Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/162

 114 THE ANCESTOR and a vast number of important charters were printed as evidence, the dignities of Arundel, Abergavenny and De Lisle being urged as precedents. But in the result the House of Lords established by its resolution rejecting the claim, February, 1861, that claims to peerage by tenure are hopeless. On one or two subsequent occasions attempts have been made to found precedence among barons by writ upon previous tenure, but without success. Finally, in the de Wahul case, it was pro- posed that previous tenure constituted a presumption that one summoned by writ had sat upon his writ. This proposition was also rejected, and it must now be regarded as settled law that no connection whatever exists between the barons of the Curia Regis — not even between the parties to Magna Charta — and the existing dignity of a peer of the realm. It is not a little curious that the lords who thus defined the law should nevertheless when free from judicial restraint, and speaking at banquets, continue to describe the House of Lords as more ancient than the House of Commons. The decisions of the seventeenth century, largely developed in the nineteenth, have established the fundamental principle that a dignity giving hereditary right to sit in Parliament can be constituted only by charter, or letters patent, or by writ of summons followed by sitting, that such dignity is inherent in the blood of the grantee and his heirs, and that if the right to such a dignity is successfully proved the claim to sit in Parlia- ment is good against the Crown. A peerage dignity, once validly created, can never be extin- guished so long as there exist heirs of the grantee within the limitation of the dignity. The enjoyment of the dignity may be in abeyance if being limited to heirs there be more heirs than one equally entitled. This doctrine has been gradually evolved by the House of Lords, as applicable to baronies created by writs of summons, but it has not yet been judicially decided that it applies to dignities otherwise created. The doctrine of abeyance is un- known to the peerage law of Scotland, the difference being that if an inheritance is indivisible no one of co-heirs can by English law inherit it, while the Scottish law gives it to the eldest co-heir. The enjoyment of a dignity may be forfeited through corruption of blood by attainder, but even so the dignity exists in the Crown, and if the attainder is reversed the heir