Rolls Of Parliament Research Articles

Counting the ‘Cavaliers’: Two Contemporary Analyses of the Political Wing of the Scots Jacobite Underground in the Union Parliament1

AbstractUnderground movements are understandably reluctant to record the names and numbers of their adherents because any such compilation is manifestly a hostage to fortune. Hence very few lists of politically active Jacobites actually compiled by the Jacobites themselves have survived to the present day. In the French foreign ministry archives at La Corneille, however, there is a rare and previously unknown/unused example of such a list. ‘The Rolls of Parliament as they stand’, is a classic printed, marked list of all the lords entitled to sit in, and commissioners elected to, Queen Anne's Union Parliament. It identifies the political allegiances of the great majority of the sitting commissioners and peers, and in particular the Jacobites among them. Rather better known, yet hitherto seldom consulted or used, is a debriefing document describing the political alignment of a great many of those in parliament and the general political inclination of their constituents written by Captain Harry Straton for the Jacobite King James III and VIII in August 1706. These two sources are the basis of the analysis that follows. The focus is on what these two Jacobite analyses of the state of Scotland and Scottish politics can tell us about the political dynamics of the Scottish Parliament and the country more broadly on the eve of the Union debates.

Henry Knighton, the Commons and the crisis of governance in the 1380s

Abstract This discussion provides the first in-depth investigation into the meaning and significance of a quite exceptional petition presented by the parliamentary Commons in the reign of Richard II. The petition survives as a unique copy in the chronicle of Henry Knighton: it was not recorded on the parliament roll. Knighton inserted the petition into his more general account of the Merciless Parliament of 1388. In this discussion I argue that the petition is most likely to have been presented in the parliament that met in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and as a result holds great constitutional significance.

INTRODUCTION

The opening decades of the twenty-first century have seen a notable revival of interest in the records of the medieval English parliament. In 2004–2005 a team of scholars funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Chris Given-Wilson published The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME), a new electronic and print edition, with full translation, of the extant parliament rolls for the reigns of Edward I to Henry VII. Because PROME focuses on those aspects of parliamentary business that were committed to permanent record on the parliament rolls, it does not consider systematically the other available records associated with the medieval parliament. In particular, it does not reproduce the substantial numbers of unenrolled petitions submitted in parliament that were printed in the eighteenth-century edition of the rolls, Rotuli Parliamentorum (RP), though it does include introductory materials and appendices providing summaries and transcripts of these and other ancillary documents.

APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF KNOWN COMMON PETITIONS, 1290–1340

The table that follows attempts to summarize all known instances of extant common petitions, either in original form, in enrolments on the parliament rolls, or in transcriptions made elsewhere in the public records and in other archives, between the earliest known common petition (of 1290) and the year 1340. After 1343 the clerks of parliament normally included on the parliament roll a transcript of the schedule of common petitions submitted in the assembly, often in conjunction with grants of taxation; although there remain a significant number of unenrolled common petitions dating from after 1340, the overall chronology of the records is therefore rather more straightforward.

Bills of Attainder

What are bills of attainder? The traditional view is that bills of attainder are legislation that punishes an individual without judicial process. The Bill of Attainder Clause in Article I, Section 9 prohibits the Congress from passing such bills. But what about the President? The traditional view would seem to rule out application of the Clause to the President (acting without Congress) and to executive agencies, since neither passes bills.This Article aims to bring historical evidence to bear on the question of the scope of the Bill of Attainder Clause. The argument of the Article is that bills of attainder are best understood as a summary form of legal process, rather than a legislative act. This argument is based on a detailed historical reconstruction of English and early American practices, beginning with a study of the medieval Parliament rolls, year books, and other late medieval English texts, and early modern parliamentary diaries and journals covering the attainders of Elizabeth Barton under Henry VIII and Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, under Charles I. The Article then turns to America, where it illustrates the influence of English practices in revolutionary New York and Pennsylvania, drawing primarily on legislative records, correspondence, memoirs, and early histories. The Article then leverages this historical research to argue in favor of interpreting the Bill of Attainder Clause to apply to summary legal proceedings conducted by the Executive.

