Duration of English Parliaments Before 1660 - Origin of Parliament

Origin of Parliament

Parliament grew out of the Curia Regis, which was a body which advised the King on legislative matters. It had come into existence after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It replaced the earlier Anglo-Saxon institution of the Witenagemot, which had a similar mix of important clerical and lay members, but different powers.

The Curia Regis (known in English as the Council or Court) was composed of prominent church leaders (Archbishops, Bishops and some Abbots) and the King's feudal tenants-in-chief (in effect the landowning aristocracy, the Earls and Barons).

The point at which some meetings of the prelates and lay magnates became known as Parliaments is difficult to define precisely.

The term parliamentum was used in the general sense of a meeting at which negotiations took place. The word began to be used to refer to meetings of the Council in the 1230s and 1240s. The earliest known official use was by the Court of King's Bench which in November 1236 adjourned a case to be heard at a parliamentum at Westminster due on the following 13 January.

A meeting of the Council was held at Merton Abbey in 1236. This gathering became known as the Parliament of Merton. It passed certain legislation, which constitutes the first entry in the official collection of the statutes of England, published in the nineteenth century.

It may be that the meeting at Merton involved no innovation, but owes its prominence to the chance survival of some records which were copied into a collection of statutes from the second half of the fourteenth century.

The list of Parliaments in this article commences with a meeting in London in 1242, which was summoned in 1241. This again may not have represented any real innovation, but rather is given prominence by the chance survival of records. Powell and Wallis confirm that a copy of the writ of summons has survived, possibly the earliest still in existence. Dramatic political events at the meeting were recorded by the chronicler Matthew Paris, so it is known that the King asked for a tax, which the Council (retrospectively dubbed a Parliament) refused to grant. It is unlikely that the gathering was seen by contemporaries as any different from the similar meetings of the Curia Regis that had been held since the Conquest, but as a list of Parliaments must start at some time this was the meeting chosen by the source from which this list is drawn.