question whether the crown had the power to refuse a writ of summons to
a peer who had once received one.

With this narrowing of the baronage, the barons lost the position they
had held in the thirteenth century as leaders of constitutional reform,
and this part was played in the fourteenth century by the knights of
the shire. The greater barons devoted themselves rather to family than
to national politics; and a system of breeding-in amalgamated many
small houses into a few great ones. Thomas of Lancaster held five
earldoms; he was the rival of Edward II, and might well be called a
peer of the crown. Edward III, perceiving the menace of these great
houses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of
marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince
married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster
in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of
Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the
heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants
of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer;
and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. New
titles were imported from abroad to emphasize the new dignity of the
greater barons. Hitherto there had been barons only, and a few earls
whose dignity was an office; now by Edward III and Richard II there
were added dukes, marquises, and viscounts, and England might boast of
a peerage nearly, if not quite, as dangerous to the crown as that of
France. For Edward's policy failed: instead of securing the great
houses in the interests of the crown, it degraded the crown to the
arena of peerage rivalries, and ultimately made it the prize of noble
factions.

Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. He