JENNI NUTTALL, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language, and Politics in Late Medieval England.

THE CREATION OF LANCASTRIAN KINGSHIP is about political language; drawing heavily on the work of J. G. A. Pocock, it focuses on reconstructing ‘textual environments’ of the early fifteenth century. Jenni Nuttall suggests that political languages and paradigms can structure how people think, taking the years following the deposition of Richard II as her case study. Focusing on two aspects of the retrospective depiction of Richard’s reign, she argues that these two paradigms structured texts and discourse in the early years of Lancastrian rule. The two aspects of the portrayal of Richard (in the articles of deposition and elsewhere) in which she is interested are the idea that his household was youthful, tyrannical, and anti-truth-telling, and the claim that his finances were fraudulent and non-reciprocal. The book is divided into two sections which deal with these two aspects: ‘Household Narratives’, and ‘Credit and Love’. Nuttall’s work is deeply interdisciplinary, moving easily between the Parliament Roll, chronicles, and poetry. Texts which are given particular attention include poems such as Richard the Redeless, The Crowned King, Mum and the Sothsegger, and Hoccleve’s writings, and chronicle writing such as Adam Usk’s and the Vita Ricardi Secundi. There are some persuasive and controlled close readings, particularly of Hoccleve’s poetry. Nuttall is an accomplished literary critic and does not attempt to flatten out the differences between diverse kinds of texts. Her argument that the influence of discourses about politics is seen in personal narratives—for example that Hoccleve’s discussion of his own financial mismanagement is indebted to discussions of financial mismanagement which have their root in critiques of Richard’s fraudulent financial practices—are intriguing and well-documented, if ultimately speculative. Nuttall’s analysis tends to be both imaginative in its insights and scholarly in its use of source and context. She shows an understanding of texts in synchronic and in diachronic terms, exploring how an idea functions at its particular historical moment and how ideas develop across time. Nuttall suggests that discourses about Richard are initially used as an explanation of what happened—Henry’s usurpation—but then become narratives of expectation: what the Lancastrian kings should do instead. They thus become ways of holding Henry to account—and indeed of criticizing him, as the discourses initially harnessed by Lancastrian apologists slip out of their control. Nuttall’s understanding of discourse as fluid and ultimately resistant to totalizing tendencies is finely honed and compelling.

‘Grace for the rebels’: the role of the royal pardon in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381

This article focuses on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as a means of examining some of the late medieval assumptions about the nature of royal mercy. Rather than adding to the weight of scholarship on the causes and characteristics of the Revolt, this article discusses the views on mercy (‘grace for the rebels’) 1 The parliament rolls of medieval England [hereafter PROME], ed. C. Given-Wilson et al. (CD-ROM. Scholarly Digital Editions, Leicester, 2005), ‘Richard II: parliament of 1381, text and translation’, item 30. I would like to thank the audience of the Oxford Medieval History Seminar for their advice on an early version of this paper, and Mark Ormrod for his helpful comments on this essay in draft form. 1 that were reportedly expressed by all parties during the course of the rebellion. The first section analyses the chronicles and their references to discussion of pardon and mercy during the revolt itself. The second section examines the role of the royal pardon in the subsequent judicial proceedings in the Home Counties — who were the first recipients of pardon, and how were they able to secure royal grace? The final section then discusses the formulation of the pardon in the autumn parliament, and the debate surrounding the course of government policy in the wake of revolt on an unprecedented scale. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Crown and commons shared a common language of pardon, and understood that by framing their discussion in terms of royal grace, they were alluding to a particular kind of idealised relationship between the king and his subjects.

