Story of British parliaments

Story of British parliaments

In November 1236, Henry III (1216-1272) adjourned a law case to a 'parliament' which was due to meet in January the following year - the very first occasion the term 'parliament' was recorded in an official document of the English crown.

This did not, however, mark the birth of parliament. The use of the term in 1236 was new, but it described a type of assembly which had existed for many centuries.

The word 'parliament', derived from the French parliament, or Latin parliamentum, meant, in essence, 'discussion'. English kings had always discussed the affairs of the realm with their subjects, but under the Norman and Angevin kings these meetings had been described by contemporaries as 'councils'.

Nevertheless, the use of the term 'parliament' signaled that important changes were happening. The council, made up of the king's closest advisors, would always remain at the heart of parliament, but from the 1240s the assembly began to acquire characteristics which made it clearly distinguishable from these older gatherings.

The real driving force behind this development was parliament's role in granting taxation to the king. Henry III was the first monarch to ask his subjects for taxation on a regular basis, because the income from crown lands was no longer sufficient on its own to fund the king's military expenditure.

Since the principle of common consent to such impositions had been enshrined in Magna Carta, increasing pressure was placed on the king to invite a greater selection of his subjects to attend parliament.

At first, assent to taxation was given by the barons, but increasingly as the 13th century progressed Henry III was forced in addition to negotiate directly with the representatives of the counties, towns and lower clergy (later to be known as the 'commons').

Parliament therefore became synonymous with an enlarged gathering of the kingdom's political elite.

In the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) parliament became a more consistent part of political life, brought together as and when the king required it, which usually was when the crown needed taxation.

This meant that the annual gatherings were infrequently meeting twice or sometimes three times a year. The length of each parliamentary session varied, depending on the nature of the business to which it attended.

Most assemblies met at Westminster, but it was not uncommon for parliament to be held elsewhere in order to accommodate the king's itinerary. In October 1290, parliament was summoned to meet at Clip stone in Nottinghamshire, a popular royal hunting lodge.

In 1292, as Edward I was campaigning in the North against the Scots, an assembly met at Berwick.

The commons did not become a regular or permanent feature of the English parliament until Edward II's reign (1307-1327).

Representatives had attended assemblies throughout the 13th century, but only on an ad hoc basis. In Edward I's reign, only 18 out of 50 parliaments had MPs (members of parliament) present.

But at the very beginning of the 14th century an important shift of perspective resulted in much greater emphasis being placed on the role and significance of the representatives.

As late as 1311, the barons had regarded themselves as the defenders of the 'community of the realm' in political discussion or confrontation with the king, but in the 1320s this role had come to be firmly associated with MPs.

A political treatise written anonymously during this decade stated that the barons in parliament could speak only for themselves. It was the knights, citizens and burgesses who represented 'the whole community of England' and who alone should grant taxation on behalf of the people.

The incessant warfare between England and Scotland, and then France, in the 14th century cemented the place of the commons in parliament, as the crown regularly looked to MPs to provide the funds necessary for defense and military campaigning.

At the start of Edward III's reign (1327-1377) the commons contained two distinct elements - the 'knights of the shire', who represented the counties, and the 'burgesses', who represented towns or cities?

The knights were usually members of the landed gentry while the burgess’s mostly rich merchants or lawyers.

Two representatives from each constituency were expected to attend each parliament. This meant that 74 knights could in theory be returned from 37 counties, and as many as 170 burgesses could be returned from a variable number of boroughs.

Although burgesses significantly outnumbered the knights of the shire, the latter were probably the more politically dominant because of their social standing and political connections.

Knights were paid four shillings a day for service in parliament, with burgesses receiving two shillings. At a time when the average daily wage for a peasant was just two pence, this was a very generous provision and represented a heavy financial burden for the constituencies to carry.

King, lords and commons

A meeting of parliament brought together not only the broader political community, but also all branches of central government. The focus of this government lay specifically in the 'lords'.

The lords had developed from a small group of councilors in the 13th century to a much greater body of men that would later, in the early 14th century, be described as the 'peerage' - dukes, earls, barons, bishops and abbots.

But the king also summoned all the key officers of state to attend the upper house. These included the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the treasurer, the senior royal judges and key members of the royal household.

The concentration of these men in the lords reflected the fact that this was where the main business of parliament was decided.

The king appointed a mixture of peers and administrators, or judges, to sit on committees to decide the outcome to petitions, drawing on their advice to respond to general matters of policy.

The relationship between the lords and commons was summed up by MPs in 1399 when they declared that whereas they were merely 'petitioners and suitors', all judgments of parliament 'belong solely to the king and lords'.

Parliament itself was organized by the administrative personnel of the lords. The chancellor normally acted as the king's spokesman. He was responsible for opening parliament with a speech declaring the reasons for holding the session and he read out the king's answers to common petitions.

The more mundane organization of the assembly was shouldered by royal clerks who were also responsible for compiling the official parliamentary record, the 'parliament roll'.

The records of parliament survive only sporadically in the 13th century, but from early in Edward III's reign there is a virtually unbroken series of parliament rolls for each assembly which met.

Elections and constituencies

The king gave 40 day's notice before parliament met to allow sheriffs to organize the county and borough elections.

In most cases, however, the 'elections' bore little resemblance to modern day notions of parliamentary democracy.

