d he shall cause to come
before the king's council at Westminster, on the fifteenth day after
Easter, two good and discreet knights of his county, whom the men of the
county shall have chosen for this purpose, in the stead of all and each
of them, to consider, along with the knights of other counties, what aid
they will grant the king in such an emergency.[27] In the principle of
election, and in the object of the assembly, which was to grant money,
this certainly resembles a summons to parliament. There are indeed
anomalies sufficiently remarkable upon the face of the writ which
distinguish this meeting from a regular parliament. But when the scheme
of obtaining money from the commons of shires through the consent of
their representatives had once been entertained, it was easily
applicable to more formal councils of the nation.[28]

A few years later there appears another writ analogous to a summons.
During the contest between Henry III. and the confederate barons in
1261, they presumed to call a sort of parliament, summoning three
knights out of every county, secum tractaturos super communibus negotiis
regni. This we learn only by an opposite writ issued by the king,
directing the sheriff to enjoin these knights who had been convened by
the earls of Leicester and Gloucester to their meeting at St. Alban's,
that they should repair instead to the king at Windsor, and to no other
place, nobiscum super praemissis colloquium habituros.[29] It is not
absolutely certain that these knights were elected by their respective
counties. But even if they were so, this assembly has much less the
appearance of a parliament, than that in the thirty-eighth of Henry III.

At length, in the year 1265, the forty-ninth of Henry III., while he was
a captive in the hands of Simon de Montfort, writs were issued in his
name to all the sheriffs, directing them to return two knights for the
body of their county, with two citizens or burgesses for every city and
borough contained within it. This therefore is the epoch at which the
representation of the commons becomes indisputably manifest; even should
we reject altogether the more equivocal instances of it which have just
been enumerated.

[Sidenote: Whether the knights were elected by freeholders in general.]

If indeed the knights were still elected by none but the king's military
tenants, if the mode of representation was merely adopted to spare them
the inconvenience of personal attendanc