Note p. 604, note 1 — THE REIGN OF WILLIAM RUFUS.

[1631] The distinction between the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament and the Court of the Lord High Steward is most clearly brought out in Jardine’s Criminal Trials, i. 229. Lord Macaulay (iv. 153) is less accurate. He speaks of the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament as one form of the Court of the Lord High Steward. But in truth, the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament is simply the Witan sitting for a judicial purpose. The Lords alone sit, because the Commons have never attained to a share in the judicial functions of the Witan. The right to be tried before the Witan thus sitting judicially is naturally confined to those classes of persons who have kept or acquired the right to the personal summons, that is, to the peers.

If it should be objected that this privilege does not now extend to the spiritual peers, the reason is most likely to be found in the fact that for some ages a bishop would not be tried before any temporal court at all. When such trials began again in the sixteenth century, the later notion of peerage had grown up, and those peers whose holding was still strictly official was looked on as in some measure less fully peers than those whose peerage was “hereditary” in the modern sense.