First, the number of tenants in chief, or the king’s freeholders, was much increased by various causes, but chiefly by the alienation which the greater barons made of their fees. Such alienation, though under some restraint, seems to have been generally permitted in the _Norman_ feuds; I mean, till MAGNA CHARTA and some subsequent statutes laid it under particular limitations. But, whether the practice were regular or not, it certainly prevailed from the earliest times; especially on some more extraordinary occasions. Thus, when the fashionable madness of the CROISADES had involved the greater barons in immense debts, in order to discharge the expences of these expeditions, they alienated their fees, and even dismembered them; that is, they parted with their right in them, and made them over in small parcels to others, to hold of the superior lord. And what these barons did from necessity, the crown itself did, out of policy: for the _Norman_ princes, growing sensible of the inconvenience of making their vassals too great, disposed of such estates of their barons as fell in to them by forfeiture, and were not a few, in the same manner. The consequence of all this was, that, in process of time, the lesser military tenants _in capite_ multiplied exceedingly. And, as many of them were poor, and unequal to a personal attendance in the court of their lord, or in the common council of the kingdom (where of right and duty they were to pay their attendance), they were willing, and it was found convenient to give them leave, to appear in the way of _representation_. And this was the origin of what we now call THE KNIGHTS OF THE SHIRES; who, in those times, were appointed to represent, not all the free-holders of counties, but the lesser tenants of the crown only. For these not attending in person, would otherwise have had no place in the king’s council.
The rise of CITIZENS AND BURGESSES, that is, representatives of the cities and trading towns, must be accounted for somewhat differently. These had originally been in the jurisdiction, and made part of the demesnes, of the king and his great lords. The reason of which appears from what I observed of the genius of the feudal policy. For, little account being had of any but martial men, and trade being not only dishonourable, but almost unknown in those ages; the lower people, who lived together in towns, most of them small and inconsiderable, were left in a state of subjection to the crown, or some other of the barons, and exposed to their arbitrary impositions and talliages.