and its Meetings of the Wise into a County Court.  But save that the king’s reeve had taken the place of the king and that the Norman legislation had displaced the Bishop and set four Coroners by the Sheriff’s side, the gathering of the freeholders remained much as of old.  The local knighthood, the yeomanry, the husbandmen of the county, were all represented in the crowd that gathered round the Sheriff, as guarded by his liveried followers he published the king’s writs, announced his demand of aids, received the presentment of criminals and the inquest of the local jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or listened solemnly to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke.  It was in the County Court alone that the Sheriff could legally summon the lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, and it was in the actual constitution of this assembly that the Crown found a solution of the difficulty which we have stated.  For the principle of representation by which it was finally solved was coeval with the Shire Court itself.  In all cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the Sheriff, as members of a class, though not formally deputed for that purpose, practically represented the judicial opinion of the county at large.  From every hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the “jurors” through whom the presentments of the district were made to the royal officer and with whom the assessment of its share in the general taxation was arranged.  The husbandmen on the outskirts of the crowd, clad in the brown smock frock which still lingers in the garb of our carters and ploughmen, were broken up into little knots of five, a reeve and four assistants, each of which knots formed the representative of a rural township.  If in fact we regard the Shire Courts as lineally the descendants of our earliest English Witenagemots, we may justly claim the principle of parliamentary representation as among the oldest of our institutions.

[Sidenote:  Knights of the Shire]

It was easy to give this principle a further extension by the choice of representatives of the lesser barons in the shire courts to which they were summoned; but it was only slowly and tentatively that this process was applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council.  As early as the close of John’s reign there are indications of the approaching change in the summons of “four discreet knights” from every county.  Fresh need of local support was felt by both parties in the conflict of the succeeding reign, and Henry and his barons alike summoned knights from each shire “to meet on the common business of the realm.”  It was no doubt with the same purpose that the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights in each shire for his famous Parliament of 1265.  Something like a continuous attendance may be dated from the accession of Edward, but it was long before the knights