and straightforward matter compared with
the methods of electing representatives from the boroughs. All that the
sheriff was ordered to do by writ was to provide for the return of two
members for each city or borough in his county; the places that were to be
considered as boroughs were not named. In the Middle Ages a town might have
no wish to be taxed for the wages of its Parliamentary representative, and
in that case would do its best to come to an arrangement with the sheriff.
(It was not till the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that a
considerable increase of boroughs took place. The Tudors created "pocket"
and "rotten" boroughs in order to have the nominees of the Crown in
Parliament.) The size of the borough bore no relation to its membership
till the Reform Act of the nineteenth century, and as the selection of
towns to be represented was arbitrary, so the franchise in the towns was
equally unsettled. One or two places had a wide franchise, others confined
the vote to freemen and corporation members. But in spite of the
extraordinary vagaries of the borough franchise, and the arbitrary
selection of towns to be represented, these early medieval Parliaments
really did in an imperfect way represent the nation--all but the peasants
and artisans.

"Our English Parliaments were _un_symmetrical realities. They were elected
anyhow. The sheriff had a considerable licence in sending writs to
boroughs, that is, he could in part pick its constituencies; and in each
borough there was a rush and scramble for the franchise, so that the
strongest local party got it whether few or many. But in England at that
time there was a great and distinct desire to know the opinion of the
nation, because there was a real and close necessity. The nation was wanted
to do something--to assist the sovereign in some war, to pay some old debt,
to contribute its force and aid in the critical juncture of the time. It
would not have suited the ante-Tudor kings to have had a fictitious
assembly; they would have lost their sole _feeler_, their only instrument
for discovering national opinion. Nor could they have manufactured such an
assembly if they wished. Looking at the mode of election, a theorist would
say that these Parliaments were but 'chance' collections of influential
Englishmen. There would be many corrections and limitations to add to that
statement if it were wanted to make it accurate, but the statement itself
hits exactly the princip