Parliament of England


The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England from the 13th century until 1707 when it was replaced by the Parliament of Great Britain. Parliament evolved from the great council of bishops and peers that advised the English monarch. Great councils were first called Parliaments during the reign of Henry III. By this time, the king required Parliament's consent to levy taxation.
Originally a unicameral body, a bicameral Parliament emerged when its membership was divided into the House of Lords and House of Commons, which included knights of the shire and burgesses. During Henry IV's reign, the role of Parliament expanded beyond the determination of taxation policy to include the right to petition, which essentially enabled English citizens to petition the body to address complaints in their local towns and counties. By this time, citizens were given the power to vote to elect their representatives—the burgesses—to the House of Commons.
Over the centuries, the English Parliament progressively limited the power of the English monarchy, a process that arguably culminated in the English Civil War and the High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I.

Predecessors (pre-13th century)

Parliament's origins stretch back to the 10th century when the first kings of England convened assemblies of the witan or . They occurred regularly at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, allowing kings to maintain ties with powerful men in distant regions of the country. These assemblies helped produce Anglo-Saxon law codes and decide major political questions, like war and peace. The witan conducted state trials, such as the trial of Earl Godwin in 1051. While not an elected body, the witan spoke for all English people through virtual representation. On behalf of the English nation, the witan negotiated with Aethelred the Unready and Cnut the Great, recognising them as kings.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the king received regular counsel from the members of his curia regis and periodically enlarged the court by summoning a magnum concilium to discuss national business and promulgate legislation. For example, the Domesday survey was planned at the Christmas council of 1085, and the Constitutions of Clarendon were made at the 1164 council. The magnum concilium continued to be the setting of state trials, such as the trial of Thomas Becket.
The members of the great councils were the king's tenants-in-chief. The greater tenants were summoned by individual writ, but lesser tenants were summoned by sheriffs. These were not representative or democratic assemblies. They were feudal councils in which barons fulfilled their obligation to provide counsel to their lord the king. Councils allowed kings to consult with their leading subjects. Still, such consultation rarely resulted in a change in royal policy. According to historian Judith Green, "these assemblies were more concerned with ratification and publicity than with debate". In addition, the magnum concilium had no role in approving taxation as the king could levy direct land taxes, either through geld or carucage, at his own discretion.
The years between 1189 and 1215 were a period of transition for the Great Council. The cause of this transition were new financial burdens imposed by the Crown to finance the Third Crusade, ransom Richard I, and pay for the series of Anglo-French wars fought between the Plantagenet and Capetian dynasties. In 1188, a precedent was established when the great council granted Henry II the Saladin tithe. In granting this tax, the great council was acting as representatives for all taxpayers.
The likelihood of resistance to national taxes made consent politically necessary. It was convenient for kings to present the great council as a representative body capable of consenting on behalf of all within the kingdom. Increasingly, the kingdom was described as the communitas regni and the barons as their natural representatives. But this development also created more conflict between kings and the baronage as the latter attempted to defend what they considered the rights belonging to the king's subjects.
King John alienated the barons by his partiality in dispensing justice, heavy financial demands and abusing his right to feudal incidents, reliefs, and aids. In 1215, the barons forced John to abide by a charter of liberties similar to charters issued by earlier kings. Known as Magna Carta, it was based on three assumptions important to the later development of Parliament:
  1. the king was subject to the law
  2. the king could only make law and raise taxation with the consent of the community of the realm
  3. that the obedience owed by subjects to the king was conditional and not absolute
Clause 12 stated that certain taxes could only be levied "through the common counsel of our kingdom", and clause 14 specified that this common counsel was to come from bishops, earls, and barons. While the clause stipulating no taxation "without the common counsel" was deleted from later reissues, it was nevertheless adhered to by later kings. Magna Carta would gain the status of fundamental law after John's reign.

13th century

The word parliament comes from the French parlement first used in the late 11th century, meaning or. In the mid-1230s, it became a common name for meetings of the great council. The word was first used with this meaning in 1236.
In the 13th century, parliaments were developing throughout north-western Europe. As a vassal to the King of France, English kings were suitors to the Parlement of Paris. In the 13th century, the French and English parliaments were similar in their functions; however, the two institutions diverged in significant ways in later centuries.
After the 1230s, the normal meeting place for Parliament was fixed at Westminster. Parliaments tended to meet according to the legal year so that the courts were also in session: January or February for the Hilary term, in April or May for the Easter term, in July, and in October for the Michaelmas term.

Attendance

Most parliaments had between forty and eighty attendees. They brought together social classes resembling the estates of the realm of continental Europe: the landed aristocracy, the clergy, and the towns. Historian John Maddicott points out that "the main division within parliament was less between lords and commons than between the landed and all others, lower clergy as well as burgesses". Meetings of Parliament always included:
The lower clergy were occasionally summoned when papal taxation was on the agenda. Beginning around the 1220s, the concept of representation, summarised in the Roman law maxim quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur, gained new importance among the clergy, and they began choosing proctors to represent them at church assemblies and, when summoned, at Parliament.
As feudalism declined and the gentry and merchant classes increased in influence, the shires and boroughs were recognised as communes with a unified constituency capable of being represented by knights of the shire and burgesses. Initially, knights and burgesses were summoned only when new taxes were proposed so that representatives of the communes could report back home that taxes were lawfully granted. The Commons were not regularly summoned until the 1290s, after the so-called Model Parliament of 1295. Of the thirty parliaments between 1274 and 1294, knights only attended four and burgesses only two.
Specialists could be summoned to Parliament to provide expert advice. For example, Roman law experts were summoned from Cambridge and Oxford to the Norham parliament of 1291 to advise on the disputed Scottish succession. At the Bury St Edmunds parliament of 1296, burgesses "who best know how to plan and lay out a certain new town" were summoned to advise on the rebuilding of Berwick after its capture by the English.

Early functions and powers

Parliament—or the High Court of Parliament as it became known—was England's highest court of justice. A large amount of its business involved judicial questions referred to it by ministers, judges, and other government officials. Many petitions were submitted to Parliament by individuals whose grievances were not satisfied through normal administrative or judicial channels. As the number of petitions increased, they came to be directed to particular departments leaving the king's council to concentrate on the most important business. Parliament became "a delivery point and a sorting house for petitions". From 1290 to 1307, Gilbert of Rothbury was placed in charge of organising parliamentary business and record-keeping—in effect a clerk of the parliaments.
Kings could legislate outside of Parliament through legislative acta and writs drafted by the chancery in response to particular court cases. But kings could also use Parliament to promulgate legislation. Parliament's legislative role was largely passive—the actual work of law-making was done by the king and council, specifically the judges on the council who drafted statutes. Completed legislation was then presented to Parliament for ratification.
Kings needed Parliament to fund their military campaigns. On the basis of Magna Carta, Parliament asserted for itself the right to consent to taxation, and a pattern developed in which the king would make concessions in return for tax grants. Withholding taxation was Parliament's main tool in disputes with the king. Nevertheless, the king was still able to raise lesser amounts of revenue from sources that did not require parliamentary consent, such as: