noble in England. That is to say, though they may be rich and ancient, though they may claim an illustrious pedigree and may be able to prove their claim, yet they have nothing to do with the peerage. In England no family is looked upon as noble unless its head is a peer. In other words, the idea of peerage has altogether displaced the older idea of nobility. The growth of the order of peers has hindered the growth of any nobility apart from the peerage. The hereditary dignity of the peer, the great political position which it carries with it, stands so immeasurably above any hereditary dignity which attaches to the simple gentleman by coatarmour, that the gentleman by coat-armour—the noble of other lands—ceased in England to be looked on, or rather perhaps never came to be looked on, as noble at all. In other words, the growth of the peerage saved the country from the curse of a nobility after the fashion of the nobility of France or of Germany. The difference in this respect between England and other lands is plain at first sight, and there really seems no other way to explain the difference except that every notion of hereditary dignity and privilege gathered so exclusively round the hereditary peerage as to leave nothing of any account to gather round any smaller hereditary position.

But, while the growth of the peerage thus hindered the growth of a nobility of which every gentleman should be a member, it was still possible that a real nobility might have grown up out of the peerage itself. That is to say, it might have come about that, while none but the descendants of peers were privileged, all the descendants of peers should be privileged. A nobility might thus have been formed, much smaller than a nobility taking in all lawful bearers of coat-armour, but still a nobility by no means small. But in England...