Changes under Edward I - UK Parliament Changes under Edward I Elizabethan Parliaments Changes under Edward I Edward I made the meeting of Parliament a more frequent event and over the course of his reign of 35 years (1272-1307) he summoned it on 46 occasions. For the first 20 years of his reign it met regularly - almost twice a year. From 1278 official records were kept of its proceedings and decisions, written up and sewn together in long scrolls, the Rolls of Parliament. Edward 1's first Parliament In 1275 Edward I called his first Parliament. He summoned nobles and churchmen, but also issued orders (known as writs) for the election of two representatives from each county (the knights of the shire) and two from each city or town (the burgesses) to attend. They were called on primarily to listen to and approve the King's plan for a new tax. Over the following years it became an accepted rule that the representatives of those who were going to be most affected by taxation had to give their consent to it in Parliament. Model Parliament However, the practice of summoning these representatives did not become standard for many years.

The next time the burgesses were summoned along with the knights of the shire was in 1295. This was to become known as the Model Parliament, because its representation of two knights from each county and two burgesses from each town became normal for (almost) all future Parliaments. Parliament and taxation Parliament developed in the 13th and 14th centuries largely through the desire of Edward I and his successors to wage war. This needed more money than they had from their own wealth and they had to levy "extraordinary" taxes, with Parliament's assent, to raise the funds. But each time the King requested assent to a tax from Parliament, it could ask a favour back again and often used the King's desperation for money to get what it wanted. Representatives of the people Since January 1327 when Parliament removed Edward I's son, Edward II, from the throne every Parliament has included representatives of the people. The pattern was now set for Parliament always to comprise three bodies: Lords, Commons and the Monarch. External links The original parchment rolls of Parliament from the thirteenth century are at the National Archives at Kew. Edward I Parliaments The Rise of Parliament Parliament c.

1400 From the earliest times, the kings of England had assembled nobles and other important subjects to advise them. The Anglo-Saxon witan or witanagemot is named as endorsing the laws of King Ine and King Alfred amongst others. The Norman and Angevin kings also called "small councils" of their immediate advisors, and "great councils" of all the major barons, churchmen and government officials. Simon de Montfort summoned assemblies that included not only bishops and noblemen but also knights of the shire and burgesses from the towns. De Montfort's appeal to the wider community of the realm was continued by Henry III and Edward I. The transition from the king's council to parliament as such was gradual and does not seem to have been very important to contemporaries (although later historians have debated at length the precise composition and origins of parliament in the 13th Century.) "The significance of parliament lay not so much in the particular acts as in the concentration of them in a formal and public occasion.

These periodical stock-takings were expressions of the cohesion between king, prelates, barons, ministers of state, judges and, when they were represented, the local communities." (Powicke, The Thirteenth Century) Edward I sometimes summoned only the nobility to his councils, but increasingly during the 1300s the representatives of the shires and towns were also called. Members of the lower clergy were also sent for on occasion. The "Model Parliament" (1295) contained councilors, bishops, abbots, priors, proctors chosen by the lower clergy, barons, burgesses and knights. Parliament was useful for endorsing laws (statutes; acts of parliament), considering important legal decisions, and approving taxation. The most important business of the Lent Parliament of 1305 was the ordinance of trailbaston. This was aimed especially against highwaymen and other violent criminals. The king had ample authority to institute such measures without parliament, but its endorsement gave it added force. Medieval muggers The role of Parliament in voting taxation grew in importance.

Strong kings like Edward were not in particular need of the political support offered by the community of the realm, but did need the financial support (especially for war) that it afforded. Acton Burnell Castle, site of Parliament in 1283. Parliament was not yet settled at Westminster, nor did it have fixed terms. It met when and where the king wanted it. In 1283, for example, when Edward I was in the Welsh Borders pursuing his campaigns against Wales, Parliament was summoned there. The early parliaments of Edward I also differed from later ones in that the firm division of two houses - Lords and Commons - had not yet been institutionalized. (In the 1295 Model Parliament, for example, the clergy met separately from the nobility and the knights, and they met separately from the burgesses.) In the course of the fourteenth century the Lords (now including bishops and abbots as well as secular nobles) and Commons (knights and burgesses) began regularly deliberate as two distinct bodies.

Nobles were summoned by writs under the Great Seal to attend parliament, but it was only established in the course of the 14th and early 15th centuries exactly which noblemen had a right to sit. Parliament became primarily a lay assembly. Bishops and abbots (as feudal tenants) continued to sit in the Lords, but from 1283 the lesser clergy were represented in Convocation (first in the Province of Canterbury; then also at York) where the bishops also sat (in the "Upper House.") Representatives of the lesser clergy ceased to go to parliament in the course of the 1300s. From its earliest sessions, the representatives of the counties and towns were empowered to make decisions without referring back to their communities. This made Parliament a powerful and flexible body for deciding policy. In England (unlike on the Continent), nobles paid taxes just as commoners did. The most powerful and prosperous landowners in the country therefore had an interest in keeping the burden of taxation low, and the English lower classes never suffered such oppressive taxation as their European counterparts.

From its earliest days, parliament was an institution that both voted taxes and redressed the grievances of subjects: English kings had to ensure at least a minimum level of contentment in exchange for consent to taxation. Parliament: History Parliament History The Origins of Parliament There was no historical continuity between the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot and the British Parliament. The first steps in the genesis of the modern parliament occurred in the 13th cent. The long, slow process of evolution began with the Curia Regis, the king's feudal council to which he summoned his tenants in chief, the great barons, and the great prelates. This was the kernel from which Parliament and, more specifically, the House of Lords developed. The Curia Regis, more commonly called the great council, had merely quasilegislative powers and was primarily a judicial and executive body. The development of the heritable right of certain barons (the peerage) to be summoned to the council, originally composed at the king's will, was not at all secure until the mid-14th cent., and even then was far from inviolable. The House of Commons originated in the 13th cent.

in the occasional convocation of representatives of other social classes of the state—knights and burgesses—usually to report the "consent" of the counties and towns to taxes imposed by the king. Its meetings were often held in conjunction with a meeting of the great council, for the early 13th cent. recognized no constitutional difference between the two bodies; the formalization of Parliament as a distinct organ of government took at least another century to complete. During the Barons' War, Simon de Montfort summoned representatives of the counties, towns, and lesser clergy in an attempt to gain support from the middle classes. His famous Parliament of 1265 included two representative burgesses from each borough and four knights from each shire, admitted, at least theoretically, to full standing with the great council. Although Edward I's so-called Model Parliament of 1295 (which contained prelates, magnates, two knights from each county, two burgesses from each town, and representatives of the lower clergy) seemed to formalize a representative principle of composition, great irregularities of membership in fact continued well into the 14th cent. Nor did the division of Parliament into two houses coalesce until the 14th cent.

