Baronage

The baronage is the collectively inclusive term denoting all members of the feudal nobility, as observed by the constitutional authority Edward Coke. It was replaced eventually by the term peerage.

The term originated at a time when there was only one substantive degree of nobility, that of the feudal baron. The feudal baron held his lands directly from the king as a tenant-in-chief by the feudal land tenure per baroniam. This gave him the obligation to provide knights and troops for the royal feudal army. Barons could hold other executive offices apart from the duties they owed the king as a tenants-in-chief, such as an earldom. Immediately after the Norman Conquest of 1066 a very few barons held the function of earldom, then not considered as a separate degree of nobility per se. An earl was at that time the highest executive office concerned with the administration of a shire. The earl held higher responsibilities than the sheriff (from shire-). In Latin, a sheriff was referred to as vice-comes, meaning a deputy-count, that is to say a deputy-earl, "count" being the Norman-French term for the Anglo-Saxon "Earl". This later developed into the English peerage title of viscount.

The privilege attached to this heavy burden was the right, indeed the obligation, to attend the king in his feudal court, the precursor of parliament, termed the Council de Baronage. It was a standard part of the feudal contract that every tenant was under the obligation to attend his overlord's court to advise and support him, receiving in return his protection from outside hostile forces. Thus the sub-tenants of a tenant-in-chief, the lord of the manor within the jurisdiction of whose manor they lived, were obliged to attend the manorial court or court-baron. The baron had no feudal superior but the king, and thus the king's court was the appropriate place for attendance by the barons, collectively forming the baronage.

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