Platinum Edition: Disempowering Monarchy, England’s Exceptionalism
'The Origins of the English Parliament', by J. R. Maddicott
J. R. Maddicott wrote:
The protests by bishops and barons at Henry III’s resort to legislation by writ before 1258, bypassing the need for general consent, showed the value set upon what was by now an indivisible association of councils and parliaments with national law-making. Such laws were worth making not only because they were needed but because they could be enforced: the result of the English state’s possessing a uniform common law which overrode local custom (in any case insignificant), which could assimilate new legislation, and which could be administered through central and local courts …
… [O]ther European states [did not] possess the equivalent of Magna Carta to serve as a permanent pole of attraction for all the ruler’s subjects: subjects who, in England, and partly through the instrumentation of the Charter, came to see themselves as constituting a communitas unknown elsewhere. Although it has become a commonplace to note that other rulers conceded grants of national liberties in the period of the Charter, few if any were addressed to so socially comprehensive a list of grantees, from archbishops to ‘everyone in our kingdom’, as Magna Carta’s 1225 reissue; and few were of more than temporary importance. (Hungary’s Golden Bull may be a possible exception).
The reason for these differences lay in two characteristics of the English state. In no other country was the pressure of royal government, which produced the Charter and kept it in the forefront of political consciousness for the next century, so intense; and no other country possessed so vigorous a conciliar tradition as to be able to match a national charter with the aspirations of those meeting regularly in a national assembly. The charters obtained by the leagues in France, though their common features reflected common aims, were granted to loose and temporary regional federations—not to established local communities like those of the English shires and still less to a single communitas reified in a national assembly, like that which received the 1225 reissue in England. In both social and political terms, in terms of interests which bridged classes and the institutions through which these interests were expressed, association remained a more potent force in England than in any other western monarchy …
… Modern writing on the origins of the English parliament generally takes the thirteenth century as its starting point. It was then that the word moved into common usage, while the thing itself acquired its later constitution of king, lords, and commons within a comparable pan-European context of rising representative institutions. This study has taken a different (and older) approach in attempting to show that parliament’s ultimate origins lay much further back, with the great assemblies which first appeared under Æthelstan in the tenth century and which may in turn, like so many early English institutions, have had Carolingian antecedents. These portentous gatherings were the lineal ancestors of the more brightly illuminated councils and parliaments of the post-Magna Carta world. From this time onwards the line joining the witan [an Anglo-Saxon national council or parliament] to the concilia and colloquia of Anglo-Norman and Angevin England, and thence to the parliaments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, remained essentially unbroken …
… Beyond the successional nature of assembly meetings, continuity was of two main kinds: of personnel in attendance and of function … To state that the prelates and magnates served as counsellors throughout this long period is to state the obvious … Less obvious perhaps are the long continuities in the attendance of two other groups: the king’s ministers and the lesser landholders … The scribes who wrote those charters must also have been in attendance; and given their expertise and their literacy it is not inconceivable that they contributed to discussion. If men of this sort look very different from the ministers present in thirteenth-century parliaments—chancellor, treasurer, judges, royal clerks—the difference marks the expansion of public offices in the meantime, beyond the boundaries of the royal household, rather than any break in the succession of skilled men whom the king trusted, at assemblies as elsewhere …
… More important still was continuity of function. Throughout the period the main work of central assemblies was resolutely political. Contemporary perceptions, as well as the historical record, show them to have been engaged above all in the management of the affairs of the realm. William of Malmesbury’s remarks of c.1130 on the Conqueror’s crown-wearing councils, where three times a year the great men came to court ‘to deal with vital business affecting the realm’ … compare closely with the statement made in the Provisions of Oxford, more than a century later, that parliaments were to be held three times a year ‘to review the state of the realm and to deal with the common business of the realm and of the king together’ …
The consistency of language here, over a period of about 150 years, is striking. A later source is rather more specific. The Modus Tenendi Parliamentum tells us that the first item on parliament’s agenda is ‘war, if there is a war, and other matters concerning the persons of the King, Queen, and their children’, and, secondly, ‘matters of common concern to the realm’. Only then comes ‘private business according to the order of petitions filed’, pointing to the clear priority which the Modus, like Edward I’s directions, gives to politics over justice in parliament’s work …
… Set besides these affairs of state, the assembly’s work in law-making and passing judgement in state trials was much more intermittent; though hardly less political in its implications. Yet much, of course, did change between Æthelstan’s reign and Edward II’s.
