ABSTRACT
It was not only in its topmost ranks that society was becoming more rigidly stratified in the later Middle Ages. This period also saw the emergence of the parliamentary peerage in England. Dukes, marquises and earls were naturally members of this group, but they were not the only members of it. By the fifteenth century, the peerage consisted of about sixty to seventy families distinguished from the rest of the landholding class by their more or less hereditary right to receive individual summonses to parliament. They were the peers of parliament, the progenitors of the later House of Lords.
