constitution. Among them, we may, without hesitation, enumerate the following circumstances.

In the first place, the sovereignty of England did not reside in the King solely. All matters of great state importance were made subjects of deliberation in the King's high court of Parliament, which was called together expressly for that purpose. In case of war, it was the business of that assembly to consider of means for carrying it on: if the succession was disputed, or a regency required, an appeal was made to their judgment; and all laws intended to be permanently binding on the people received the sanction of their authority. Nor did the princes of the House of Tudor attempt by any means to diminish or undervalue the importance of Parliament. The crown of Henry the Seventh rested on a Parliamentary Act. Henry the Eighth repeatedly employed the name, and acknowledged the power of Parliament to change the succession. In the reign of Elizabeth, the offence of saying that the Queen by the authority of Parliament had not power to dispose of the succession to the crown was made high treason during her life, and a misdemeanour with forfeiture of goods and chattels after her decease. Thus, however arbitrary the acts of these sovereigns, nothing was taken from the reverence due to the Parliament, the great council of the King, the grand inquest of the nation, and the highest court in the kingdom. The power given to Henry the Eighth, to issue proclamations equal in validity to laws, was indeed a direct blow to parliamentary government. But this Act was in force only eight years, and contained a proviso that these proclamations should not be contrary to the established laws of the realm. During the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, the Parliament, however subservient, was yet a principal instrument in carrying on the government. Hence arose a necessity, not indeed that a King of England

.

should relinquish all hope of exercising tyrannical power, but that, if successful, he must have his Lords and Commons accomplices in his tyranny. If these bodies therefore should ever claim practically that share in the state which the laws virtually allowed them, or if they should refuse their support to the measures of the Crown, the King must either submit to their claims, or by discontinuing parliaments, give fair warning to the people that the form of government was changed.

Secondly. The nobility were not separated from the people by odious distinctions, like the other feudal nobility of Europe. Various causes have been assigned for this difference; without discussing them, I shall content myself with stating the fact. It would not be correct to suppose, however, that the feudal system has not existed in England in a very odious shape. After the Conquest, the feudal tenure seems to have been adopted by all the principal landholders of England, in a great council held in the year 1086.* Wardships, liveries, primer seisins, and ouster-lemains, values and forfeitures of marriage, fines for alienation, tenures by homage, knight-service and escuage, as well as aids for marrying the King's daughter, and knighting his son, all ligaments of the feudal system, are enumerated as part of the law of England, by the Act of Charles II., which abolishes them. Happily, however, the system was not allowed to throw its roots very deep into the soil. A practice, which was growing general, of sub-infeudations, or granting inferior feuds by the mesne lords, with the same conditions as the chief, was restrained by the Act of Quia emptores (18 Edw. I.), which directs that upon all sales, or grants of land in fee, the subtenant shall hold, not of the immediate, but of the

* Blackstone, b. ii. c. 4.

superior lord. A corrective to the tyranny of the feudal system was also to be found in the constitution of our county courts, the cradle of our liberties, in which are to be found the origin of our juries, and the model of our parliaments. Here the free tenants met to do justice between man and man; and here, it is probable, they deliberated on the means of affording the assistance they were bound to give, to defend their country against an enemy.

Thus much with respect to the free tenants. The state of the villeins is, perhaps, a subject of still more importance. The main difference between the two classes was this. The free tenant held his land, on condition of performing certain fixed services; the villein also frequently held land, but was bound to perform services, base in their nature, and generally undefined in their extent. Here was real servitude. How soon it began to be abrogated we know not, but we are told by Sir Thomas Smith, who was secretary to Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, that in all his time he never knew any instance of a villein in gross, that is, of a villein transferable by sale, and not attached to the soil, in the kingdom; and that the few villeins attached to the soil who remained, were such only as had belonged to bishops, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical corporations. The last claim of villenage recorded in our courts, was in the fifteenth year of James I. great change, which had been silently operating in the condition of the people of England, is probably to be attributed to various causes, the absence of foreign armies, the necessity of conciliating the people during the civil wars,--and above all, the inherent justice and piety of the nation.

This

There were several ways in which a villein attached to the soil could obtain his freedom. He might be manumitted. Or if his lord brought an action against him, the lord was supposed to allow

his freedom. Or if he went into a town and settled there, he, in a certain time, enjoyed its immunities, and became free. Or, lastly, if he could show that, for time out of mind, he and his ancestors had been registered in the roll of the lord's court, as having possession of the land he held, he obtained a prescriptive right against his lord. This was done by producing a copy of the court roll, and hence the term copyholder. It has been supposed by some that copyhold was known before the conquest. At whatever time it originated, the early prevalence of freedom is nobly characteristic of the English nation. Villenage was known in France till near the end of the eighteenth century; in Spain it was only abolished in the nineteenth; in Germany it is hardly extinct; in Russia it was abolished by the present Emperor, to his immortal honour, in 1864. But the spirit of the English people, and the equality of the common-law, have always been a just corrective of the degrading institutions and customs imported from other countries. Magna Charta itself is a noble and singular proof of the sympathy then existing between the barons and the people of England. Philippe de Comines speaks of the humanity with which the nobility treated the people in the civil wars. It would seem that Englishmen have always felt that, if the order of civil society required the relations of superior and inferior ranks, nature conferred feelings and capacities with impartial justice upon all.

Intimately connected with this spirit, is the absence of any distinction between gentleman and roturier. Sir Thomas Smith is perhaps the first author who takes notice of the difference of the title of gentleman in England and on the Continent. I subjoin an extract from his work:-'Ordinarily the King doth only make knights and create barons, or higher degrees; for as for gentlemen, they be

made good cheap in England. For whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in the universities, who professes liberal sciences, and, to be short, who can live idly and without manual labour, and will bear the port, charge, and counteance of a gentleman, he shall be called Master, for that is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen, and shall be taken for a gentleman: for true it is with us as is said, Tanti eris aliis quanti tibi feceris; and, if need be, a king of heralds shall also give him, for money, arms newly made and invented, the title whereof shall pretend to have been found by the said herald in perusing and viewing of old registers, where his ancestors, in times past, had been recorded to bear the same. A man may make doubt and question whether this manner of making gentlemen is to be allowed or no; and for my part I am of that opinion, that it is not amiss. For, first, the prince loseth nothing by it, as he should do, if it were as in France: for the yeoman or husbandman is no more subject to taile or tax in England than the gentleman: no, in every payment to the King, the gentleman is more charged, which he beareth the gladlier, and dareth not gainsay for to save and keep his honour and reputation."* The law,' says Mr. Hallam, has never taken notice of gentlemen.† From the reign of Henry III., at least, the legal equality of all ranks below the peerage was, to every essential purpose, as complete as at present. Compare two writers nearly contemporary,-Bracton with Beaumanoir, and mark how the customs of England and France are distinguishable in this respect. The Frenchman ranges the

De Republicâ Anglorum,' lib. i. c. 20, 21

The Statute of Merton cer tainly affords an exception to this remark, when it speaks of the wards of noblemen being dispa

raged by marrying villeins, or others as burgesses. But the same Act allows that such marriages, if made by the ward's consent after fourteen years of age, are legal.-J. R.