The judicial power achieved by the gentry in their individual counties did not translate easily into political influence at the centre of the country's affairs. There, a notion of representation derived from feudal relationships remained dominant – that the tenants-in-chief represented their tenants and the whole ‘community of the realm’ in dealings with the king as ‘lord paramount’. Chapter 14 of Magna Carta, though it was excluded from reissues, appears to set out the accepted principle. Before levying an aid (beyond the three to which every lord was entitled from his tenants: for his own ransoming, his eldest son's knighting and his eldest daughter's first marriage), and before imposing a scutage in place of knight service in the field, the king would ‘obtain the common counsel of the realm,’ by summoning individually the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls and greater barons, while the lesser tenants-in-chief would be summoned generally through his sheriffs and bailiffs. In all letters of summons the reason for it would be stated; the business would then go forward on the day arranged, and by implication all be committed by the outcome, ‘even if not all those summoned have come’.

The provision in Magna Carta for the consultation of the lesser men matured into the election to Parliament of ‘knights of the shire’, who were not, of course, usually tenants-in-chief of the king, nor by the fourteenth century sometimes even knights in the old sense at all.