Parliament of England

Origins

The Parliament of England emerged gradually from the medieval practice of kings consulting with their major subjects on matters of taxation and policy. English monarchs had long summoned great councils (magnum concilium) of bishops, abbots, earls, and barons to advise on important decisions and, crucially, to consent to extraordinary taxation. The term “parliament” (from French parler, to speak) first appeared in the 1230s to describe these assemblies, though they lacked fixed membership, regular meeting, or clear constitutional role.

The decisive transformation came in the thirteenth century. Magna Carta (1215) established the principle that the king required consent for new taxes, while the rebellion against Henry III culminated in Simon de Montfort’s Parliament of 1265, which for the first time summoned representatives of towns and shires alongside the nobility. Though Montfort was killed shortly after, the precedent took hold. Edward I (r. 1272-1307) regularized the practice of summoning both nobles and elected representatives of counties and boroughs, creating the template for the bicameral Parliament—Lords and Commons—that would endure.

By the fourteenth century, Parliament had become a regular feature of English government. It met roughly annually, always at Westminster, and had established key privileges: control over taxation, the right to present petitions (which evolved into legislation), and judicial authority as the highest court. The Commons—knights of the shire and burgesses of the towns—became increasingly important, since they represented the taxpaying classes whose consent made royal finance possible. The Speaker of the Commons first appeared in 1376, institutionalizing the lower house’s separate identity.

Structure & Function

The English Parliament developed as a bicameral legislature with distinct but complementary roles. The House of Lords comprised the spiritual peers (bishops and abbots, later just bishops) and temporal peers (earls, barons, and later dukes and other nobles), sitting by hereditary right or royal appointment. The House of Commons consisted of elected representatives: two knights from each county and two burgesses from each parliamentary borough, chosen by restricted electorates of property-holders.

Parliament’s core function was legislative—making, amending, and repealing laws. Bills could originate in either house, required approval by both, and needed royal assent to become statute. Parliamentary sovereignty—the principle that Parliament can make or unmake any law and no body can override its statutes—emerged as the fundamental constitutional principle, though its full articulation came only after the seventeenth-century struggles between Crown and Parliament. Parliament also served judicial functions, with the Lords acting as the final court of appeal.

Financial control remained Parliament’s most potent power. The Crown could not levy taxes without parliamentary consent, and from the seventeenth century onward, Parliament increasingly controlled not just taxation but also expenditure through annual appropriations. This power over the purse enabled Parliament to extract constitutional concessions from monarchs who needed money for wars. The principle that the executive must command parliamentary confidence—essential to modern cabinet government—developed gradually as monarchs learned they could not govern without Parliament’s cooperation.

Historical Significance

The English Parliament became the template for representative government worldwide. The “Westminster model”—a bicameral legislature with an elected lower house, ministerial responsibility to Parliament, and parliamentary sovereignty—was exported throughout the British Empire and adopted or adapted by dozens of countries. The world’s oldest continuous representative assembly, Parliament demonstrated that large states could be governed through elected representatives rather than absolute monarchs.

Parliament’s historical development encoded principles that became fundamental to liberal constitutionalism: consent of the governed (through representatives), rule of law (statute made through deliberative process), separation of powers (legislature distinct from executive and judiciary, though with crucial overlaps), and individual rights (secured through parliamentary legislation and common law). The Petition of Right (1628), Habeas Corpus Act (1679), Bill of Rights (1689), and Act of Settlement (1701) established through Parliament the legal framework for limited government.

Yet Parliament was never simply democratic. For most of its history, it represented property rather than persons. The electoral franchise was narrow and unequally distributed—“rotten boroughs” with few voters elected as many members as populous cities. The Lords exercised a veto over Commons legislation until 1911. Democratic reforms came gradually: the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 expanded the franchise; women gained full voting rights only in 1928. Parliament’s evolution from aristocratic council to democratic legislature—still incomplete in some views—provides a case study in institutional adaptation and the struggle for political inclusion.