Before the middle of the century the clerical representatives withdrew to their own convocations, leaving only two estates in Parliament (in contrast to the French States-General). The knights of the shires, who, as a minor landholding aristocracy, might have associated themselves with the great barons in the House of Lords, nevertheless felt their true interest to lie with the burgesses, and with the burgesses developed that corporate sense that marked the House of Commons by the end of the century. The Growth of Parliamentary Sovereignty The constitutional position of Parliament was at first undifferentiated from that of the great council. Large assemblies were called only occasionally, to support the king's requests for revenue and other important matters of policy, but not to legislate or "consent to taxation" in the modern sense. In the 14th cent., Parliament began to gain greater control over grants of revenue to the king. From Parliament's judicial authority (derived, through the Lords, from the judicial powers of the great council) to consider petitions for the redress of grievances and to submit such petitions to the king, developed the practice of withholding financial supplies until the king accepted and acted on the petitions.

Statute legislation arose as the petition form was gradually replaced by the drafting of bills sent to the king and ultimately enacted by Commons, Lords, and king together. Impeachment of the king's ministers, another means for securing control over administrative policy, also derived from Parliament's judicial authority and was first used late in the 14th cent. In the 15th cent., through these devices, Parliament wielded wide administrative and legislative powers. In addition a strong self-consciousness on the part of its members led to claims of parliamentary "privilege," notably freedom from arrest and freedom of debate. With the growth of a stronger monarchy under the Yorkists and especially under the Tudors, Parliament became essentially an instrument of the monarch's will. The House of Lords with its lord chancellor (now the lord speaker) and the House of Commons with its speaker appeared in their modern form in the 16th cent. The English Reformation greatly increased the powers of Parliament because it was through the nominal agency of Parliament that the Church of England was established. Yet throughout the Tudor period Parliament's legislative supremacy was challenged by the crown's legislative authority through the privy council, a descendant of part of the old feudal council.

With the accession (1603) of the Stuart kings, inept in their dealings with Parliament after the wily Tudors, Parliament was able to exercise its claims, drawing on precedents established but not exploited over the preceding 200 years. In the course of the English civil war , Parliament voiced demands not only for collateral power but for actual sovereignty. Although parliamentary authority was reduced to a mere travesty under Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate, the Restoration brought Parliament back into power—secure in its claims to legislative supremacy, to full authority over taxation and expenditures, and to a voice in public policy through partial control (by impeachment) over the king's choice of ministers. Charles II set about learning to manage Parliament, rather than opposing or circumventing it. James II's refusal to do so led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which permanently affirmed parliamentary sovereignty and forced William III to accept great limitations on the powers of the crown. During the reign of Queen Anne even the royal veto on legislation disappeared. The Ascendancy of Commons Despite a general division into Whig and Tory parties toward the end of the 17th cent., political groupings in Parliament were more inclined to form about a particular personality or issue.

Although members had considerable freedom to make temporary political alliances without regard to their constituencies, control over members was exercised by the ministry and the crown through patronage, which rested on the purchase of parliamentary seats and tight control over a narrow electorate. As members were paid no salaries, private wealth and liberal patronage were prerequisites to a seat in Commons; as a result, Parliament represented only the propertied upper classes, and private legislation took precedence over public acts throughout the 18th cent. The parliamentary skills of Sir Robert Walpole , in many respects the first prime minister, both signified and contributed to the growing importance of Commons. The crown retained the theoretical power to appoint a ministry of its choice, but the resignation (1782) of George III's minister Lord North established, once and for all, a tendency that had developed gradually since the Glorious Revolution—that the prime minister could not function without the support and confidence of the House of Commons. The complexion of Parliament changed rapidly after 1800. The union (1800) of Ireland and England dissolved the Irish Parliament and added to the British Parliament 100 Irish members, who functioned as an important political bloc throughout the 19th cent.

With the appearance of powerful new classes created by the Industrial Revolution and with the currency of democratic doctrines grew demands for extension of suffrage, reform of flagrant abuses of patronage, and reorganization of the entire representative basis of Commons. The first step was achieved by the great Reform Bill of 1832 (see Reform Acts ), followed by the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884 and the eventual establishment of universal suffrage by the Representation of the People Acts in 1948. Parliamentary committees, appointed to investigate social conditions and recommend legislation, played an enlarged role. The tendency toward consolidation of parties was accelerated as public opinion became a factor in elections free from patronage. Although the Liberals and the Conservatives were known to stand for certain general policies, it was not until near the end of the 19th cent. that William E. Gladstone began the practice of making national campaign tours to pledge the party to a program for the coming Parliament. With the development of the party caucus, at about the same time, freedom of action by individual members was reduced. By the late 19th cent.

members of working-class origin (later organized into the Labour party) were being elected to the House of Commons. Concomitantly, the class represented in the House of Lords began to lose power in British society, and through long conflict with the Commons, particularly on matters of social legislation, the House of Lords itself was weakened. Commons was at first able to intimidate Lords by threatening the creation of enough new peers to override any opposition by the upper house. The contest over the financial bill of 1909 finally led Commons to a more drastic solution. The Parliament Act of 1911 stripped the House of Lords of its veto power on money bills, and on other bills provided that a measure should become law if passed by Commons in two separate sessions, even if vetoed by Lords, if two years had elapsed between sessions. The Parliament Act of 1949 reduced the period to one year. The 1911 act also provided for the payment of salaries to members, thus opening participation to representatives of all classes. Party discipline became increasingly strong as the 20th cent. progressed, to the extent that a member may be ejected from the parliamentary party if he or she does not vote the party line on specified issues.

The result has been to eliminate choice for most MPs on most issues. Long periods of loyal party service in Commons have become nearly required for achieving ministerial status. The rise of socialism in Great Britain after World War II did not greatly affect parliamentary structure, although increased delegation of important functions to the civil service reduced Parliament's immediate control of many governmental activities. Toward the end of the century Parliament implemented some fundamental changes by moving to redefine the role of the House of Lords and by accepting Scotland's desire to create its own parliament for the governing of domestic affairs; a Welsh assembly was also established. The removal of many hereditary peers from the House of Lords strengthened the remaining members' belief that they had a legitimate constitutional right to challenge those laws passed by the Commons that they regarded as bad law. Sections in this article: BRIA 25 2 King and Parliament in Medieval England - Constitutional Rights Foundation BRIA 25 2 King and Parliament in Medieval England CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION Bill of Rights in Action FALL 2009 (Volume 25, No. 2) The Major Debates at the Constitutional Convention | King and Parliament in Medieval England | Every New Generation King and Parliament in Medieval England The English Parliament evolved over hundreds of years.

