document, borrowed the seal of the city of London(34). This last fact brings me round to what I first spoke of long ago, what I may perhaps seem to have forgotten, but what I have in truth had constantly before my eyes, the distinctly constitutional reforms which we owe to Earl Simon of Montfort. The fact that a document which professed to speak in the name of all classes of the whole nation could not be so fittingly signed as with the seal of the city of London marks the place which that city held in the political estimation of the time. But London held that position only as the greatest member of an advancing class, as the foremost among the cities and boroughs of England. Now the great work of Earl Simon was to give those cities and boroughs their distinct place as one of the elements of the body politic. Let us trace the steps by which that great work was done. When we reach the thirteenth century, we may look on the old Teutonic constitution as having utterly passed away. Some faint traces of it indeed we may find here and there in the course of the twelfth century, as when both sides in the wars of Stephen and Matilda acknowledged the right of the citizens of London to a voice in the disposal of the Crown(35). But the regular Great Council, the lineal representatives of the ancient _Mycel Gemôt_ or _Witenagemôt_, was shrinking up into a body not very unlike our House of Lords. Its constitution, as I have already hinted, was far more fluctuating, far less strictly hereditary, than the modern body, but it was almost as far from being in any sense a representation of the people. The Great Charter secures the rights of the nation and of the national Assembly as against arbitrary legislation and arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. But it makes no change in the constitution of the Assembly itself. The greater Barons were to be summoned personally; the lesser tenants in chief, the representatives of the _landsittende menn_ of Domesday, were to be summoned by a general writ(36). The Great Charter in short is a Bill of Rights; it is not what, in modern phrase, we understand by a Reform Bill. But, during the reigns of John and Henry the Third, a popular element was fast making its way into the national Councils in a more practical form. The right of the ordinary freeman to attend in person had long been a shadow; that of the ordinary tenant-in-chief was becoming hardly more practical; it now begins to be exchanged for what had by this time become the more practical right of choosing representatives to act in his name. Like all other things in England, this right has grown up by degrees and as the result of what we might almost call a series of happy accidents. Both in the reign of John and in the former part of the reign of Henry, we find several instances of knights from each county being summoned(37). Here we have the beginning of our county members and of the title which they still bear, of knights of the shire.