The first important turning point came with the Norman Conquest.
As we have seen, the assemblies that William I inherited from his English predecessors were occasions for charismatic display, social bonding, and the transaction of national business. Like so many Anglo-Norman institutions, the councils of the Conquest were those of Anglo-Saxon England under new management. It was the basis for the magnates’ attendance that was innovatory. A new landed class holding from the king replaced the shattered nobility of pre-Conquest England, who had held their lands more freely, often by bookright … Yet the ideal of representation which the witan [national council later known as ‘parliament’] embodied was real enough. It rested, however, not on election, but on the implied notion … that the country’s assembled great men could act as spokesmen for the realm.
For about 150 years after the Conquest this ceased to be true. None of the councils of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries can be seen, or were seen by contemporaries, as representative bodies, and no one wrote of ‘the concilium of the English people’. The councils which initiated the Domesday survey or settled the succession on Matilda were feudal gatherings of a royal lord and his tenants. In this sense they were akin to the private honor courts of the magnates …
… But the post-Conquest councils, though indigenous by descent, stood for the conquerors against the conquered, and their members were largely separated by language, culture, and social outlook from their inferiors. They were the vassals of a foreign lord, not the representatives of a native people.
A second turning point in the evolution of assemblies sprang from this first one, though it greatly outstripped the introduction of feudal tenure in ultimate importance. It arose from the complex of changes attendant on the reintroduction of national taxation between 1188 and 1225. National taxation restored to great councils (as they can now be termed), for onward transmission to the parliaments of the thirteenth century, the representative qualities which assemblies had lacked since the Conquest …
[T]hose attending the assembly are viewed by the crown as explicitly representative figures, though not elected ones. But at the same time as the universal embrace of tenure, unique in Europe, allowed the crown to develop the notion of representation in its own fiscal interest, this idea was also emerging from below, largely in response to the fiscal pressures applied by the crown. When the magnates, meeting in council at Oxford in 1205, forced John to swear to preserve intact ‘the rights of the kingdom of England with their counsel’, they took a tentative step towards identifying themselves with the realm and its interests. A further move in that direction came with Magna Carta, negotiated by barons and churchmen but granted to ‘all free men’. The process was capped and placed within a firmer institutional framework when Henry III reissued the Charters in 1225 in return for a tax grant. Just as the grant was actually made by the great council but notionally by ‘everyone in our kingdom’, so on the same occasion the Charters were conceded to ‘archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, and everyone in our kingdom’. The great council thus acts on behalf of the realm, not only in granting taxes in the crown’s interest, but in receiving liberties in the subjects’ interests.
It was in this way that the kingdom’s central assembly, soon to be its parliament, re-emerged as a representative body after the long hiatus initiated by the Conquest. The ‘witan of the English people’ had been reborn as the communitas regni represented by the great council: a rebirth made possible, perhaps paradoxically, by the system of tenurial dependence introduced by Norman rule and arising in the first place from the crown’s fiscal needs. Yet although national taxation does much to explain the growth of notions of representation from c.1200 onwards, and nothing to explain their earlier embodiment within the witan, the two processes shared some common ground. By the late twelfth century the common English identity which allowed the pre-Conquest English to view the witan as a nationally representative body had begun to re-emerge. The growing use of the English language by the aristocracy, the decline of magnate holdings in Normandy, and the increasingly xenophobic temper suggested by opposition to foreigners, whether to William Longchamp under Richard I or to John’s alien captains and counsellors, all gave plausibility to the magnates’ conciliar stand in 1205 for ‘the rights of the kingdom of England’. Such a stand would have been inconceivable a hundred years earlier. The great council’s almost insensible adoption of a corporate English persona left it well placed to revive, equally insensibly, the representative role once played by the witan.
