Corruption entered the relationship when the king declared that he would
deal only with representatives endowed with plena potestas. Then, the
principals’ consent to any deal between the representative and the king
supposedly was implied in the principals’ choice of the agent. The idea of
representation became even more corrupted when the kings succeeded to
transfer the representative function from the individual representatives to the
representative assembly itself. Then, the consent of a simple majority of the
representatives was sufficient to bind all of the representatives and all of the
people they represented.