they paid relief as barons, they might be
challenged on juries, and, as I presume, by parity of reasoning, were
entitled to trial by their peerage. These lower barons, or more commonly
tenants by parcels of baronies,[292] may be dimly traced to the latter
years of Edward III.[293] But many of them were successively summoned to
parliament, and thus recovered the former lustre of their rank, while
the rest fell gradually into the station of commoners, as tenants by
simple knight-service.

[Sidenote: Baronial tenure required for lords spiritual.]

As tenure without summons did not entitle any one to the privileges of a
lord of parliament, so no spiritual person at least ought to have been
summoned without baronial tenure. The prior of St. James at Northampton,
having been summoned in the twelfth of Edward II., was discharged upon
his petition, because he held nothing of the king by barony, but only in
frankalmoign. The prior of Bridlington, after frequent summonses, was
finally left out, with an entry made in the roll that he held nothing of
the king. The abbot of Leicester had been called to fifty parliaments;
yet, in the 25th of Edward III., he obtained a charter of perpetual
exemption, reciting that he held no lands or tenements of the crown by
barony or any such service as bound him to attend parliaments or
councils.[294] But great irregularities prevailed in the rolls of
chancery, from which the writs to spiritual and temporal peers were
taken--arising in part, perhaps, from negligence, in part from wilful
perversion; so that many abbots and priors, who like these had no
baronial tenure, were summoned at times and subsequently omitted, of
whose actual exemption we have no record. Out of one hundred and
twenty-two abbots and forty-one priors who at some time or other sat in
parliament, but twenty-five of the former and two of the latter were
constantly summoned: the names of forty occur only once, and those of
thirty-six others not, more than five times.[295] Their want of baronial
tenure, in all probability, prevented the repetition of writs which
accident or occasion had caused to issue.[296]

[Sidenote: Barons called by writ.]

The ancient temporal peers are supposed to have been intermingled with
persons who held nothing of the crown by barony, but attended in
parliament solely by virtue of the king's prerogative exercised in the
writ of summons.[297] These have been called barons by writ; and it
seems to be d