The hereditary peers have now been voted out of existence - the Bill removing them has received Royal Assent - and this seems a sensible time to reflect on the House of Lords, its history, and how it has changed over the many centuries of its existence.
The House of Commons has a precise date for its first meeting: 20th January 1265. Although knights representing the shires had previously been summoned to the King, it was Simon de Montfort’s decision to call Burgesses from the towns that led to the Commons as we know it. This was in response to a pressing political need - De Montfort had more support in the towns than in the shires. It was not part of a well thought through, enlightenment-style constitutional settlement.
The House of Lords has no such date, its origins are lost in the mists of time, and if you go back far enough, the Privy Council and the Lords seem to have been the same body. In the early parliaments, peers, as well as bishops and abbots, attended by writ of summons. They were called to attend the king, but did not have a right to do so, and nor did their heirs. This evolved so that peers who were summoned from 1295 were deemed to have the right to attend future parliaments, as were their heirs.
This led to an interesting quirk in the peerage, as those created by writ of summons pass by the normal laws of inheritance, while those issued by letters patent do so according to the patent. This means that generally writs of summons can pass through the female line, while patents tend to restrict it to the male line only.
The first peerage created by letters patent was by Henry VI in 1440, when he enobled the Viscount of Beaumont, with the first barony coming in 1448 to Lord Sturton. This increasingly became the norm, with no new creations by writ of summons since the 15th century.
As the way of creating peers changed, so did the composition of the house. Henry VIII was the last to summon abbots, one of whom, Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury, he infamously murdered. But bishops continued to come, and their number was finally formalised by the 1858 Bishops in the House of Lords Act.
The next change was the creation of life peerages for the judges by the 1876 Appellate Jurisdiction Act. This ensured that great legal brains could be brought into the Lords as the highest court of appeal, without creating an hereditary honour. In the 19th century, it was still considered important for a peer to be of sufficient financial standing to maintain the dignity of his peerage.