The first medieval English Parliaments took important steps toward a more representative and democratic government. The English monarchy had been around for a long time before William the Conqueror led the French Norman invasion and occupation of England in A.D. 1066. After the conquest, a new line of Norman kings continued the English monarchy. The English people believed God had blessed the king’s right to rule. They also accepted that his successor, usually his eldest son, inherited that right. But the king of England also owed duties to the people. At his coronation, he promised to preserve the unwritten “common law” passed down through the generations. He also had a duty to act with “right justice” and defend the realm by leading his army in battle. From ancient times in England, the king was the only lawmaker and often acted above the law. But things began to change in 1215 when King John lost a war against his powerful barons who forced him to sign the Magna Carta. This feudal document mainly guaranteed certain rights to the barons, who made up most of the landowning elite. But the Magna Carta also established that the king must obey the law and use only lawful means against his subjects.

Even at the height of their powers, English kings seldom acted without consulting important nobles and church leaders, the Lords of the kingdom. After the Magna Carta, the king increasingly sought the advice and consent (agreement) of the Lords in exchange for their supporting his government’s policies and projects. This was the origin of Parliament. The king created Parliament to serve his own purposes. But during its long evolution, the English Parliament changed dramatically and nibbled away at the king’s powers until almost none remain today. Advice and Consent of Parliament King Henry III, the son of King John, began his reign in 1216. At first, he consulted with a small Council of important Lords, who were usually always around him. Later, Henry began the practice of summoning an expanded group of Lords from the entire kingdom. Known as a Great Council, it included the major land-owning barons, other nobles, and the archbishops and bishops of the Catholic Church, the state religion. The king’s judges and top government officials also attended. Henry summoned about 50 Lords to a Great Council when he needed their advice and consent for such things as going to war, changing the law, or levying a new tax.

The Great Council Lords looked upon their advice and consent as both a duty to the king and a right that he was bound to honor. By ancient custom, the king was not supposed to change the law or impose taxes without the advice and consent of those affected. At the Great Councils, the Lords could discuss, debate, request changes, or seek exemptions from what the king wanted. The Lords could attempt to change the king’s mind, but in the end, they had a duty to consent to his desires. By 1236, royal clerks used the word “parliament” to refer to the king’s meetings with his Great Council. This term comes from the French verb “to talk or discuss.” French, not English, was the language spoken by the kings and ruling elite, who were the descendants of the Norman conquerors. King Henry III summoned his Lords to Parliament when he wanted to meet with them. He found this was an effective way to secure the advice and consent of his Lords and to discuss important matters with them. From the beginning, Parliament also acted as the highest court in the land.

The Lords handled trials of their fellow nobles, sat as an appeals court, and judged cases that were too difficult or controversial for the regular king’s courts. Toward the end of Henry III’s reign, the barons grew frustrated with their limited power in Parliament. In 1258, Henry summoned Parliament to approve new taxes to pay his extravagant royal household expenses, foreign war debts, and a scheme to obtain the crown of Sicily for one of his sons. The barons at Parliament balked and demanded that Henry agree to government reforms before they consented to a new tax. Among other things, the reforms called for Parliament to meet three times a year and for a committee of barons to serve as the king’s chief advisers. Desperate for money, Henry agreed. In 1262, Henry III denounced the reforms, saying they invaded his rights as king. The conflict escalated into a civil war between Henry and the rebel barons led by Simon de Montfort, the king’s brother-in-law. Montfort defeated Henry and his son, Edward, in battle, but they escaped. For a year, Montfort ruled the kingdom and summoned his own Parliament.

But Henry and Edward rallied royalist supporters and finally won the war by defeating Montfort in 1265. During the battle, Henry sent a special assassination squad to kill Montfort and mutilate his body. Representation in Parliament Another factor in the evolution of Parliament was representation. At first, only the great Lords, king’s judges, and chief government officials met with the king in Parliament. During the reign of King Henry III, most assumed that the Lords in Parliament gave their advice and consent on behalf of everyone in the kingdom. The barons and Catholic Church were well represented in King Henry’s Parliament. But lower-ranking nobles like knights, free yeoman farmers, town merchants, and the vast numbers of poor people had no direct representation. Yet the laws and taxes approved by Parliament applied to most of them. While King Henry was away fighting in France, those he left in charge of the kingdom agreed to call a Parliament in 1254 that included elected knights, two from each English shire (county). Henry III felt this change violated his rights as king and never summoned the knights again. When Simon de Montfort briefly ruled, his Parliament included elected shire knights and town representatives, called burgesses, along with the Lords.

As taxes increasingly fell on knights and townspeople, many believed that they also needed to give advice and consent to the king. King Edward I, son of Henry, called his first Parliament in 1275. In addition to summoning the Lords, he ordered the election of two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each city and town. Edward wanted their consent for new taxes to fund his military campaigns. The knights and burgesses together made up a new group in Parliament called the Commons. The Commons was a body of “commoners” (non-nobles) in Parliament. In 1295, King Edward called what later was dubbed the “Model Parliament.” It included knights and burgesses and began the practice of including the Commons on a fairly regular basis. Still, the knights and burgesses represented only well-off property owners. By 1325, at the end of the reign of King Edward II, the Commons had won the right of representation at every Parliament. But the Commons was timid and usually did little but give consent to agreements reached by the king and the Lords.

After Edward III became king in 1327, the Lords and Commons began to meet annually in two separate “houses” at Westminster Palace. This is the location of the current Houses of Parliament in London. About 50 barons, other nobles, archbishops, and bishops met in the House of Lords. They were a close-knit body that did not change membership until a lord died. Owners of property worth a certain value elected about 200 knights and burgesses to Commons. These representatives often changed from one Parliament to another. Centuries would pass before all the English people would gain the right to vote and run for a seat in the House of Commons. English Kings (1199–1399) Parliament (Pepys' Diary) Parliament of Ireland The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England . In 1066, William of Normandy introduced what, in later centuries, became referred to as a feudal system, by which he sought the advice of a council of tenants-in-chief (a person who held land) and ecclesiastics before making laws.

In 1215, the tenants-in-chief secured Magna Carta from King John , which established that the king may not levy or collect any taxes (except the feudal taxes to which they were hitherto accustomed), save with the consent of his royal council, which gradually developed into a parliament. Over the centuries, the English Parliament progressively limited the power of the English monarchy which arguably culminated in the English Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649. After the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II , and the subsequent Glorious Revolution of 1688, the supremacy of Parliament was a settled principle and all future English and later British sovereigns were restricted to the role of constitutional monarchs with limited executive authority. The Act of Union 1707 merged the English Parliament with the Parliament of Scotland to form the Parliament of Great Britain . When the Parliament of Ireland was destroyed in 1801, its former members were merged into what was now called the Parliament of the United Kingdom . Contents 7 External links History This article includes a list of references , but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations . Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations.