A third turning point was intimately related to the same circumstances of fiscal necessity and taxative response which had recreated representative assemblies.
From 1215 onwards taxation became dependent on the consent of an assembly to which all tenants-in-chief were summoned; statutorily dependent, one might say, since this principle was enshrined in clauses 12 and 14 of Magna Carta, observed henceforth even in their absence from the Charter’s reissues. The linking of taxation to conciliar consent was perhaps the most momentous of all the interpositions which punctuated the development of assemblies over a period of some 400 years. It opened the way for ‘politicized debate’ between king and magnates, creating the conditions for bargaining over taxation, and allowing those in parliament to demand, if not always to secure, the redress of grievances before the supply of taxes. In so doing it confirmed and enlarged the primordial political function of assemblies, while overlaying the conciliar consensus which had sanctioned (for example) the Domesday survey with the confrontations which often marked Henry III’s parliaments. Since ‘redress’ usually meant the Charter’s confirmation, reissue, and observance, it helped to embed the Charter in the consciousness of the political nation and to associate this code of liberties more closely with parliament. Finally, taxation by consent brought the minor tenants-in-chief to parliament with what was almost certainly a novel frequency, matching that of the crown’s numerous tax requests; and in this way it broadened parliament’s social base and allowed the complaints of those below baronial status to begin to be heard. Most of these tendencies converged at the parliamentum of January 1237 (the first so called), where the king was criticized, inter alia, for his failures abroad and his reliance on aliens at home, and where he secured a tax grant, from knights as well as from churchmen and magnates, only on condition that he confirmed the Charter and added three barons to his regular council. The Charter’s terms had profoundly altered the content and conduct of conciliar business, in ways impossible to envisage for the generation or so after the Conquest.
If we now take a larger and more general view of the transition from the assemblies and councils of pre- and post-Conquest England to the parliaments of the thirteenth century, we can observe an overarching change. From being periodic extensions of the king’s court these gatherings took on a more public character, acquired more public functions, and moved more fully into the public eye. The history of early assemblies may suggest that there is exaggeration here; and it is true that by comparison with the familiar counsel that often guided the policies of the Capetian kings, witan and concilium were already public bodies. The letter of 1227 from the citizen of Caen contrasting the closed and restricted counsel of a few confidants drawn on by the French king with the larger and more open councils of his English counterpart, their activities widely advertised, suggests the degree to which a meeting of the great council took place in an arena rather than a chamber. Yet much that happened at these early assemblies was internally directed and concealed from any larger audience. Crown-wearings, for example, could impress only those present and were sometimes staged at such out-of-the-way places as Brampton in Huntingdonshire which were not intended to facilitate participation by any besides those summoned. Even after the decline of crown-wearing in the middle years of Henry I, those attending councils had little or no direct and formal engagement with any wider public beyond their own membership. Though ‘the vital business of the realm’ that they discussed might affect the population at large, as with the conciliar planning of the Domesday survey, there was no countervailing response at the centre from those affected …
… [P]arliamentary activity extended outwards, to bring within the ambit of national politics many whose ancestors would have been left untouched by the activity of the great councils of the twelfth century.
In part this reflected no more than the sagacity of one particular king [Edward I] and his realization of parliament’s value as a means of publicizing the beneficence of his rule. But Edward’s use of parliament had its place in a more long-term evolutionary trend which had created a novel public awareness of parliament’s role and of its centrality to national life. This was chiefly the result of an enlargement of functions which sprang from changes already discussed: the advent of national taxation and its quasi-legal dependence, after 1215, on corporate consent. Debates on taxation (with which twelfth-century councils had little or no concern), the questioning of royal policies which such debates often produced, and the supplementary presentation of grievances, all drew in more participants: first, the lesser tenants-in-chief, then increasingly from the late 1260s the elected knights and burgesses.
