Page:William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (3rd ed, 1768, vol I).djvu/415

 Ch. 12. 4. name of vice-comes or vicount was afterwards made ue of as an arbitrary title of honour, without any hadow of office pertaining to it, by Henry the ixth; when in the eighteenth year of his reign, he created John Beaumont a peer, by the name of vicount Beaumont, which was the firt intance of the kind. 5. A baron's is the mot general and univeral title of nobility; for originally every one of the peers of uperior rank had alo a barony annexed to his other titles. But it hath ometimes happened that, when an antient baron hath been raied to a new degree of peerage, in the coure of a few generations the two titles have decended differently; one perhaps to the male decendants, the other to the heirs general; whereby the earldom or other uperior title hath ubited without a barony: and there are alo modern intances where earls and vicounts have been created without annexing a barony to their other honours: o that now the rule doth not hold univerally, that all peers are barons. The original and antiquity of baronies has occaioned great enquiries among our Englih antiquarians. The mot probable opinion eems to be, that they were the ame with our preent lords of manors; to which the name of court baron, (which is the lord's court, and incident to every manor) gives ome countenance. It may be collected from king John's magna carta, that originally all lords of manors, or barons, that held of the king in capite, had eats in the great council or parliament, till about the reign of that prince the conflux of them became o large and troubleome, that the king was obliged to divide them, and ummon only the greater barons in peron; leaving the mall ones to be ummoned by the heriff, and (as it is aid) to it by repreentation in another houe; which gave rie to the eparation of the two houes of parliament. By degrees the title came to be confined to the greater barons, or lords of parliament only; and there Rh