ers, 9 earls, 41 barons, 63 knights of the shire, and
172 representatives of the cities and boroughs--an aggregate of
approximately 400 persons. There were thus present in the assemblage,
in person or by deputy, all of the constituent orders of English
society, and the irregular device of Simon de Montfort was vested at
last with the character of legality. After Edward I. Parliament may be
said to have been an established institution of the realm. Its
meetings long continued intermittent and infrequent, and its powers
from time to time varied enormously, but the place which it filled in
the economy of the nation grew ever more important.

*13. Establishment of the Bicameral System.*--Like its counterpart in
France, the Estates-General, the English Parliament comprised the
three great estates or orders--nobility, clergy, and commons--of
which, aside from the peasantry, mediaeval society in all western
European countries was composed. In the working out of its internal
structure, however, two chambers resulted, rather than, as in France,
three. Originally the three estates sat separately. Their primary
business was the voting of supplies and, the principle being that a
tax ought to be conceded by those who would be called upon to pay it,
the natural course was for the lords to grant their scutages and aids,
the commoners their tenths and fifteenths, and the clergy their
subsidies, apart. Indeed there is reason to believe that at times even
the knights and the burgesses deliberated separately. Gradually,
however, there appeared certain affiliations of interest which
operated to modify the original practice. In the first place, the
lesser clergy, inconvenienced by attendance and preferring to vote
their contributions in the special ecclesiastical assemblages known as
the convocations of Canterbury and York, contrived to throw off
entirely their obligation of membership. The greater clergy and the
greater barons, in the next place, developed sufficiently large
interests in common to be amalgamated with ease in one body.
Similarly, the lesser barons found their interests essentially
identical with those of the country freeholders, represented by the
knights of the shire, and with those of the burgesses. The upshot was a
gradual alignment of the aggregate membership in two great groups, (p. 014)
the one of which became historically the House of Lords, the other the
House of Commons. At the beginning of the reign of Edward III.