All long-lived institutions have their antecedents, and the antecedents of Parliament (or, perhaps more accurately put, the origins of the House of Lords) are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon witan which brought the leading men of the realm periodically together with the King for ceremonial, legislative and deliberative purposes.  In its earliest history ‘Parliament’, first used as a technical term in 1236, was a gathering of the same type, an assembly of prominent men, summoned at the will of the King once or twice a year, to deal with matters of state and law. It remained largely in that form for much of the thirteenth century. Occasionally, however, these assemblies were afforced by the summons of a wider grouping.  At first these extended assemblies – the first known dates from 1212 – served as a means by which the King could communicate with men who, although below the ranks of his leading tenants, were of standing in their localities and well-informed about local grievances. 

Had the Crown been able to subsist financially upon its landed and feudal revenues alone, these representatives of the localities, the precursors of the Commons, might have remained, from its point of view, no more than conduits of information and recipients of instruction. The decline in the real value of its traditional revenues and the financial demands of war, however, transformed these local representatives from an occasional to a defining component of Parliament.  Above all else, this was because the levy of taxation came to be understood as depending on their consent. The theoretical principle of consent had been stated in Magna Carta, but that consent was conceived, on the feudal principle, as residing exclusively in the King’s leading subjects, his tenants-in-chief.  But as the thirteenth century progressed this principle gave way to another, namely that consent must also be sought from the lesser tenants as the representatives of the localities.  There was both a theoretical and practical reason for this: on the one hand, there was the influence of the Roman law doctrine, ‘what touches all shall be approved  by all’, cited in the writs that summoned the 1295 Parliament; and, on the other, there was the practical consideration that the efficient collection of a levy on moveable property, the form that tax assumed, depended on some mechanism of local consent.  Hence, from the 1260s, no general tax was levied without the consent of the representatives of local communities specifically summoned for the purpose of giving their consent, and only Parliaments in which the Crown sought no grant of taxation met without these representatives.  The Crown’s increasing need for money meant it was a short step to the Commons becoming an indispensable part of Parliament.  After 1325 no Parliament met without their presence.

None the less, although this right of consent gave the Commons their place in Parliament, it did not give them any meaningful part in the formulation of royal policy.  In so far as that policy was determined in Parliament, it was determined between the King and the Lords, who came to Parliament not through local election, as was the case with the Commons, but by personal writ of summons from the monarch.  Further, the Commons’ right of consent was as much an obligation as it was a privilege.  Since subjects had a duty to support the Crown in the defence of the realm, the Commons had few grounds, even had they sought them, on which to deny royal requests for taxation.  What did, however, remain to them was some scope for negotiation.  To make demands on his subjects’ goods, the Crown had to demonstrate an exceptional need, a need generally arising from the costs of war; and, in making a judgment on the level of taxation warranted by this need, the Commons were drawn into a dialogue with the Crown over matters of policy, at least in so far as those matters  concerned expenditure.  Hence the Crown had to measure its demands to avoid exciting criticism of its government.  The consequences of its failure to do so are exemplified most clearly by the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376, when the Commons, in seeking to legitimate the extreme step of refusing to grant direct taxation, alleged misgovernance, accusing certain courtiers of misappropriating royal revenue.

Aside from the granting of taxation, the other principal function of the medieval Parliament was legislative.  Even before the early Parliaments lawmaking was theoretically established as consensual between King and subjects, yet, in the reign of Edward I, legislation arose solely out of royal initiative and was drafted by royal counsellors and judges.  As the medieval period progressed, however, the assent of Parliament, first of the Lords and then of the Commons, became an indispensable part of the legislative process.  Here, however, the question was not, as in the case of taxation, simply one of parliamentary assent, it was also one of initiative.  New law came to be initiated not only by the Crown but also by the Commons.  In the early fourteenth century, in what was a natural elaboration of Parliament’s role as the forum for the presentation of petitions of individuals and communities, the Commons began to present petitions in their own name, seeking remedies, not to individual wrongs, but to general administrative, economic and legal problems.  The King’s answers to these petitions became the basis of new law. Even so, it should not be concluded from this important procedural change that Crown conceded its legislative freedom.  Not only could it deny the Commons’ petitions, but, by the simple means of introducing its own bills among the common petitions, it could steer its own legislative program through the Commons.  

By the end of the medieval period, Parliament was, in both structure and function, the same assembly that opposed the Stuarts in the seventeenth century. It bargained with the Crown over taxation, formulated local grievances in such a way as to invite legislative remedy, and, on occasion, most notably in 1376, opposed the royal will. Yet this is not to say that Parliament had yet achieved, or even sought, an independent part in the polity.  The power of the Lords resided not in their place in Parliament, but in the landed wealth of the great nobility.  For the Commons, a favourable answer to their petitions remained a matter of royal grace, yet they were under an obligation to grant taxation as necessity demanded (a necessity largely interpreted by the Crown); and their right of assent to new law was a theoretical rather than a practical restraint on the King’s freedom of legislative action.  Indeed, Parliament amplified, rather than curtailed, royal power, at least when that power was exercised competently.  Not only were the Crown’s financial resources expanded by the system of parliamentary taxation, so too was its legislative force and reach extended by the Commons’ endorsement of the initiatives of a strong monarch, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the legislative break with Rome during the Reformation Parliament of 1529-36. 

S.J.P.

This is a revised version of the article ‘Parliament and politics before 1509’ by Dr Simon Payling, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

It is impossible to discern and date accurately the birth of any institution that goes on to last centuries and, in its infancy and adolescence, was subject to profound change both in composition and function.  Hindsight gives to a nascent institution a definition and form that flirts with anachronism, and what historians identify as its central and indispensable parts may have had a much less substantial appearance to contemporaries. 

