The committee seem to have been perplexed about the word _magnates_ employed in several records to express part of those present in great councils. In general they interpret it, as well as the word _proceres_, to include persons not distinguished by the name "_barones_;" a word which in the reign of Henry III. seems to have been chiefly used in the restricted sense it has latterly acquired. Yet in one instance, a letter addressed to the justiciar of Ireland, 1 Hen. III., they suppose the word _magnates_ to "exclude those termed therein 'alii quamplurimi;' and consequently to be confined to prelates, earls, and barons. This may be deemed important in the consideration of many other instruments in which the word _magnates_ has been used to express persons constituting the 'commune concilium regni.'" But this strikes me as an erroneous construction of the letter. The words are as follows:--"Convenerunt apud Glocestriam plures regni nostri magnates, episcopi, abbates, comites, et barones, qui patri nostro viventi semper astiterunt fideliter et devotè, et alii quamplurimi; applaudentibus clero et populo, &c., publicè fuimus in regem Angliæ inuncti et coronati." (p. 77.) I think that _magnates_ is a collective word, including the "alii quamplurimi." It appears to me that _magnates_, and perhaps some other Latin words, correspond to the witan of the Anglo-Saxons, expressing the legislature in general, under which were comprised those who held peculiar dignities, whether lay or spiritual. And upon the whole we may be led to believe that the Norman great council was essentially of the same composition as the witenagemot which had preceded it; the king's thanes being replaced by the barons of the first or second degree, who, whatever may have been the distinction between them, shared one common character, one source of their legislative rights--the derivation of their lands as immediate fiefs from the crown.