(February 2013) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message ) Under a monarchical system of government, monarchs usually must consult and seek a measure of acceptance for their policies if they are to enjoy the broad cooperation of their subjects. Early kings of England had no standing army or police , and so depended on the support of powerful subjects. The monarchy had agents in every part of the country. However, under the feudal system that evolved in England following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the laws of the Crown could not have been upheld without the support of the nobility and the clergy . The former had economic and military power bases of their own through major ownership of land and the feudal obligations of their tenants (some of whom held lands on condition of military service). The Church was virtually a law unto itself in this period as it had its own system of religious law courts. In order to seek consultation and consent from the nobility and the senior clergy on major decisions, post-Norman Conquest English monarchs called Great Councils . A typical Great Council would consist of archbishops , bishops , abbots , barons and earls , the pillars of the feudal system.

When this system of consultation and consent broke down, it often became impossible for government to function effectively. The most prominent instances of this prior to the reign of Henry III are the disagreements between Thomas Becket and Henry II and between King John and the barons. Becket, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury between 1162 and 1170, was murdered following a long running dispute with Henry II over the jurisdiction of the Church. John, who was king from 1199 to 1216, aroused such hostility from many leading noblemen that they forced him to agree to Magna Carta in 1215. John's refusal to adhere to this charter led to civil war (see First Barons' War ). The Great Council evolved into the Parliament of England. The term itself came into use during the early 13th century, deriving from the Latin and French words for discussion and speaking. The word first appears in official documents in the 1230s. As a result of the work by historians G. O. Sayles and H. G. Richardson, it is widely believed that the early parliaments had a judicial as well as a legislative function.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, the kings began to call Knights of the Shire to meet when the monarch saw it as necessary. A notable example of this was in 1254 when sheriffs of counties were instructed to send Knights of the Shire to parliament to advise the king on finance . [1] Initially, parliaments were mostly summoned when the king needed to raise money through taxes. Following the Magna Carta this became a convention. This was due in no small part to the fact that King John died in 1216 and was succeeded by his young son Henry III. Leading peers and clergy governed on Henry's behalf until he came of age, giving them a taste for power that they would prove unwilling to relinquish. Among other things, they made sure that Magna Carta would be reaffirmed by the young king. Parliament in the reign of Henry III Once the minority of Henry III ended and he took full control of the government, leading peers became increasingly concerned with his style of government, specifically his unwillingness to consult them on decisions he took, and his seeming patronisation of his foreign relatives over his native subjects.

Henry's support of a disastrous papal invasion of Sicily was the last straw. In 1258, seven leading barons forced Henry to swear to uphold the Provisions of Oxford , superseded, the following year, by the Provisions of Westminster . This effectively abolished the absolutist Anglo-Norman monarchy, giving power to a council of fifteen barons, and providing for a thrice-yearly meeting of parliament to monitor their performance. Parliament assembled six times between June 1258 and April 1262, most notably at Oxford in 1258. The French-born nobleman Simon de Montfort , Earl of Leicester , emerged as the leader of this characteristically English rebellion. In the following years, those supporting Montfort and those supporting the king grew more hostile to each other. Henry obtained a papal bull in 1263 exempting him from his oath and both sides began to raise armies. At the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, Henry was defeated and taken prisoner by Montfort's army. However, many of the peers who had initially supported Montfort began to suspect that he had gone too far with his reforming zeal.

His support amongst the nobility rapidly declined. So in 1264, Montfort summoned the first parliament in English history without any prior royal authorisation. The archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls and barons were summoned, as were two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each borough. Knights had been summoned to previous councils, but the representation of the boroughs was unprecedented. This was purely a move to consolidate Montfort's position as the legitimate governor of the kingdom, since he had captured Henry and his son Prince Edward (later Edward I ) at the Battle of Lewes. A parliament consisting of representatives of the realm was the logical way for Montfort to establish his authority. In calling this parliament, in a bid to gain popular support, he summoned knights and burgesses from the emerging gentry class, thus turning to his advantage the fact that most of the nobility had abandoned his movement. This parliament was summoned on 14 December 1264. It first met on 20 January 1265 in Westminster Hall [1] and was dissolved on 15 February 1265. It is not certain who actually attended this parliament.

Nonetheless, Montfort's scheme was formally adopted by Edward I in the so-called " Model Parliament " of 1295. The attendance at parliament of knights and burgesses historically became known as the summoning of "the Commons", a term derived from the Norman French word "commune", literally translated as the "community of the realm". Following Edward's escape from captivity, Montfort was defeated and killed at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. Henry's authority was restored and the Provisions of Oxford were forgotten, but this was nonetheless a turning point in the history of the Parliament of England. Although he was not obliged by statute to do so, Henry summoned the Commons to parliament three times between September 1268 and April 1270. However, this was not a significant turning point in the history of parliamentary democracy. Subsequently, very little is known about how representatives were selected because, at this time, being sent to parliament was not a prestigious undertaking. But Montfort's decision to summon knights of the shires and burgesses to his parliament did mark the irreversible emergence of the landed gentry as a force in politics.

From then on, monarchs could not ignore them, which explains Henry's decision to summon the Commons to several of his post-1265 parliaments. Even though many peers who had supported the Provisions of Oxford remained active in English public life throughout Henry's reign, the conditions they had laid down for regular parliaments were largely forgotten, as if to symbolise the historical development of the English Parliament via convention rather than statutes and written constitutions. The emergence of parliament as an institution A 16th-century depiction of Edward's parliament During the reign of Edward I , which began in 1272, the role of Parliament in the government of the English kingdom increased due to Edward's determination to unite England, Wales and Scotland under his rule by force. He was also keen to unite his subjects in order to restore his authority and not face rebellion as was his father's fate. Edward therefore encouraged all sectors of society to submit petitions to parliament detailing their grievances in order for them to be resolved. This seemingly gave all of Edward's subjects a potential role in government and this helped Edward assert his authority.

Both the Statute of Westminster 1275 and Statute of Westminster 1285 , with the assistance of Robert Burnell , codified the existing law in England. As the number of petitions being submitted to parliament increased, they came to be dealt with, and often ignored, more and more by ministers of the Crown so as not to block the passage of government business through parliament. However the emergence of petitioning is significant because it is some of the earliest evidence of parliament being used as a forum to address the general grievances of ordinary people. Submitting a petition to parliament is a tradition that continues to this day in the Parliament of the United Kingdom and in most Commonwealth realms. These developments symbolise the fact that parliament and government were by no means the same thing by this point. If monarchs were going to impose their will on their kingdom, they would have to control parliament rather than be subservient to it. From Edward's reign onwards, the authority of the English Parliament would depend on the strength or weakness of the incumbent monarch. When the king or queen was strong he or she would wield enough influence to pass their legislation through parliament without much trouble.

