[311] The lords' committee do not like, apparently, to admit that bannerets were summoned to the house of lords as a distinct class of peers. "It is observable," they say, "that this statute (5 Ric. II. c. 4) speaks of bannerets as well as of dukes, earls, and barons, as persons bound to attend the parliament; but it does not follow that banneret was then considered as a name of dignity distinct from that honourable knighthood under the king's banner in the field of battle, to which precedence of all other knights was attributed." p. 342. But did the committee really believe that all the bannerets of whom we read in the reigns of Richard II. and afterwards had been knighted at Crecy and Poictiers? The name is only found in parliamentary proceedings during comparatively pacific times. [312] West, whose business it was to represent the barons by writ as mere assistants without suffrage, cites the writ to them rather disingenuously, as if it ran vobiscum et cum prelatis, magnatibus ac proceribus, omitting the important word cæteris. p. 35. Prynne, however, from whom West has borrowed a great part of his arguments, does not seem to go the length of denying the right of suffrage to persons so summoned. First Register, p. 237. [313] These descended from two persons, each named Geoffrey le Scrope, chief justices of K.B. and C.B. at the beginning of Edward III.'s reign. The name of one of them is once found among the barons, but I presume this to have been an accident, or mistake in the roll; as he is frequently mentioned afterwards among the judges. Scrope, chief justice of K.B., was made a _banneret_ in 14 E. III. He was the father of Henry Scrope of Masham, a considerable person in Edward III. and Richard II.'s government, whose grandson, Lord Scrope of Masham, was beheaded for a conspiracy against Henry V. There was a family of Scrupe as old as the reign of Henry II.; but it is not clear, notwithstanding Dugdale's assertion, that the Scropes descended from them, or at least that they held the same lands: nor were the Scrupes barons, as appears by their paying a relief of only sixty marks for three knights' fees. Dugdale's Baronage, p. 654. The want of consistency in old records throws much additional difficulty over this intricate subject. Thus Scrope of Masham, though certainly a baron, and tried next year by the peers, is called chevalier in an instrument of 1 H. V. Rymer, t. ix. p. 13. So in the indictment against Sir John Oldcastle he is constantly styled knight, though he had been summoned several times as lord Cobham, in right of his wife, who inherited that barony. Rot. Parl. vol. iv. p. 107. [314] Blomefield's Hist, of Norfolk, vol. iii. p. 645 (folio edit). [315] Rot. Parl. vol. iii. p. 427. [316] Rot. Parl. vol. ii. p. 290. [317] vol. iii. p. 209. [318] Id. p. 263, 264. [319] vol. iv. p. 17. [320] Id. p. 401.