History of England 1-6

Many hundreds of villagers were also fighting as foot soldiers beside the mounted knights. The poorest of them had knives and scythes, the more prosperous were obliged by law to possess an iron cap and a lance. They were fighting against the king’s exactions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century three pits were uncovered in Lewes; each one contained approximately 500 bodies. They had just been piled one on top of another, the unmourned and unremembered casualties of war. They are described by one chronicle as ordinary people bred ‘de vulgo’, from the masses. Very few knights were killed in the battle.

Henry III was returned to London after his defeat, where he was placed for safekeeping in St Paul’s Cathedral. A small body of nine barons, under the leadership of de Montfort, assumed power while all the departments of state continued to operate in the name of the king. But it was only a name. De Montfort was now the strong man of the state. It is the first instance in English history of a subject seizing rule from an anointed sovereign. He confiscated the lands of eighteen barons who had fought on the wrong side, and took the lion’s share of ransom money. He even turned on his fellow barons, and consigned one of them to prison; another fled the realm. De Montfort was becoming a tyrant. That is what happens within oligarchies; one climbs over the others. As a result his support was soon fatally weakened. Who would not prefer a king to a tyrant?

Yet in the search for support he summoned two parliaments, at one of which the representatives of the towns as well as the knights and lords were present. From a period of authoritarian rule emerged an instrument of liberty; it can be said that the growing identity of the nation itself was shaped in opposition to the king. Out of contrast comes growth; out of opposition emerge principles. The exploitations of Richard and John had helped to foster a sense of communitas in towns and villages; the weakness of Henry now led to a more general recognition of the ‘community of the realm’.

The growth and development of parliament were part of the same process. There had always been parliaments of a kind. The structure itself existed before the moment it reached selfconsciousness, thereby acquiring an identity. We cannot look back into the darkness of prehistory, but we can be sure that the tribal leaders had their own councils of wise or noble men. The Saxon invaders had brought with them the idea of the witan, which means literally ‘the knowing’, or witenagemot (the word itself is not recorded before 1035); this was an assembly, made up of bishops and nobles, that met once or twice a year. They were consulted by the king, and deliberated upon the making of new laws or the raising of new taxes. They may have had the power of electing, and even deposing, a king.

The Norman council, established after the successful invasion of England, was a smaller body of perhaps thirty-five ecclesiastical and secular lords. In 1095 William Rufus called together a larger assembly, comprising all the abbots, bishops and principes or chief men of the land. This became the template for the councils of later reigns; with the absence of the Norman and Angevin kings in France and elsewhere, the assembly of magnates learned how to act collectively to enforce its will. They also assumed a collective identity. In the reign of Henry II the abbot of Battle declared that the king could not change the laws of the country without ‘the counsel and consent’ of the barons. That was still debatable.

The first parliamentary summons came from King John who, in the summer of 1212, demanded that the sheriff of each county should come to him with ‘six of the more lawful and discreet knights who are to do what we shall tell them’. The knights were not present to advise the king. They were there to communicate the royal will to their regions. Yet the provisions of the Magna Carta, three years later, were designed to curtail the powers of the king; in particular it was ordained that no monarch could levy extraordinary taxation without the ‘common counsel’ of the realm. The realm, at this juncture, of course meant only the barons and the bishops.

In 1236 Henry III called a parliament at Westminster. This represents the first official use of the term, but the actual assembly consisted only of lay magnates and bishops. There were no representatives from the shires or the towns. But the king needed money from various and different sources. He could no longer rely on the feudal tax paid by his barons, or on taxes collected from their tenants. So in 1254 the sheriffs were ordered to send two knights from each county chosen by the county court. The lower clergy were also graciously admitted to the parliamentary assembly.