Some strong monarchs even bypassed it completely, although this was not often possible in the case of financial legislation due to the post-Magna Carta convention of parliament granting taxes. When weak monarchs governed, parliament often became the centre of opposition against them. Subsequently, the composition of parliaments in this period varied depending on the decisions that needed to be taken in them. The nobility and senior clergy were always summoned. From 1265 onwards, when the monarch needed to raise money through taxes, it was usual for knights and burgesses to be summoned too. However, when the king was merely seeking advice, he often only summoned the nobility and the clergy, sometimes with and sometimes without the knights of the shires. On some occasions the Commons were summoned and sent home again once the monarch was finished with them, allowing parliament to continue without them. It was not until the mid-14th century that summoning representatives of the shires and the boroughs became the norm for all parliaments. One of the moments that marked the emergence of parliament as a true institution in England was the deposition of Edward II .

Even though it is debatable whether Edward II was deposed in parliament or by parliament, this remarkable sequence of events consolidated the importance of parliament in the English unwritten constitution. Parliament was also crucial in establishing the legitimacy of the king who replaced Edward II: his son Edward III . In 1341 the Commons met separately from the nobility and clergy for the first time, creating what was effectively an Upper Chamber and a Lower Chamber, with the knights and burgesses sitting in the latter. This Upper Chamber became known as the House of Lords from 1544 onward, and the Lower Chamber became known as the House of Commons , collectively known as the Houses of Parliament . The authority of parliament grew under Edward III; it was established that no law could be made, nor any tax levied, without the consent of both Houses and the Sovereign. This development occurred during the reign of Edward III because he was involved in the Hundred Years' War and needed finances. During his conduct of the war, Edward tried to circumvent parliament as much as possible, which caused this edict to be passed. The Commons came to act with increasing boldness during this period.

During the Good Parliament (1376), the Presiding Officer of the lower chamber, Sir Peter de la Mare , complained of heavy taxes, demanded an accounting of the royal expenditures, and criticised the king's management of the military. The Commons even proceeded to impeach some of the king's ministers. The bold Speaker was imprisoned, but was soon released after the death of Edward III. During the reign of the next monarch, Richard II , the Commons once again began to impeach errant ministers of the Crown. They insisted that they could not only control taxation, but also public expenditure. Despite such gains in authority, however, the Commons still remained much less powerful than the House of Lords and the Crown. This period also saw the introduction of a franchise which limited the number of people who could vote in elections for the House of Commons. From 1430 onwards, the franchise was limited to Forty Shilling Freeholders , that is men who owned freehold property worth forty shillings or more. The Parliament of England legislated the new uniform county franchise, in the statute 8 Hen. 6, c. 7.

The Chronological Table of the Statutes does not mention such a 1430 law, as it was included in the Consolidated Statutes as a recital in the Electors of Knights of the Shire Act 1432 (10 Hen. 6, c. 2), which amended and re-enacted the 1430 law to make clear that the resident of a county had to have a forty shilling freehold in that county to be a voter there. King, Lords, and Commons It was during the reign of the Tudor monarchs that the modern structure of the English Parliament began to be created. The Tudor monarchy was powerful and there were often periods of several years when parliament did not sit at all. However the Tudor monarchs were astute enough to realise that they needed parliament to legitimise many of their decisions, mostly out of a need to raise money through taxation legitimately without causing discontent. Thus they consolidated the state of affairs whereby monarchs would call and close parliament as and when they needed it. By the time Henry Tudor ( Henry VII ) came to the throne in 1485 the monarch was not a member of either the Upper Chamber or the Lower Chamber.

Consequently, the monarch would have to make his or her feelings known to Parliament through his or her supporters in both houses. Proceedings were regulated by the presiding officer in either chamber. From the 1540s the presiding officer in the House of Commons became formally known as the " Speaker ", having previously been referred to as the "prolocutor" or "parlour" (a semi-official position, often nominated by the monarch, that had existed ever since Peter de Montfort had acted as the presiding officer of the Oxford Parliament of 1258). This was not an enviable job. When the House of Commons was unhappy it was the Speaker who had to deliver this news to the monarch. This began the tradition whereby the Speaker of the House of Commons is dragged to the Speaker's Chair by other members once elected. A member of either chamber could present a "bill" to parliament. Bills supported by the monarch were often proposed by members of the Privy Council who sat in parliament. In order for a bill to become law it would have to be approved by a majority of both Houses of Parliament before it passed to the monarch for royal assent or veto .

The royal veto was applied several times during the 16th and 17th centuries and it is still the right of the monarch of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms to veto legislation today, although it has not been exercised since 1707 (today such exercise would presumably precipitate a constitutional crisis ). When a bill was enacted into law, this process gave it the approval of each estate of the realm: the King, Lords, and Commons. In reality, this was not a democratic process. The Parliament of England was far from being a democratically representative institution in this period. It was possible to assemble the entire peerage and senior clergy of the realm in one place to form the estate of the Upper Chamber. However, the voting franchise for the House of Commons was small; some historians estimate that it was as little as three per cent of the adult male population; and there was no secret ballot. This meant that elections could be controlled by local grandees, because in many boroughs a majority of voters were in some way dependent on a powerful individual, or else could be bought by money or concessions. If these grandees were supporters of the incumbent monarch, this gave the Crown and its ministers considerable influence over the business of parliament.

Many of the men elected to parliament did not relish the prospect of having to act in the interests of others. So a law was enacted, still on the statute book today, whereby it became unlawful for members of the House of Commons to resign their seat unless they were granted a position directly within the patronage of the monarchy (today this latter restriction leads to a legal fiction allowing de facto resignation despite the prohibition, but nevertheless it is a resignation which needs the permission of the Crown). However, it must be emphasised that while several elections to parliament in this period were in some way corrupt by modern standards, many elections involved genuine contests between rival candidates, even though the ballot was not secret. It was in this period that the Palace of Westminster was established as the seat of the English Parliament. In 1548, the House of Commons was granted a regular meeting place by the Crown, St Stephen's Chapel . This had been a royal chapel. It was made into a debating chamber after Henry VIII became the last monarch to use the Palace of Westminster as a place of residence and following the suppression of the college there.

This room became the home of the House of Commons until it was destroyed by fire in 1834, although the interior was altered several times up until then. The structure of this room was pivotal in the development of the Parliament of England. While most modern legislatures sit in a circular chamber, the benches of the British Houses of Parliament are laid out in the form of choir stalls in a chapel, simply because this is the part of the original room that the members of the House of Commons utilised when they were granted use of St Stephen's Chapel. This structure took on a new significance with the emergence of political parties in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as the tradition began whereby the members of the governing party would sit on the benches to the right of the Speaker and the opposition members on the benches to the left. It is said that the Speaker's chair was placed in front of the chapel's altar. As Members came and went they observed the custom of bowing to the altar and continued to do so, even when it had been taken away, thus then bowing to the Chair, as is still the custom today.

