Plena Potestas and Consent in Medieval Assemblies: A Study in Romano-Canonical Procedure and the Rise of Representation, 1150–1325

Abstract

By the end of the thirteenth century the royal writ of summons to Parliament usually specified that communities send representatives with “full power” to consent to whatever should be ordained by the king in his court and council. This “full power” was the famous plena potestas which was stated in the mandates carried by knights and burgesses to Parliament and by delegates of cities and towns to Cortes and States General, and which is still current in proxies for stockholders' meetings. It has, of course, like almost every word of the terminology in documents relating to representation, challenged interpretation: on the one side is the argument of J. G. Edwards, who confines himself to England, that plena potestas implied an almost political or sovereign consent which limited the royal authority; on the other, the assumption that it was an expression of involuntary consent to the acts and decisions of the royal government. In general, of course, whatever modern scholars have decided as to the right of consent has resulted either from modern conceptions of representation or from a strict interpretation of the terminology in the sources for the history of assemblies. No one has examined plena potestas in the light of the legal theory and procedure of the thirteenth century It is possible that by studying how legists and canonists viewed the meaning of plena potestas—for it, like most of the terminology in the mandate, came from Roman Law—we can find at least a relatively new approach to the problem of medieval consent.