Parliament in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

THE real problem in the history of parliament, it has been rightly said, is not so much to explain the beginnings of certain modern practices in the house of commons as to attempt to show why popular representation became an essential and inseparable feature of parliament.' Marked as the changes have been in the structure and complexion of parliament, the use of elected representatives has been a persistent feature of parliament since the thirteenth century. In the course of time, this feature has become a dominant and basic fact in modern political institutions. The problem is not to be clarified by any search into origins, no matter how ingenious or far-reaching.2 The house of commons, as we know it today, may be said to date mainly from the seventeenth century, most of its procedure from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The explanation is therefore to be found in tracing the increasing activities of the representatives in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period; it is to be found in tracing the new ideas consequent upon these activities, which resulted in the commons' coming to be considered an essential part of the machinery of parliament. It was the grafting of new ideas and practices onto the old institution which brought about the transformation of the medieval into the modern parliament. Parliament began in the thirteenth century as an expanded session of the king's council. Administrative expedience and financial needs had caused the king to summon before his council at Westminster not only the magnates and greater barons but also elected representatives of the counties and towns. Those representatives, however, appeared only by royal command, and they treated upon those matters in which the king was interested. Throughout the fourteenth and the greater part of the fifteenth centuries, parliament was in a very real sense the king's court. The magnates and representatives in the fourteenth century were scarcely more than the servants and petitioners of the prerogative, and their wishes and grievances were redressed