distinct assent to measures proposed by crown authority. The motives prompting summons to this new estate ensured distinct embodiment of it. The point that requires special elucidation is not the recognition of the commons as a parliamentary estate, but the existence of facilities for making practically effective the summons sent to communities requiring them to attend in the person of their representatives. It is obvious that there is a radical distinction between a summons to individual persons and a summons to a mass of people to send deputies. In the one case no question of procedure disturbs the issue. The responsibility is simple and direct. In the other case the question of procedure comes up at once. Who is to respond to the summons? How shall the deputies be chosen? Merely to notify the inhabitants of a particular region that they must send deputies is not enough. It is proverbial that what is everybody's business is nobody's business. Of course, it might be possible for

1 The etymology of such terms as common, community, bears witness that the original notion was not that of right or privilege, but was obligation, from the Latin communis, i.e., bound, obliged. Attendence at parliament was originally regarded by all classes mainly as an obligation. There is a memorial on record in which the petitioner alleges that he is not really a baron and therefore begs to be excused. (Pearson's History of England, Vol. II, p. 462; Hallam's Middle Ages, Vol. III, p. 22). Long after representation of the commons had become regular practice, it occasionally happened that communities tried to beg off. Even American colonial history furnishes instances of this character.

agents of the central authority to select persons who would be designated as representatives, and there are indications that that sort of thing did in fact take place, but it would not be possible to maintain that the commons of England were present by their deputies, unless there was some sort of corporate relation between the deputies and the communities for which they appeared. Unless in some effective way the deputies did represent communities, acting for them and not merely for themselves, there would have been little of practical value in the business. These were serious difficulties that might have been insurmountable save for the influence of the church, which will now be considered.

CHAPTER X

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH

THAT representative government should get its original form from the church, was as inevitable a consequence of the situation that then existed as that documents should be drawn up by people who can write. The apparatus of government was in the main supplied by the church, crown authority supplying little more than its power. Kings were always trying to commandeer the offices of the church, with considerable support for their claims in the nature of the feudal system. The struggles that ensued receive the attention of historians chiefly in the matter of investitures, and the principal figure is Pope Gregory VII, who in 1075 forbade kings to nominate or invest bishops. In England the matter was eventually settled by a compromise by which the king was allowed to receive homage for temporalities held by ecclesiastics while their appointment and investiture was reserved to the church. But while the church stood firm on the question of investiture, and also against such demands as that bishops and abbots should serve as sheriffs, there was much political service to which the church

consented and what is now known as the civil service was originally an ecclesiastical employment. The king's accounts were kept, his letters were written, his proclamations were framed and the laws were drafted by churchmen.1

But such service was common throughout Europe at that period. Everywhere the influence of the church tended to moralize and systematize political institutions, whatever their type might be. In so doing, however, the church accepted and made the best of the conditions it found. An influence so general and so adaptable does not explain such a special event as the appearance of representative government in England. The motive was supplied by the special conditions heretofore noted. The church gave form to a constitutional purpose, excited by the events of English history during this period, and it was well able to do so, since in its own organization the principle of election had been introduced and systematized.2

1 Many details of the way in which clerics shaped the administrative apparatus of government are given in T. F. Tout's Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. In his The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century Professor Tout gives an interesting account of the way in which such great offices as the Exchequer and the Chancery originated in the labors of the king's domestic chaplains.

• Professor Freeman himself got hold of this clue but he did not follow it up. In a letter written to an Oxford student, August 2, 1854, he remarked: "The development of temporal institutions in Europe was very much influenced by ecclesi

The view that the synodical system of the church supplied a pattern for the organization of the state, while doubtless in the main correct, needs considerable qualification to bring it into complete accord with the facts. In the confusion and disorder of Anglo-Saxon times the practice of holding synods became obsolete in England, and was not revived until the Norman conquest introduced some degree of order and social security. By the canons of the Council of Winchester, 1076, bishops were required to hold diocesan synods once a year, but their composition in general embodied simply the principle of summons. The Council of London, 1075, ruled that only bishops and abbots were to speak in synod except with the leave of the metropolitan. It was only in the monastic orders that the principle of election was developed into the form in which it was taken over into politics, but it is not an essential part of the monastic system and it was not originally a feature of that system.

Monasticism originally implied nothing more than segregation, as the etymology of the term still indicates. The primitive ideal was that of the hermit; monastic life in community was a

astical ones, and I cannot help fancying that you will find something like a real representative system in ecclesiastical assemblies earlier than in civil ones." The full text of this letter may be found in W. R. Stephens' Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, Vol. I, p. 168.