[5] Hody (Treatise on Convocations, p. 126) states the matter thus: in the Saxon times all bishops and abbots sat and voted in the state councils, or parliament, as such, and not on account of their tenures. After the Conquest the abbots sat there not as such, but by virtue of their tenures, as barons; and the bishops sat in a double capacity, as bishops, and as barons. [6] Hody, p. 128. [7] [Note I.] [8] Madox, Baronia Anglica, p. 138. Dialogus de Scaccario, 1. i. c. 17. Lyttelton's Henry II. vol. ii. p. 217. The last of these writers supposes, contrary to Selden, that the earls continued to be governors of their counties under Henry II. Stephen created a few titular earls, with grants of crown lands to support them; but his successor resumed the grants, and deprived them of their earldoms. In Rymer's Foedera, vol. i. p. 3, we find a grant of Matilda, creating Milo of Gloucester earl of Hereford, with the moat and castle of that city in fee to him and his heirs, the third penny of the rent of the city, and of the pleas in the county, three manors and a forest, and the service of three tenants in chief, with all their fiefs; to be held with all privileges and liberties as fully as ever any earl in England had possessed them. [9] Selden's Works, vol. iii. p. 713-743. [10] Lyttelton's Henry II. vol. ii. p. 212. [11] Hody on Convocations, p. 222, 234. [12] Lib. ii. c. 9. [13] Hody and Lord Lyttelton maintain these "barons of the second rank" to have been the sub-vassals of the crown; tenants of the great barons to whom the name was sometimes improperly applied. This was very consistent with their opinion, that the commons were a part of parliament at that time. But Hume, assuming at once the truth of their interpretation in this instance, and the falsehood of their system, treats it as a deviation from the established rule, and a proof of the unsettled state of the constitution. [14] [Note II.] [15] M. Paris, p. 785. The barons even tell the king that this was contrary to _his_ charter, in which nevertheless the clause to that effect, contained in his father's charter, had been omitted. [16] Henry II., in 1175, forbad any of those who had been concerned in the late rebellion to come to his court without a particular summons. Carte, vol. ii. p. 249. [17] Upon the subject of tenure by barony, besides the writers already quoted, see West's Inquiry into the Method of creating Peers, and Carte's History of England, vol. ii. p. 247. [18] Hody on Convocations, p. 293. [19] Brady, Introduction to History of England. Appendix, p. 43. [20] Brady's History of England, vol. i. Appendix, p. 182. [21] Brady's Introduction, p. 94. [22] Hist. of Common Law, vol, i. p. 202.