The numbers of the Lords Spiritual diminished under Henry VIII, who commanded the Dissolution of the Monasteries , thereby depriving the abbots and priors of their seats in the Upper House. For the first time, the Lords Temporal were more numerous than the Lords Spiritual. Currently, the Lords Spiritual consist of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, and twenty-one other English diocesan bishops in seniority of appointment to a diocese. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535–42 annexed Wales as part of England and this brought Welsh representatives into the Parliament of England, first elected in 1542. Rebellion and revolution List of Parliaments of England Parliament had not always submitted to the wishes of the Tudor monarchs. But parliamentary criticism of the monarchy reached new levels in the 17th century. When the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, died in 1603, King James VI of Scotland came to power as King James I, founding the Stuart monarchy.

In 1628, alarmed by the arbitrary exercise of royal power, the House of Commons submitted to Charles I the Petition of Right , demanding the restoration of their liberties. Though he accepted the petition, Charles later dissolved parliament and ruled without them for eleven years. It was only after the financial disaster of the Scottish Bishops' Wars (1639–1640) that he was forced to recall Parliament so that they could authorise new taxes. This resulted in the calling of the assemblies known historically as the Short Parliament of 1640 and the Long Parliament , which sat with several breaks and in various forms between 1640 and 1660. The Long Parliament was characterised by the growing number of critics of the king who sat in it. The most prominent of these critics in the House of Commons was John Pym . Tensions between the king and his parliament reached boiling point in January 1642 when Charles entered the House of Commons and tried, unsuccessfully, to arrest Pym and four other members for their alleged treason. The five members had been tipped off about this, and by the time Charles came into the chamber with a group of soldiers they had disappeared.

Charles was further humiliated when he asked the Speaker, William Lenthall , to give their whereabouts, which Lenthall famously refused to do. From then on relations between the king and his parliament deteriorated further. When trouble started to brew in Ireland, both Charles and his parliament raised armies to quell the uprisings by native Catholics there. It was not long before it was clear that these forces would end up fighting each other, leading to the English Civil War which began with the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642: those supporting the cause of parliament were called Parliamentarians (or Roundheads ). Battles between Crown and Parliament would continue throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but parliament was no longer subservient to the English monarchy. This change was symbolised in the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It is somewhat ironic that this event was not instigated by the elected representatives of the realm. In Pride's Purge of December 1648, the New Model Army (which by then had emerged as the leading force in the parliamentary alliance) purged Parliament of members that did not support them.

The remaining " Rump Parliament ", as it was later referred to by critics, enacted legislation to put the king on trial for treason. This trial, the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion, led to the execution of the king and the start of an 11 year republic. The House of Lords was abolished and the purged House of Commons governed England until April 1653, when army chief Oliver Cromwell dissolved it following disagreements over religious policy and how to carry out elections to parliament. Cromwell later convened a parliament of religious radicals in 1653, commonly known as Barebone's Parliament , followed by the unicameral First Protectorate Parliament that sat from September 1654 to January 1655 and the Second Protectorate Parliament that sat in two sessions between 1656 and 1658, the first session was unicameral and the second session was bicameral. Although it is easy to dismiss the English Republic of 1649-60 as nothing more than a Cromwellian military dictatorship, the events that took place in this decade were hugely important in determining the future of parliament.

First, it was during the sitting of the first Rump Parliament that members of the House of Commons became known as "MPs" (Members of Parliament). Second, Cromwell gave a huge degree of freedom to his parliaments, although royalists were barred from sitting in all but a handful of cases. His vision of parliament appears to have been largely based on the example of the Elizabethan parliaments. However, he underestimated the extent to which Elizabeth I and her ministers had directly and indirectly influenced the decision-making process of her parliaments. He was thus always surprised when they became troublesome. He ended up dissolving each parliament that he convened. Yet it is worth noting that the structure of the second session of the Second Protectorate Parliament of 1658 was almost identical to the parliamentary structure consolidated in the Glorious Revolution Settlement of 1689. In 1653 Cromwell had been made head of state with the title Lord Protector of the Realm. The Second Protectorate Parliament offered him the crown. Cromwell rejected this offer, but the governmental structure embodied in the final version of the Humble Petition and Advice was a basis for all future parliaments.

It proposed an elected House of Commons as the Lower Chamber, a House of Lords containing peers of the realm as the Upper Chamber, and a constitutional monarchy, subservient to parliament and the laws of the nation, as the executive arm of the state at the top of the tree, assisted in carrying out their duties by a Privy Council. Oliver Cromwell had thus inadvertently presided over the creation of a basis for the future parliamentary government of England. In 1657 he had the Parliament of Scotland unified with the English Parliament. In terms of the evolution of parliament as an institution, by far the most important development during the republic was the sitting of the Rump Parliament between 1649 and 1653. This proved that parliament could survive without a monarchy and a House of Lords if it wanted to. Future English monarchs would never forget this. Charles I was the last English monarch ever to enter the House of Commons. Even to this day, a Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom is sent to Buckingham Palace as a ceremonial hostage during the State Opening of Parliament , in order to ensure the safe return of the sovereign from a potentially hostile parliament.

During the ceremony the monarch sits on the throne in the House of Lords and signals for the Lord Great Chamberlain to summon the House of Commons to the Lords Chamber. The Lord Great Chamberlain then raises his wand of office to signal to the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod , who has been waiting in the central lobby. Black Rod turns and, escorted by the doorkeeper of the House of Lords and an inspector of police, approaches the doors to the chamber of the Commons. The doors are slammed in his face – symbolising the right of the Commons to debate without the presence of the Queen's representative. He then strikes three times with his staff (the Black Rod), and he is admitted. Parliament from the Restoration to the Act of Settlement The revolutionary events that occurred between 1620 and 1689 all took place in the name of parliament. The new status of parliament as the central governmental organ of the English state was consolidated during the events surrounding the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Following the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658, his son Richard Cromwell succeeded him as Lord Protector, summoning the Third Protectorate Parliament in the process.

When this parliament was dissolved following pressure from the army in April 1659, the Rump Parliament was recalled at the insistence of the surviving army grandees . This in turn was dissolved in a coup led by army general John Lambert , leading to the formation of the Committee of Safety , dominated by Lambert and his supporters. When the breakaway forces of George Monck invaded England from Scotland where they had been stationed—without Lambert's supporters putting up a fight—Monck temporarily recalled the Rump Parliament and reversed Pride's Purge by recalling the entirety of the Long Parliament. They then voted to dissolve themselves and call new elections, which were arguably the most democratic for 20 years although the franchise was still very small. This led to the calling of the Convention Parliament which was dominated by royalists. This parliament voted to reinstate the monarchy and the House of Lords. Charles II returned to England as king in May 1660. The Anglo-Scottish parliamentary union that Cromwell had established was dissolved in 1661 when the Scottish Parliament resumed its separate meeting place in Edinburgh. The Restoration began the tradition whereby all governments looked to parliament for legitimacy.