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275-1504

THE Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME) provides for the first time a complete edition of the principal record of the medieval assemblies, from the first surviving roll in 1290 to the last parliament of Henry VII in 1504. PROME supersedes the six-volume Rotuli Parliamentorum, published in 1767–77 under the general editorship of the Reverend John Strachey. The new edition incorporates material edited subsequently, not least by Maitland and by Richardson and Sayles. Other sections are transcribed for the first time: for instance, the rediscovered twelfth and final membrane of the roll for the parliament of October 1318. Unlike the old edition, PROME includes notes of interlineations, erasures, lacunae, and other scribal features. It also describes the condition of each roll. Translations for all parts of the rolls—those parts in English as well as those in Latin and in Anglo-Norman French—are provided in a parallel-text format. Footnotes provide cross-references to original documents (principally the texts of the original bills, petitions, and proviso clauses). References are also supplied for direct quotations and for the chapter numbers of statutes. PROME therefore provides a complete and authoritative text of the rolls. The translations should ensure that the parliament rolls become more widely used as a historical source, and are read in their entirety rather than in excerpted collections.

On—and Off—the Record: The Rolls of Parliament, 1337–1377

On—and Off—the Record: The Rolls of Parliament, 1337–1377

The Forfeiture of Barnard Castle to the Bishop of Durham in 1459

THE DOCUMENT PRINTED BELOW is a hitherto unknown proviso of exemption to the act of attainder of the Coventry parliament of 1459.Those attainted were Richard, Duke of York and the other Yorkist rebels present at the battle of Blore Heath and rout of Ludford, the most important of whom fled abroad. Prominent among these were two leading members of the junior (Middleham) branch of the northern house of Neville: Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury (d. 1460), lessee of the lordship of Barnard Castle in County Durham, and his son and namesake Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, (d. 1471), alias Warwick the Kingmaker, who was lord of Barnard Castle in right of his wife Anne Beauchamp. The act of attainder confiscated all the rebels' possessions and vested them in the Crown. Henry VI accepted only two provisos of exemption. One, which was entered on the parliament roll and printed in the Rolls of Parliament, saved the rights of his two new foundations, Eton College and King's College, Cambridge.! A second, much longer, proviso, hitherto unknown and the subject of this article, reserves the rights to Barnard Castle of Laurence Booth, Bishop of Durham. That Booth secured possession of the lordship at this juncture is well known; indeed Professor Pollard has shown him to have done so even ahead of the meeting of parliament at which the rebels were attainted.2 Specific parliamentary authority for his action was not known. The proviso constitutes a small but significant contribution to the history of the Palatinate which, as we shall see, raises some other significant issues. The Palatinate of Durham was one of the most extensive of medieval liberties, in which the bishops of Durham exercised an authority that elsewhere rested with the king. The Palatinate corresponded broadly to County Durham pre-1974 with certain additions and exclusions. It included certain other liberties in Northumberland, notably Norham, Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands, and in Yorkshire. The most important of the supposed exclusions around the Palatinate's periphery were the lordships of Hartlepool on the North Sea coast and Barnard Castle and the manor of Gainford in the south-west. The lordship of Barnard Castle centred on the market town of that name and the imposing castle standing on a high bluff overlooking the River Tees.Worth £304 in 1488-89, equivalent to the total income of some northern barons, it was an outlying possession of the earls of Warwick from 1296. A key measure of the bishops' regality was their right even to forfeitures for treason. In theory. The principle was admitted by Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Henry VI and Edward IV.3 Practice differed somewhat. If the bishops