Particularly in the case of this last development, the outcome was the expansion of ties between parliament and the provinces, as local communities began to play a part in parliamentary arrangements: MPs had to be elected in local courts, ‘full power’ given to them to act for their communities, pledges found for their appearance in parliament, and money raised locally for the payment of their wages. The activities of parliament, and especially its promotion of a Charter granted to ‘all free men’, now affected a multitude of interests, helping to lodge some parliamentary events in provincial memory. Thus the shire community of Worcestershire, faced in 1297 with royal demands for an illicit tax, could appeal to ‘the liberties of the great charter and the charter of the forest’ granted to the communitas regni in the great council of 1225. But national taxation was not the only issue with wide public implications, though it was the most important. The question of papal provisions and papal taxation, recurrent items on the parliamentary agenda of the 1240s and 1250s (but never raised in the twelfth century), affected every individual and institution with rights of ecclesiastical patronage: bishops, magnates, knights, and monasteries. Here too those outside parliament as well as those within might have strong personal interests in parliament’s business.
The effect of these developments was to raise the public profile of parliament and to make possible a wider degree of social participation in its work. The almost explosive growth in petitioning from the mid 1270s onwards was an extension of this latter process, springing not only, like taxation, from the king’s needs but also from his subjects’ grievances. It probably did more than any other single factor in our period to heighten public awareness of a parliament which now facilitated not only taxes but also remedies for complaint. But even before the advent of petitioning parliament had become associated with redress. The Provisions of Westminster, the most permanent legacy of the baronial reform movement of 1258–65, had promised general benefits to all, even to the villeins who stood outside Magna Carta’s magic circle of ‘all free men’. Made in parliament and read aloud by the king’s order in Westminster Hall in October 1259 at parliament’s conclusion and in the presence of earls, barons, and ‘innumerable people’, the Provisions had shown how parliament might work for the common good and how—the lesson learnt by Edward I—public dissemination of that fact might be exploited to the advantage of those in power. The value of such publicity was seized on again by Simon de Montfort when, in March 1265, after another lengthy parliament, the conditions for the Lord Edward’s release were read aloud in Westminster Hall ‘in the presence of all the people’. These two appeals for public support set a precedent not only for the public recitation of Westminster II in 1283 but for the revolutionary process of Edward II’s deposition in 1327, carried through as it was in Westminster Hall during a clamorous parliament and in the presence of earls, barons, ‘and a great multitude of people, especially the Londoners’.
The use of the kingdom’s prime public space for what were in effect appeals to the crowd was one mark of the emergence of a more public politics and a larger political nation. More than distance in place and time separated Henry III’s Westminster Hall from Henry I’s hunting lodge at Brampton. The elements of charismatic display present in Anglo-Norman kingship, signalized by crown-wearing and the singing of the laudes regiae at festal courts and at the councils with which they had often coincided, had dwindled almost to vanishing point. Parliament now provided a platform which allowed the king to project himself and his policies to an audience much larger than any of his predecessors had addressed in the more circumscribed councils of the twelfth century; and on occasion it allowed his opponents to do something similar. There were long continuities in parliament’s evolution; but there was also transformation …
… Even those most inclined to question the notion of English exceptionalism would probably agree that the early English state, as it emerged in post-Carolingian Europe, was unique in two particular ways: in the strength of its monarchy and in the extent of popular participation in the processes of government and politics on which that strength partly rested …
In no other state was general taxation so closely tied to assembly consent as in England, largely because no other state possessed so sacrosanct and enduring a code of liberties as the Charter which gave rise to that principle. In no other state was the nobility so strictly subject to taxes, with all the scope thus provided for political association with other taxpayers and for an abiding interest in the parliaments and processes through which taxes were granted. In no other state were assembly representatives drawn predominantly from the rural gentry, creating the potential, realized more often than not, for a landed alliance between magnates and gentry hard to detect in continental societies. And in no other state did a national assembly come to embody so close an enmeshment of central authority and local action.
The Source:
J. R. Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament 924-1327, Oxford 2010 [pp. 400, 439, 440-453]
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