In 1681 Charles II dissolved parliament and ruled without them for the last four years of his reign. This followed bitter disagreements between the king and parliament that had occurred between 1679 and 1681. Charles took a big gamble by doing this. He risked the possibility of a military showdown akin to that of 1642. However he rightly predicted that the nation did not want another civil war. Parliament disbanded without a fight. Events that followed ensured that this would be nothing but a temporary blip. Charles II died in 1685 and he was succeeded by his brother James II . During his lifetime Charles had always pledged loyalty to the Protestant Church of England, despite his private Catholic sympathies. James was openly Catholic. He attempted to lift restrictions on Catholics taking up public offices. This was bitterly opposed by Protestants in his kingdom. They invited William of Orange , [2] a Protestant who had married Mary, daughter of James II and Anne Hyde to invade England and claim the throne.

William assembled an army estimated at 15,000 soldiers (11,000 foot and 4000 horse) [3] and landed at Brixham in southwest England in November, 1688. When many Protestant officers, including James's close adviser, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough , defected from the English army to William's invasion force, James fled the country. Parliament then offered the Crown to his Protestant daughter Mary , instead of his son ( James Francis Edward Stuart ). Mary refused the offer, and instead William and Mary ruled jointly, with both having the right to rule alone on the other's death. As part of the compromise in allowing William to be King—called the Glorious Revolution —Parliament was able to have the 1689 Bill of Rights enacted. Later the 1701 Act of Settlement was approved. These were statutes that lawfully upheld the prominence of parliament for the first time in English history. These events marked the beginning of the English constitutional monarchy and its role as one of the three elements of parliament.

Union: the Parliament of Great Britain Following the Treaty of Union in 1707, Acts of Parliament passed in the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland created a new Kingdom of Great Britain and dissolved both parliaments, replacing them with a new Parliament of Great Britain based in the former home of the English parliament. The Parliament of Great Britain later became the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1801 when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed through the Act of Union 1800 . Places where Parliament has been held other than London • Link My Lord Montagu's scheming, recorded on March 14 1659/60, is to influence the election of the two members for the County of Huntingdonshire. Each County sent two members to Parliament, while many other places sent one member. These were not modern elections. The franchise was limited, and there was no secret ballot. Some of the infamous "Rotten" boroughs, once thriving towns, were already small villages. The system was reformed in the 19th Century, starting in 1832 with the Great Reform Act.

Perhaps the last vestiges of the old system were the university seats for Oxford and Cambridge, which survived until the middle of the last century. ✹ • Link Sidelight on public attitudes toward the Rump: Those with access to a research library’s periodical department might want to look up an article appearing in the 50th anniversary issue, November 2002, of “Past and Present: A journal of historical studies,” from Oxford Univ. Press. In it, “Mark Jenner employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the cathartic function of laughter and the scatology of carnival to enrich our understanding of what people were doing when they burned carcasses and sang bawdy songs on the London streets of 1659-62 in mockery of the Rump Parliament.”---Adam Fox, 7 March 2003 Times Literary Supplement, p. 27. ✹ Question B2 (2) In what ways and for what reasons did the functions and powers of Parliament change between the reigns of Henry III and Charles I? During the reign of Henry III the term 'Parliament' was coined to represent a meeting of a great council of barons that would advise the king on law to be passed in England.

It began small with representation solely from the super wealthy and upper clergy, with a temporary and unstable as well as insubstantial amount of power. Dissatisfaction with the actions taken by Henry III during he reign led to a semi-radical faction of lords to rise against him, one of which being Simon de Montfort. De Montfort was the "inventor" of the next stage of parliamentary development when he devised the make-up of the Model Parliament which was to now include a knight from every shire as well as another representative. Eventually of course, these factions of barons and lesser nobility would split into the houses of Lords and Commons, but that was still far off. After the reign of Henry III, in the reign of Edward I, Parliament was only called occasionally as a tool to be used by the king to ease in his legislation. But it wasn't until his successor Edward II's reign that Parliament in the form of the noble class, spoke out to the king. Edward II loved to play favorites but soon found that the rest of his nobility weren't pleased with this.

With the Ordinance issued in 1311 Parliament convinced or tried to convince the king to get rid of Piers Gaveston if he wanted his policies to pass through without trouble or to receive Parliamentary grants. When he married Isabella though and received her dowry, Parliament was easily bought off though discontent remained. From here history learns a lesson that if the king wants $ and peace among subjects he can't play favorites and must get on with his Parliament. Although kings occasionally tried to get along without Parliament, from the reign of Edward II onwards Parliament was staffed more by professionals - though the mentality of it only being a temporary body remained until Civil War broke out in 1642. Parliament may have lost a bit of ground beneath Richard II, who wasn't very wise in dealing with them either, and during the Hundred Years War the main function of Parliament was to grant kings money to pursue France (Henry V) or to deny it. Also the Wars of the Roses were as well a time semi-latency in parliamentary development. Working relationships were hard to formulate with a quickly passing line of succession. Henry VI was incompetent when it came to royal policy and as such his wife, Margaret and the Beauforts ruled.

They did as much they could to keep Richard, Duke of York at bay. Parliament was their tool to seize his lands while he was away and later became Warwick the Kingmaker's tool to place Edward II on the throne. A few successions later beneath Henry VII, Parliament became a tool of fiscal change and a way to pass legislation effectively. Both he and his son, Henry VIII, understood that they must work with Parliament and Henry VIII worked closely with it. It consistently began to be called every three years through both reigns and was ruthlessly used during both. Henry VIII used Parliament to declare his separation from Rome and to crown his new church, both of which the king would not have been able to accomplish without MPs' consent. Mary's, or "Bloody Mary's", reign passed quickly into the hands of her much more capable sister Elizabeth. Though it must be said that Mary had not been trained for the throne, so her involvement with Parliament was minimal and she tried to carry out her Catholic beliefs anyway, but things weren't going to happen that way. Elizabeth on the other hand used Parliament to her full advantage throughout her disputes with Spain. She came out with an empty treasury and the nickname "Good Queen Bess".

Also a stable - possibly too much so - administration was set up that lasted too long into James I's reign. The early Stuarts were fools when it came to dealing with Parliament. James I made repeated promises to work with Parliament that he never managed to follow through on, which greatly fed into growing animosity. Because of an empty treasury and a system of substantial rewards to he friends, James I needed to find fast ways of gaining income, so he decided to turn away from Parliament and began reviving old feudal rights and placing impositions on people. Parliaments were not fond of this and Robert Cecil, one of the king's chief advisors, recognized this. In 1610 he proposed the Great Contract in which the king would relinquish fiscal feudalism and wardship in return for a yearly income. This however was rejected. Until 1625 at the end of his reign, James I continued to further what Parliament considered illegal policies and to promote his divine right to the throne. If war hadn't broken out between Frederick V and the Spanish Hapsburgs, the king and Parliament would never have agreed on anything.

