344 The Period of Constitution Making
patent were, so to speak, becoming the fashion. A
gradual recognition of the broader advantages kept them
in fashion. * It is obvious that through the use of letters
patent the term baron would gradually lose all its old
feudal meaning.2
Here a query necessarily arises concerning the spiritual
lords. No principles of inheritance could apply to them.
How were they faring during these changes? Bishogs
and abbots had been summoned^to^Jhe ^kin£'sf^|eudal
court by*virtue oftfie baronies they held, that is, because
they were tenants»in-cKie£ They were major barons in
the twetftfi-century sense; and they were wise and j_ji-
fiuential, and hence important as counsellors. Though
the king's will continued to determine who were to be
major barons, the bishops received the writs of summons
with practically unbroken uniformity; their importance,
tenurially and otherwise, placed them beyond question.
But with the abbots and priors who were barons, the
king exercised the same capriciousness as with the Jay
barons pi,corresponding grade. Also, as with the lay
barons, the capriciousness decreased under Edward III.;
certain abbots and most priors were scarcely ever sum-
moned. The abbots as a class were disinclined to attend.3
When the barons began to call themselves peers, the
prelates were considered as fully peers as the lay barons,
for the technical basis of their attendance was the same.
This continued to be the case until well along in the
fifteenth century. But a different conception finally
1 The Crown actually used its power of creating peers to overcome an
adverse majority in the House of Lords in 1711. The Tory ministers who
negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht did not control the House, and Queen
Anne created twelve peers (calling up three eldest sons and creating nine
new peerages) to give them a majority. In 1832 a threat of creation
served to pass the Reform Bill through the Lords, and the same was true in
the case of the Parliament Bill of 1911.
3 On the subject of the new titles of dignity and the letters patent, see
Stubbs, Constitutional History, § 428.
3 Under Edward L there were seventy-two abbots that at one time or
another attended his assemblies—sixty-seven in the "Model Parlia-
ment." This number fell to twenty-seven under Edward III., and this
remained the number until the dissolution of the monasteries. See below,
PP- 345» 370-373, 376, note i.