were regarded as more than local deputies for the assessment of taxation or admitted to a share in the general business of the Great Council.  The statute “Quia Emptores,” for instance, was passed in it before the knights who had been summoned could attend.  Their participation in the deliberative power of Parliament, as well as their regular and continuous attendance, dates only from the Parliament of 1295.  But a far greater constitutional change in their position had already taken place through the extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large.  The one class entitled to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the lesser baronage; and it was of the lesser baronage alone that the knights were in theory the representatives.  But the necessity of holding their election in the County Court rendered any restriction of the electoral body physically impossible.  The court was composed of the whole body of freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish the “aye, aye” of the yeoman from the “aye, aye” of the lesser baron.  From the first moment therefore of their attendance we find the knights regarded not as mere representatives of the baronage but as knights of the shire, and by this silent revolution the whole body of the rural freeholders were admitted to a share in the government of the realm.

[Sidenote:  Boroughs and the Crown]

The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far more radical revolution in the admission into the Great Council of representatives from the boroughs.  The presence of knights from each shire was the recognition of an older right, but no right of attendance or share in the national “counsel and assent” could be pleaded for the burgesses of the towns.  On the other hand the rapid developement of their wealth made them every day more important as elements in the national taxation.  From all payment of the dues or fines exacted by the king as the original lord of the soil on which they had in most cases grown up the towns had long since freed themselves by what was called the purchase of the “farm of the borough”; in other words, by the commutation of these uncertain dues for a fixed sum paid annually to the Crown and apportioned by their own magistrates among the general body of the burghers.  All that the king legally retained was the right enjoyed by every great proprietor of levying a corresponding taxation on his tenants in demesne under the name of “a free aid” whenever a grant was made for the national necessities by the barons of the Great Council.  But the temptation of appropriating the growing wealth of the mercantile class proved stronger than legal restrictions, and we find both Henry the Third and his son assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure and without any authority from the Council even over London itself.  The burgesses could refuse indeed the invitation to contribute to the “free aids” demanded by the royal officers, but the suspension of their markets or trading privileges brought them in the end to submission.  Each of these “free aids” however had to be extorted after a long wrangle between the borough and the officers of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven to comply with what they considered an extortion they could generally force the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise and abatement of its original demands.