But at Buckingham's and Charles' urging, the "peacemaker" became no more and met with a "Happy Parliament" who urged him toward war. The biggest growth in Parliamentary power came beneath Charles I. This ruler and his Parliament were at such odds that for 11 years from 1629 to 1640, Parliament was nonexistent. The king refused to call it because as he saw it, nothing could be accomplished. When his Ship Money collection was brought to court in 1635, a 7-5 decision in his favor showed growing defiance. When war forced him to call parliament in 1640, MPs passed the Triennial Act which stated that Parliament could only dissolve itself, that they were the only body that could pass legislation and the MPs had to be called every three years. This Long Parliament remained in session for years to come that encompassed a Militia Bill of 1640, the Great Remonstrance 1641 (recalling Elliot's 3 charges against Charles) and eventually the formation of its own faction in a Civil War which began the following year on August 22.

Throughout the Civil War and later revolution the shift of power came full circle to rest upon the reinstatement of Charles II in 1660. During these wars Parliament managed to defeat the king, raise an army by which it could only govern, then executed the king (1649), dissolved by the very militia it had raised (the Rump and Pride's Purge) to only be dismissed by the very man they had placed in power (Oliver Cromwell). Parliament had grown immensely and almost destroyed itself with its new found power. By 1657 hints or ghosts of the Houses of Lords and Commons began to form once again as the Council and House of Peers and it was they who chose to bring back the monarchy, with a little military persuasion from General Monck in 1660. This essay has some flaws of expression and organization. Nonetheless, it earned a solid A. This was because of its many virtues. It is crammed full of relevant information; - much of it specific and exact. Anyone who read it, would know far more about the functions and power of Parliament afterwards than before. It is organized simply around a narrative - moving from the earliest king to the latest.

Although in the rush of writing a long essay under examination conditions, some phrases are not 100% clear, it is basically written in clear and grammatical English. NB An essay does not have to be perfect in every respect in order to be good enough to earn an A. Knowing a lot about the topic is most of the battle. Government | S-cool, the revision website S-cool, the revision website The structure of government The structure of government in the fifteenth century was very different to what we are used to today. Parliament was used infrequently often for writs, issued by the King to suit himself (usually when he needed money!). Although it was the King who would call parliaments and establish councils, this did not mean that he had absolute, arbitrary rule. It was accepted that the King was subject to the laws of the land, and for that reason, those who were ruled by Henry VII, and the other Tudors for that matter, considered constitutional law supreme. This idea went right back to the Magna Carta of 1216. The Royal Household This was the centre of government. It is sometimes referred to as the King's court - it's the same thing.

Henry appreciated the need to make his own household a majestic and glittering court. Where he was frugal with money in other areas of government, he spent enormous amounts of money on his court. Every noble would have had a household for the administration of their property and the localities over which they presided. This was the highest household in the land, and many nobles would have spent much of their time at court, rather than in their own households, especially if they had a central role in the running of the country. It was mobile, following the King wherever he went, but for most of the time the court was in one of the palaces in London. As the King owned much of the land in the Kingdom, he had to administer the collection of rents and other dues. The household had another role in that it was where the informal business of government took place. Many issues would have been discussed along the corridors of the palace, and these informal chats could have a significant impact on legislation and cases brought before the numerous courts. This aspect of the Royal household also made it a melting pot for political intrigue and faction.

The Councils and Great Councils A council was a group of individuals (councillors) who met on a regular basis to provide advice to the King, to be the centre of national administration, and to be a judicial court. It supervised the economic and religious life of the country also. (To a limited extent Henry already had a council when he became King as he had a number of advisors who had been resident at his court in Brittany, and who helped him win the backing of the French King for his invasion of England.) For most of the time the court was involved with day-to-day mundane tasks, only occasionally was it the centre of high politics. Historians writing earlier in the Twentieth century held the view that Henry's councils constituted a new way of governing the country, however, nowadays, most historians are agreed that there are not many differences between the councils of Edward IV and Henry VII. Nevertheless, one of the differences was that Henry created offshoots form the main council to deal with specific areas of administration, thereby increasing effectiveness. An example of one of these was the 'Council Learned in Law' established in 1495. Henry's councils were large (here we see continuity with councils of the past).

He had over 240 councillors. Not all of these would meet at one time. Attendance records show that around 24 would meet at any one sitting. The Great Councils were used later on in Henry's reign. These were more carefully selected men, and they would discuss issues at the heart of policy-making, like how much taxation to levy, foreign affairs and military campaign tactics. The notion of a Great Council, while not Henry's own idea, was a medieval institution that had fallen out of use by fifteenth century monarchs. Towards the end of his reign he ruled with the Council Learned only. John Guy maintains that this was 'personal monarchy at its height'. The Court of Star Chamber So called because the room that this group met in had stars on the ceiling. The role of this group was to preside over the hearings of poor men's legal suits, known as 'requests'. The role of the Court of Star Chamber was increased in Henry's reign to include two tribunals, one of 1487, and the other of 1495. The 1487 court dealt with laws against rioters and the likes.

The court of 1495 was set up to deal with offences of perjury. Neither of these tribunals survived Henry's death. Parliament had the crucial role of being a point of contact between the Royal household and the localities. Local representatives would sit in parliament to petition the king with grievances. Parliament would also levy taxation. The members were in an ideal position to know how much money their constituency was able to raise. The role of parliament was to pass laws that would go into the Statute Book. However, it was not a permanent institution. Remember that it met only when the King summoned it. Typically, they were used by all of the Tudor monarchs when the King or Queen was short of money. This gave to parliament what historians call 'the power of the purse'. In all, the parliaments of Henry VII met 7 times, and for a total of 24 weeks out of a reign of 24 years. It was an institutionused far more at the beginning of his reign than later on. This was not crucial to Henry since he was careful with money, and he did not pursue an aggressive foreign policy. What historians say about Henry's use of parliament: S.B.

Chrimes: "Little or nothing of much significance occurred in the history of parliament in the reign of Henry VII...The precedents already set over the previous century or so were followed." R.L. Storey: "The history of parliament in Edward IV's reign is very similar to what it was in Henry's." J. Loach: "The parliaments of Henry VII's reign, and indeed, those of Henry VIII before 1529, were very like those of the Yorkists...Henry VII's parliaments were much more concerned with the needs of the monarch and his greater subjects than they were with the good of the country as a whole." M.A.R. Graves: "Chrimes might dismiss the legislative record of Henry VII's parliaments because few of the 192 Acts were of major importance to the crown. Yet their intrinsic significance should not be denied. Over twenty Acts restored attainted persons. The lawyers' hands were writ large in legal reforms concerning murder, abduction, bail, fraud and counterfeit"

Question: During the reign of which king did the 'Model Parliament' sit?
Answer: EDWARD I