298 The Period of Constitution Making
Henry II. and John had many of the latter class in their
official households. The truth seems to be that these
earlier kings were strong enough to be served by whom
they chose, while in the fourteenth century a more con-
tinuous and effective baronial opposition was possible.
Reform councils, devised of course by the barons, appear
to have been artificial and were certainly ephemeral—
great lords trying to enter and control a council which
was normally and historically made up to a considerable
extent of the king's choices from a different class. But
whatever the truth on this point may be, continued
friction between lords and king over the composition of
the counselling group seems to have been an important
cause of divergence between Parliament and Council, to
have prevented the council core of the early Parliament
from becoming a mere division or " house" of that body.1
From political motives the lords came to look on the
Council as something different from themselves and, for
certain purposes, something less than themselves. These
descendants of the large and small sessions of the king's
court were no longer the same; the difference became
qualitative and not simply quantitative; the great coun-
cil, the Parliament (with or without the representative
knights and burgesses),2 the developing House of Lords
was one thing, the Council not a wholly different thing,
but becoming more so. In their judicial work, the use of
the common law by the former and equity by the latter
was both a result and a cause in this change.3 And it is
also true that the judges of the central courts, who sat
with both Lords and Council, merely advised the former,
while, until late in the fourteenth century, they both
advised and voted in the latter. The counsellor's oath
was the subject of occasional modification and definition
in the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II., but was always
1 This separation and general mistrust of the Council accounts in part
for the decline in the amount and value of statutory legislation after
Edward L, and for the rise of equity; for the Council was the natural place
for the preparation and initiation of royal measures. See above, pp. 214, 215.
See below, pp. 397-400. J See above, pp. 208, 209.