342 The Period of Constitution Making
complete in the reign of Richard II., for relics of the old
feudal, tentuial basis lasted a surprisingly long time; but
a comparatively small and quite compact body of heredi-
tary peers had taken shape.
While it is true that fourteenth-century peers attended
what we may venture to call the House of Lords (it was
first so called in the reign of Henry VIII.) because they
received writs of summons from the king, it should be
remembered that they were barons by tenure already.
The writs did not make them barons; to use the old
terminology, they made them major barons, or, in lan-
guage more .suited to the time, the writs did not deter-
mine who should be barons—which was still a matter of
tenure—but which of the barons should be peers of the
realm. As all the peers were barons, it was natural that
the inheritance of the dignity of a peer should be regulated
by the rules which applied to the inheritance of fiefs.
Hence in default of male heirs, the dignity might pass,
like the barony, to an heiress. No peeress was ever sum-
moned to the House of Lords,1 but she might confer
upon her husband a presumptive right to the king's writ
of summons. In the later middle ages, there were many
instances in which the husbands of such heiresses were
summoned to Parliament as peers.
A change took place in the fifteenth century which
eventually brought to an end this method of transmitting
a peer's dignity and which was the last important step
new family. It was decided that it remained in the old family notwith-
standing the alienation.
1 Perhaps the nearest approach to the summons of a woman to Parlia-
ment was the case of "four abbesses who in 1306 were cited to a great
council held to grant an aid on the knighting of the Prince of Wales."—
Maitland, C. H. £., p. 168. But a chronicler in 1265, writing of the parlia-
ment held just after the battle of Evesham, states: "At the feast of the Exal-
tation of the Holy Cross a great parliament was held at Winchester, to
which were called all the magnates of the land, and all the wives of the
earls, barons, and knights killed in battle or remaining captives in prison."
AnnaUs Monastici, ii., 366. The Waverley Chronicle, in which this state-
ment is made, was contemporaneous from 1219 to 1266 and is regarded
as one of the chief authorities for Henry III.'s reign, especially for the
time of the^ battle of Evesham. Lacking the summoning writs and like
statements in other chronicles, we must probably always remain in doubt
about £h.e Waverley Chronicler's accuracy on this point.