MPs were usually selected by the mutual agreement of a small number of the constituency's elite. This led occasionally to corruption. Records show in 1362 that the deputies of the sheriff of Lancashire were found to have simply returned themselves to parliament without the county's assent.

MPs generally took their responsibilities to their constituents seriously. In 1328, for example, the representatives of London twice wrote home from the York parliament to inform the city of the progress of their negotiations with the crown.

On the other hand, the representatives were not always eager to face the consequences of their own decisions, as it was a regular condition of a parliamentary grant of taxation that the MPs themselves would not be appointed to collect the money when they returned home.

Their fears were sometimes realized. The 'Peasants' Revolt' of 1381 was a direct consequence of the poll tax levied at one-shilling per head which MPs had consented to in the parliament of November 1380.

Top

Complaint and redress

Alongside its role in granting the crown taxation, the English parliament was also the place where individuals and communities could present petitions to the king seeking redress for difficulties or disputes which had arisen in their localities.

From its very beginnings, parliament had been conceived as the superior court of the realm with powers to address any grievance or request brought to it by the king's subjects.

In the late 13th and early 14th centuries many hundreds of petitions could be presented in each parliament.

Petitioners ranged from very high ranking members of the political elite to very humble peasant farmers, such as Ralph Sechville who complained in 1293 that a neighbour had threshed his corn and stolen his pigs and bacon.

In the early 14th century, a new type of 'community' petition, or common petition, appeared in parliament.

These were complaints presented by the commons which concerned the affairs of the whole realm. Common petitions formed the basis of new statutory legislation - laws made with the assent of parliament.

By the mid-14th century, parliament was passing a wide range of new laws which had been suggested by MPs. Typically these related to the kingdom's trade, commerce, defense, law and order.

One of the most famous laws passed by the medieval parliament was the 'Statute of Laborers’ of 1351 which set a national scale of wage-rates in an attempt to protect landlords from the adverse economic effects of the Black Death (1348-1349).

This legislation, which effectively imposed a maximum wage level on peasant laborers, offers an interesting contrast to the modern parliament and its attempts to establish a minimum wage level in the interests of the working population.

Common petitions gave a political voice to the commons by allowing them to trade grants of taxation with the king in return for the redress of their grievances.

The performance of the commons at parliament received mixed reactions. In 1376, the first known speaker of the commons, Sir Peter de la Mare (MP for Herefordshire), was praised by a chronicler for his 'amazing eloquence' in putting his points across to the crown.

On the other hand, a satirist of the early 15th century felt so disenchanted with the commons that he described the knights as 'sitting like a zero in arithmetic; they mark a place but signify nothing'.

Parliament and political opposition

The vast majority of English parliaments in the later Middle Ages saw high levels of cooperation between the king, lords and commons, but occasionally the assembly could be the scene of dramatic political confrontation and change.

In 1327, Queen Isabella and her lover Mortimer used parliament to furnish their deposition of Edward II with the vital ingredient of popular assent and support.

Similarly, in 1399, Henry Bolingbroke had used an assembly of estates which resembled a parliament to draw up the deposition articles against Richard II and to have himself proclaimed Richard's successor, with the words 'I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this realm of England ... as I am descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry III'.

It was a measure of the key position which parliament now held in medieval English politics that the assembly was used to legitimise regime change.

At other times, parliament could be used to force reforms on an unwilling king. The assembly was most dangerous to the crown when the commons united with the lords in pursuit of a common political goal.

In 1388, the combined opposition of the commons and the lords overwhelmed Richard II. The resulting purge of the royal household was so excessive that it earned the assembly the epithet of 'Merciless Parliament'.

Similarly, in 1450, parliament was the scene of the downfall of one of Henry VI's most favoured courtiers, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who was charged with eight counts of treason.

These more extreme examples highlight the crucial role played by parliament in bringing the government, and specifically the king, to account for their actions.

The 15th century

The 15th century was a period of steady consolidation rather than great innovation in the history of parliament.

The assembly was becoming more and more embedded into the fabric of political life in late medieval England.

Moreover, there was a growing awareness of the distinctive qualities it lent to the English political system. The great political writer of the 15th century, Sir John Fortescue, was able to muse on the differences between the English and French monarchies, stating that whereas the king of France could rule his people by such laws as he made himself and set upon them taxes without their assent, the king of England by contrast could not rule his people 'by laws other than those the people had assented to'.

Parliamentary legislation was no longer enacted in the name of the king and council, but by 'authority of parliament', and the assembly itself was no longer seen as the superior court of the king, but as the 'high court of the realm'.

The development of this terminology highlighted that the great legacy of the later Middle Ages, besides the emergence of parliament itself, was the deeply ingrained belief that the assembly existed as much to serve the interests of the king's subjects as it did the king himself.

Books

The King's Parliament of England by G O Sayles (London, 1975)

The Second Century of the English Parliament by G Edwards (Oxford, 1979)

The English Parliament in the Middle Ages by H G Richardson and G O Sayles (London, 1981)

A History of Parliament: The Middle Ages by R Butt (London, 1989)

The English Parliament in the Middle Ages by R G Davies and J H Denton (Manchester 1991)

Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages by G Dodd (Oxford, 2007)

The Commons in the Parliament of 1422 by J S Roskell (Manchester 1954)....