Petitions in the Early English Parliaments

It has long escaped the notice of historians that "Petitions" had much importance in the early history of English Parliament. W. Stubbs and his followers, looking from their traditional point of view of "the political assembly: of the Three Estates", treated "taxation" as the most important driving force of parliamentary history and counted petitions as naught. It owes the laborious work of Mr. H. G. Richardson and Professor.G. O. Sayles that petitions have gained a certain attention among the historians.Richardson and Sayles produced an entirely new picture of the early parliaments, questioning, or even denying, the traditional picture of the political "representative" parliament of England. But they went too far to give a modest and. acceptable picture, by disavowing all the parts of the traditional theory both in function and in construction of parliament. The shortcomings of their theory now need to be re-considered and be corrected.The author of this short article wants to make some arguments on this subject by considering such excellent but each isolated works on early petitions together, as the works of Richardson and Sayles, J: G. Edwards, H. L. Gray, A. F. Pollard, A. D. Mayers and D. Rayner. Thus arranging the ideas about early petitions and then re-considering them in the light of the printed rolls and documents, the author anticipates to show one more aspect of the changing phase of parliamentary function and construction than that she has already produced in another article.The main points of this article are twofold. 1) The FUNCTION of early petitions: The earliest petitions had both judicial and executive or administrative charactors. In time, as the judicial charactor became, lost from the records of petitions on the parliament rolls, the executive or administrative records of petitions broke into two kinds, one called the "private" petitions, and the other the "common" petitions. Then even the "private" petitions faded away from the parliament rolls, and the "common" petitions became the only kind of the petitions on the rolls, . growing more and more legislative in charactor. 2) The PROCEDURE of early petitions: Keeping pace with these changes and developments of functions the procedure of petitions differentiated. There developed beside the older process of "private" petitions a new one of the "com-mon" petitions. But this could not mean that, as Richardson and Sayles thought, the former lost its real function in favour of the latter. The development of parliamentary offices in and after the late 14th century seems to show that those functional changes of petitions were, at least from one aspect, rather surface, and were only the results of differentiation of the system of record-making. Of course these differentiation is very important because this in turn suggests the emergence of certain differentiation of ideas of justice, legislation and administration. But the functioning body of parliament as a whole seemes still accumurative and attractive, rather the center of the whole government than some entirely re-constructed two Houses of political charactor.The change and development of the function of early parliamentary petitions coincides with the change and development of the function of early parliaments as a whole, that is, from judicial to legislative. But this change and development was a very slow process, and through this process parliaments still kept and even developed to be the center of the whole government.

The Winchester Session of the 1449 Parliament: A Further Comment

SINCE THE DAYS of Bishop Stubbs, historians of the medieval English parliament and of the fifteenth century have lamented the serious lacunae which exist among the surviving sources for the study of this central institution of government and for the exploration of this muchmisunderstood period. Consequently, the crumbs of evidence which have been located-albeit sometimes in the shape of later copies or transcripts -have been subjected to ultramicroscopic analysis and minutely detailed interpretation. This has certainly been the fate of those fragmentary materials relating to the parliament of 1449 which (aside from the formal parliament roll) have been publicized recently by several historians. These materials consist of (1) a list of members-both lords and commons-of the parliament whose first session opened at Westminster on February 12, 1449; (2) a memorandum of lords' attendance at the same session on March 20, 21, and 24, 1449, along with a report of an exchange of views among the lords on March 20; and (3) a list of lords thought to have been present at the third session of this parliament, held at Winchester between June 16 and July 16, 1449, together with a report of another exchange of views between some of the lords.' These documents survive today as copies of the originals (or as copies of copies of the originals) written in the sixteenth or seventeenth century; but it is remarkable that of all Henry VI's parliaments, it is the assembly of 1449 alone to which all the surviving documents refer. This is undeni-

Councils and Councillors of Henry IV, 1399–1413

The one important, indeed invaluable, source for the history of the council in the early-fifteenth century is the Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 10 Richard II–33 Henry VIII, edited by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas and published by the Record Commission in seven volumes in the years 1834 to 1837, but in so far as the title of this work implies a formal and continuous record of proceedings it is misleading, for, unlike parliament, the council left no regular account of its activities. The Rolls of Parliament, even though their account of the proceedings is one-sided, official and incomplete, do at least record such bare facts as the dates of meeting, the names of the Speakers, and usually the dates of adjournment; but there are no similar rolls for the council. The phrase ‘privy council’ in Nicolas's title is also something of an anachronism, at least for the early part of the period covered. At this time the future privy council was generally known simply as the council or the king's council, although it was sometimes called the continual council to distinguish it from the larger body known to contemporaries as the great council. This distinctionis usually made in official records, but chroniclers often referred indifferently to either body as the council, and the differences are not now always apparent to us.

