[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.
[1632] See N. C. vol. v. pp. 423, 878.
[1634] See N. C. vol. v. p. 145.
[1635] See the decree of the Council, Hist. Nov. 53.
[1636] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 42. We are told that the Duke, “succensus amore pecuniæ quam copiosam illum ferre rumor disperserat, proponit animo eam ipsi auferre.” But there is really nothing in what Odo is said to have done which implies any such bad purpose. Perhaps Eadmer judged him uncharitably.
[1637] See Historical Essays, Third Series, p. 20. On my last visit to Rome (1881) I found the apse of Saint John Lateran destroyed, not by Huns or Turks, but by its own chapter, with the approval, it is said, of its present and late bishops. I believe there is some pretence of enlarging the church, and of replacing the mosaics in a new apse.
[1638] Eadmer, Vit. Ans. ii. 5. 48. “Angli illis temporibus Romam venientes, pedes ejus ad instar pedum Romani pontificis sua oblatione honorare desiderabant. Quibus ille nequaquam acquiescens, in secretiorem domus partem fugiebat, et eos pro tali re nullo patiebatur ad se pacto accedere.”
[1639] Hist. Nov. 49. “Hinc etiam erat quod non facile a quoquam Romæ simpliciter homo vel archiepiscopus, sed quasi proprio nomine sanctus homo vocabatur.”