Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/55

] House of Commons no longer presented their requests in the form of petitions praying for the removal of any grievances which affected them, but they drew up such laws and enactments as they desired, in the form of bills, which were presented to the king in the House of Lords, and which, after receiving the approbation of the Lords and the assent of the monarch, became law. They were entered on the statute-roll, and then transmitted to the sheriffs to be promulgated in their county courts. The archbishops and bishops took their places amongst the Lords, as well as twenty-five abbots and two priors, so that the spiritual peers generally doubled the number of the temporal ones, and gave enormous power to the church, which it did not fail to exert, and which was awfully exhibited against the Lollards.

The rest of the clergy were summoned regularly to meet in convocation at the same time as the lay Parliament, and all matters affecting them, such as the levying of taxes, were sent to them to receive their sanction.

In 1429 universal suffrage, which till then prevailed, was restrained, and confined to the forty-shilling freeholders in the counties, as remains to the present day. The electors were to be possessed of "free land as tenements to the value of forty shillings by the year at least, above all deductions." What was the limit in cities and boroughs does not appear. In some it is supposed that the burgesses at large elected the representatives; in others that the corporations only elected.

The qualification for a county member was the possession of a freehold of £40 a year, equivalent to £400 at the present time. There were to be two for each county. The sheriffs themselves could not be elected. Henry IV. prohibited all lawyers from being elected, but this was deemed an unconstitutional exception, and was abandoned. In the last century we showed that already very corrupt practices had crept into the elections for Parliament; and these, spite of the popular resistance, still prevailed. The sheriffs, probably bribed or acted upon by the aristocracy, were very arbitrary and remiss in issuing their writs to the different boroughs. They appear often to have sent to just such boroughs as they pleased, and passed over others without notice. The Parliament of 1444 passed an Act to put an end to this abuse. It states "that diverse sheriffs of the counties of the realm of England, for their singular avail and lucre, have not made due elections of the knights, nor in convenient time nor good men and true returned, and sometimes no return of the knights, citizens, and burgesses to come to the Parliament; but such knights, citizens, and burgesses have been returned as were never duly chosen, and other citizens and burgesses than those which, by the mayors and bailiffs, were to the said sheriffs returned. And sometimes the sheriffs have not returned the writs which they had to make of elections of knights to come to Parliament, but the said writs have embisiled, and, moreover, made no precept to the mayor and bailiff, or to the bailiff or bailiffs, where no mayor is, of cities and boroughs, for the election of citizens and burgesses to come to Parliament."

We see in this passage the shapes of various abuses which the nobility were already practising on the commons to serve their own purposes. To remedy some of these, the candidate, who was, to his astonishment, omitted after due election in the sheriff's return, and found another person occupying his place, was authorised, by an Act of King Henry IV., of 1409, to sue the sheriff before the judge of assize; and the sheriff, if convicted, was to pay a fine of £100 to the king—equal to £1,000 at this day—and the false member returned was to lose his wages. This not proving sufficient check to this abuse, the sheriff, by an Act of 1429, was, besides this fine, to be imprisoned for a year. This again was made still more severe in 1444: the sheriff, besides the regal fine and the year's imprisonment, was condemned to pay £100 to the unjust candidate, thus making his punishment equal to a year's imprisonment and £2,000 at the present period. The reason for this great severity was, that Parliaments, seldom enduring more than one or two sessions, the sheriff had a great chance of escaping the due penalty before the proper member recovered his seat. Yet, notwithstanding all these penalties and precautions, there existed many strange violations of all law in Parliamentary elections. In Yorkshire the great nobility, by the extent of their estates, set the lesser freeholders at defiance, and returned the county members, by their agents, at their pleasure, as many of them have continued to do even in our day. In 1447 this evil was wholly or partially remedied by express enactment. In 1460 the Parliament of Coventry was summoned by Henry VI., in utter violation of the constitution. There was no election at all, but the members were nominated by the king, and returned by the sheriffs, who were afterwards protected by a bill of indemnity.

The peers attended Parliament at their own proper cost, for this was a service contingent on the holding their baronies. But all the members of the Commons received regular wages. These were fixed, in the reign of Edward III., at 4s. a day for a knight of the shire, and 2s. a day for a citizen or burgess; and this rate of payment continued so long as the payment of members continued at all. This was an admirable means for ensuring a full attendance during the whole session; and as it would amount at this day, at the same rate, to £2 per day for the county members, and £1 per day for borough members, would probably, even now, throw a telling weight in the scale opposite to grouse, pheasants, and legislative indifference.

The protection of the persons of the representatives was also in full existence at this time, and both their wages, their privileges, and their attendance commenced and terminated at the same time. They commenced as many days prior to the meeting of Parliament as were requisite to travel to the place of meeting, and so for returning, and not a day longer. That the Commons were already alive to the maintenance of their privileges, is demonstrated by the petitions to the Lords or to the crown, which are yet extant on the rolls of Parliament. These wages had no slight influence on the duration of the parliamentary sessions, for the constituents became very restive when they continued long, on account of the amount of payment to the members. In the Parliament of the twenty-third of Henry VI., which lasted four sessions—a total of 178 days—the payment by each county for its two members amounted to £142 8s.—equal to £1,424 of to-day. These expenses were a sharp spur to the dispatch of business, and under such a system the