means stood
still. The enormous power and independence exhibited by the chambers,
especially the Commons, in the seventeenth century was the product of
substantial, if more or less hidden, growth during the previous one
hundred and fifty years. The composition of the two houses at the
accession of Henry VII. was not clearly defined. The House of Lords
was but a small body. It comprised simply those lords, temporal and
spiritual, who were entitled to receive from the king, when a
parliament was to be held, a special writ, i.e., an individual
summons. The number of these was indeterminate. The right of the
archbishops, the bishops, and the abbots to be summoned was immemorial
and indisputable, although the abbots in practice evaded their
obligation of attendance, save in cases in which it could be shown
that as military tenants of the crown they were obligated to perform
parliamentary duty. Among the lay nobility the selection of
individuals for summons seems originally to have been dependent upon
the royal pleasure. Eventually, however, the principle became (p. 023)
fixed that a man once summoned must be summoned whenever occasion
should arise, and that, furthermore, his eldest son after him must be
summoned in similar manner. What was at the outset an obligation
became in time a privilege and a distinction, and by the day when it
did so the rule had become legally established that the king could not
withhold a writ of summons from the heir of a person who had been once
summoned and had obeyed the summons by taking his seat. During the
fourteenth century the aggregate membership of the chamber fluctuated
in the neighborhood of 150. By reason of the withdrawal of some of the
abbots and the decline of the baronage, in the fifteenth century the
body was yet smaller. The number of temporal lords summoned to the
first parliament of Henry VII. was but 29.

*24. The House of Commons in 1485.*--The House of Commons at the
beginning of the Tudor period was a body of some 300 members. It
contained 74 knights of the shire, representing all but three of the
forty English counties, together with a fluctuating number of
representatives of cities and boroughs. In the Model Parliament of
1295 the number of urban districts represented was 166, but as time
went on the number declined, in part because of the discrimination
exercised from time to time in the selection of boroughs to be
represented, and in part by reason of the fact t