It is important to note the ascendancy of the barons in the medieval Parliaments, and their self-destruction in the Wars of the Roses. Unless we realise how very largely the barons were the Parliament, it is difficult to understand how it came about that Parliament was so utterly impotent under the Tudors. The Wars of the Roses killed off the mighty parliamentarians, and it took a hundred years to raise the country landowners into a party which, under Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, was to make the House of Commons supreme. "The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were its most potent members, tired the small nobility and gentry, and overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual resistance to the sovereign had been based."[25] To get an idea of the weakness of Parliament when the Tudors ruled, we have but to suppose at the present day a Parliament deprived of all front-bench men on both sides of the House, and of the leaders of the Irish and Labour parties, and a House of Lords deprived of all Ministers and ex-Ministers. THE MEDIEVAL NATIONAL ASSEMBLIES Before passing to the Parliamentary revival of the seventeenth century, there still remain one or two points to be considered relating to the early national assemblies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. (1) _Who were the electors in the Middle Ages?_--In the counties, all who were entitled to attend and take part in the proceedings of the county court had the right of electing the knight of the shire; and "it is most probable, on the evidence of records, on the analogies of representative usage, and on the testimony of later facts, that the knights of the shire were elected by the full county court."[26] The county court or shire-moot not only elected knights for Parliament; it often enough elected them for local purposes as well. The county coroner was elected in similar fashion by the county. All the chief tenants and small freeholders were therefore the county electors; but the tenants-in-chief (who held their lands from the Crown) and the knights of the county had naturally considerably more influence than the smaller men. "The chief lord of a great manor would have authority with his tenants, freeholders as they might be, which would make their theoretical equality a mere shadow, and would, moreover, be exercised all the more easily because the right which it usurped was one which the tenant neither understood nor cared for."[27]