A Parliament Roll of 1512

Journal Article A Parliament Roll of 1512 Get access E. A. Greening Lamborn E. A. Greening Lamborn Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 189, Issue 1, 14 July 1945, Pages 7–9, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/189.1.7 Published: 14 July 1945

A Parliament Roll of 1512

A Parliament Roll of 1512 Get access E. A. Greening Lamborn E. A. Greening Lamborn Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 188, Issue 13, 30 June 1945, Pages 275–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/188.13.275 Published: 30 June 1945

Parliament Roll of 1512

Parliament Roll of 1512

The Irish Parliament Rolls of the Fifteenth Century

T HE recent appearance of the fourth volume in the Irish Record Office series of the Early Statutes of Ireland completes the publication of the so-called statute rolls to the end of the reign of Edward IV.' We may have to wait some years for the appearance of its successor, but in the meantime Dr. D. B. Quinn has brought together all the accessible information, and a good part of the material, relating to the projected and actual legislation of the Irish parliament during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII.2 While therefore the student of Irish parliamentary history has yet to expect the integral publication of the rolls of Richard III and his successors and, we may add, a collection of parliamentary documents from other sources which the Irish Manuscripts Commission have in hand, he has already at his command by far the greater part of the fifteenth-century material he can ever hope to see in print. It is not then an inappropriate moment at which to assess the contribution this material may make to the history of Ireland and, in particular, to the history of the Irish parliament. In the first place a few words may not be amiss on the title given to the 'statute rolls' from which, with but inconsiderable exceptions, the text of the series from the year 1427 is taken. These rolls are more properly to be described as the rolls of parliament without any qualification. They were known as such not only to contemporaries but certainly as recently as the seventeenth century. Contemporary usage is made clear in a passage in the roll of 27 Henry VI which contains the protestation of the commons when they presented John Chever as their speaker: since it is there stated that the protestation was

The Rolls of Parliament and the New English Dictionary

The Rolls of Parliament and the New English Dictionary

Laurence Minot's Tribute to John Badding

In commemorating the men who fought for “sir Edward” in the battle “of Inglisch men & Normandes in þe Swyn” Laurence Minot praised John Badding “als one of þe best.” Beyond this tribute, however, Badding has remained unknown to the readers of Minot's poems. In editing these poems, Mr. Joseph Hall surmises that, since Badding's name appears in no other account of the fight at Sluys (1340) the poet “has here inserted the name of some comparatively obscure friend of his.” This friend, he thinks, was probably some person connected with the Robert Badding who was M.P. for Winchelsea in 1371, with the John Badding who was M.P. for Rye between 1386 and 1407, or with the John Badding who, according to Rolls of Parliament, I, 413, was involved in the taking of twenty-four livres worth of goods from a vessel belonging to John Houchoun and Thomas Peverell of Sherborne in 1321-22. It is my purpose to show that, whatever his relation to the M.P.'s for Winchelsea and Rye may have been, the John Badding who was involved in the affair of 1321-22 was probably the person to whom Minot paid tribute for his valor in the fight at Sluys. The evidence for this statement is contained in the record mentioned above and in two other records which identify John Badding with the Cinque Ports and show that he was a well known English seaman of the second quarter of the fourteenth century. With these facts established, the justice of Minot's tribute becomes plausible.

XXXVI. Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III. communicated by John Topham, Esq. F.R.S. F.S.A.

I have the honour to lay before the Society the transcript of a record, which, in my opinion, contains some valuable, historical facts. It is divided into three parts. The first part contains the return of a subsidy granted by parliament to king Edward III. in the fifty-first year of his reign A. D. 1377, of four pence to be paid by every lay person in the kingdom, as well male as female, of the age of fourteen years and upwards; real mendicants only excepted. The grant of this subsidy may be seen in that valuable repository of historical information the Rolls of Parliament, vol. II. p. 364. This return states the sums of money which had been levied by the collectors of this tax in the different counties, cities, and principal towns in England, separately; and the number of persons at that time being in each county, city and town, subject to the payment thereof.