The 297
began.1 We in the early century
of the barons' hostility to 4<evil counsellors/" inves-
tigation shows that in the barons" vernacular "evil"
meant low-born, that is, low-born in
their own status. They were not controlling the Council
as they wished. This the question whether the
use of these more humble counsellors, knights many of
them, marked a new policy upon the part of the king.
Probably from early times there is to be found a distinc-
tion in the counselling group those greater
barons who looked upon themselves as the more legitimate
hereditary royal counsellors the lesser men, knights
or others, some feudal tenants of the king not,
whom it was the king's pleasure to employ. Surely
1 Maitland has said: ". . .it necessary to remind
who are conversant with the 'parliaments'' of later days, that about the
parliaments of Edward I.*s time there is still much to fve discovered,
that should they come to the decision that a session of the king's council
is the core and essence of every parli&menium* that the documents usually
called 'parliamentary petitions* are petitions to the kint* and bis council,
that the auditors of petitions are committees of the council, that the
rolls of parliament are records of the business done by the council.—some-
times with, but more often without, the concurrence r*f the estates of the
realm,—that the highest tribunal in Englanl is not a genera] a-'semKy of
barons and prelates, but the king's council, they will nnt be departing very
far from trie path marked out by books that art already Lla^ical."'—-
Memoranda de Parliantento, p. Ixxxviii. From certain descriptive terms,
applied loosely by the chroniclers to bodies of men of whoje technical
character they had little knowledge, it has sometimes been supposed that
there was mo're than one kind of king's council at this time. Maitland
remarks: " The one point about which 1 venture to differ from what
to be the general opinion of modern historians 'and 1 am uncertain as to
whether the difference is real} is that I cannot f n»i in the official language
of Edward 1. *s time any warrant for holding that the king has more than
one concilium, or rather consilium; any warrant, that Is, for holding that
this term is applied to two or three different bodies of persons, which are
conceived as permanently existing bodies, or anv warrant for holding
that the term should be "qualified by some adjective- such as commune,
or magnum, or ordinarium. , . . One thing is clear: an order sending to
their homes the prelates, earls, barons, knights, and other commoners,
4sauve les Evesques, Corttes et Barouns, Justices et autres, qui sotmt du
Counseil nostre seigneur le Roy/ is an intelligible order." Ibid., Introduc-
tion, p. Ixxxviii., note i. This conclusion has been borne out by the de-
tailed investigations of Baldwin. Later in the fourteenth century, these
descriptive terms did receive some official recognition; but their tise re-
flects no multiplication of councils. As the Council assumed a distinctive
character in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it very commonly
bore the French name, Conseil. In Latin it had from the early thirteenth
century been quite regularly called Consilium*