does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But
the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises,
earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of
parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor
electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another;
and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The
use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the
fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not
have in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; that
is to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had been
equal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been elected
by his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been elected
king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other
kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be
peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were
simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.

The barons, however, of William I or Henry II had been a large class of
comparatively small men, while the peers of Richard II were a small
class of big men. The mass of lesser barons had been separated from the
greater barons, and had been merged in the landed gentry who were
represented by the knights of the shire in the House of Commons. The
greater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to the
House of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issue
of these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did not
mean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father did
not involve the summons of his eldest son and successor. But gradually
the greater barons made this summons hereditary and robbed the crown of
all discretion in the matter, though it was not till the reign of
Charles I that the House of Lords decided in its own favour the