Magna Charta begins in this style: "We grant, of our own free will, the
following privileges to the archbishops, bishops, priors, and barons of
our kingdom," etc.

The House of Commons is not once mentioned in the articles of this
Charter--a proof that it did not yet exist, or that it existed without
power. Mention is therein made, by name, of the freemen of England--a
melancholy proof that some were not so. It appears, by Article XXXII.,
that these pretended freemen owed service to their lords. Such a liberty
as this was not many removes from slavery.

By Article XXI., the king ordains that his officers shall not
henceforward seize upon, unless they pay for them, the horses and carts
of freemen. The people considered this ordinance as a real liberty,
though it was a greater tyranny. Henry VII., that happy usurper and
great politician, who pretended to love the barons, though he in reality
hated and feared them, got their lands alienated. By this means the
villains, afterwards acquiring riches by their industry, purchased the
estates and country seats of the illustrious peers who had ruined
themselves by their folly and extravagance, and all the lands got by
insensible degrees into other hands.

The power of the House of Commons increased every day. The families of
the ancient peers were at last extinct; and as peers only are properly
noble in England, there would be no such thing in strictness of law as
nobility in that island, had not the kings created new barons from time
to time, and preserved the body of peers, once a terror to them, to
oppose them to the Commons, since become so formidable.