Note (Back) — Chapter V

101. Origins.—With the possible exception of the Hungarian Table of Magnates, the British House of Lords is the most ancient second chamber among parliamentary bodies. It is, furthermore, among second chambers the largest and the most purely hereditary. Its descent can be traced directly from the Great Council of the Plantagenet period and, in the opinion of some scholars, from the witenagemot of Anglo-Saxon times.[138] To the Council belonged originally the nobility, and the clergy, greater and lesser. Practically, the body was composed of the more influential churchmen and the more powerful tenants-in-chief of the crown. In the course of time the lesser clergy found it convenient to confine their attention to the proceedings of the ecclesiastical assemblage known as Convocation; while the lesser nobles, i.e., the poorer and more uninfluential ones, found it to their interest to cast in their lot, not as formerly with the great barons and earls, but with the well-to-do though non-noble knights of the shire. From the elements that remained—the higher clergy and the greater nobles—developed directly the House of Lords. The lesser barons, the knights of the shire, and the burgesses, on the other hand, combined to form the House of Commons.