So it is with Parliament and the significance assigned to the date 1295 in its evolution by the great Victorian historian, William Stubbs (1825-1901), regius professor of history at Oxford University and later bishop of Oxford.  In using the term ‘model’ to describe the Parliament of the November of that year he was giving expression to a theory of parliamentary development that, although derided in works of modern scholarship, retains an attractive explicatory simplicity.  For him, the history of Parliament was to be understood in linear terms, as the steady but remorseless advance of an institution that had come in his time, as it had always been destined to do, to guarantee the rights and express the will of the people (in other words, ‘a beacon for democracy’ as the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees Mogg, described the Victorian Commons on 25 July. 

The moment that the representatives of local communities won their place as an essential component of Parliament was crucial in this line of development, and it is this moment that Stubbs located in the assembly of November 1295.  In an oft-quoted phrase, he described it as ‘a model assembly … a pattern for all future assemblies of the nation’. In this, of course, he was wrong.  The representatives of both shires and boroughs had been present, as Stubbs himself knew, in the Parliament summoned by Simon de Montfort in January 1265.  Even if this precedent can be disregarded as marking a rebel rather than a royal assembly, other precedents unknown to Stubbs cannot be similarly discounted.  Knights and burgesses were present in the Parliaments of April 1275 and September 1283, and loss of evidence may conceal other instances.  

Further, if the 1295 Parliament was a model it was a very imperfect one.  Not until 1325 did the representatives of local communities become an intrinsic parliamentary component, invariably summoned to every assembly, and there were thus several Parliaments in the intervening 30 years that did not conform to the model (although none of these, and Stubbs would have rightly considered this an important point, made a grant of taxation).  Moreover, just as the representatives of the local communities were making themselves indispensable, the representatives of the lower clergy, whom Stubbs identified as an important component of his ‘model’, were doing the opposite, effectively withdrawing from Parliament to Convocation to give their consent to clerical taxation.   There are, in short, reasons enough for rejecting his use of the term ‘model’ to describe the 1295 Parliament. 

Yet, on the other hand, there are reasons why 1295 should retain its place as a landmark one in parliamentary history.  It was then that the writs which summoned the local representatives reached the form they were to retain until 1872, including that most important assertion of the representative principle, namely that the MPs were to come with ‘full power (plena potestas)’ to bind their constituencies not simply, as had been the case before, ‘to what shall be agreed on by the magnates’ but to do what ‘by common counsel shall be ordained (ad faciendum quod tunc de communi consilio ordinabitur)’. 

For the prosoprographical study of Parliament, so central to the work of the History of Parliament Trust, the Parliament of 1295 is the first for which the names of a significant number of MPs are known, nearly 300, against about 70 for all previous assemblies (most from that of 1290 to which only the county but not borough representatives were summoned).  More broadly, although it might be to overemphasis its distinctiveness to single out the 1295 Parliament, there can be no doubt that it fell in a period of great importance in parliamentary history.  The financial strain on Edward I’s government occasioned by the wars of the last years of his reign gave the representatives of the local communities a new importance.  Although they did not win a permanent parliamentary place until they end of the next reign, it is not only with the benefit of hindsight that their role in the raising of direct taxation meant that they were on their way to doing so.

SJP

Further reading:

• D.A. Carpenter, ‘Origins of the Commons, Magna Carta to 1307’, in The House of Commons, ed. R. Smith and J.S. Moore, pp. 26-47.
• J.R. Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327.

In the thirteenth century, Eleanor de Montfort was one of the most important women in England. She was a key political player and a major protagonist in events. Yet her life has long been overshadowed by the career of her second husband, Simon, earl of Leicester, who headed a movement to reform the government of Eleanor’s brother, King Henry III. During the period of baronial rebellion in England from 1258, Eleanor worked tirelessly to support her husband’s cause until the fateful outcome of the battle of Evesham in 1265.

Eleanor was born around 1215, the daughter of King John. Her first marriage, to William Marshal junior, earl of Pembroke, when she was just nine years old, was a political one. However, due to Eleanor’s youth the couple lived apart for most of their short union, which ended with Pembroke’s death in 1231 (Eleanor was around 16). Under the influence of her governess, Cecily of Sandford , the grieving young widow took a vow of chastity, promising to devote her life to Christ, a decision that Eleanor later came to regret. In 1238 she secretly married Simon de Montfort, the ambitious younger son of a French count who had come to England intent on pursuing a claim to the earldom of Leicester. This union was possibly a love match and had Henry III’s blessing but when news of it leaked out, it caused a national outcry. Later Henry III himself very publicly claimed that Simon had seduced Eleanor, something that might or might not be true.

Simon and Eleanor’s marriage was a highly successful union in personal terms, if somewhat tempestuous. Eleanor bore Simon six children who survived the illnesses of medieval childhood. She became her husband’s close confidante and accompanied him as far as Italy when he went on crusade in the early 1240s. She then often resided with him in Gascony in modern day France when Simon served as the king’s lieutenant there. Eleanor and Simon shared the same spiritual interests and formed a close circle of friends that included the Franciscan friar, Adam Marsh. Marsh famously rebuked Eleanor in his letters for her forthright behaviour, for being quick to anger and for her love of ostentatious dress and finery.

In 1258, Eleanor and her husband’s lives changed for ever when they became involved in a baronial movement to reform English government. Eleanor played a significant part in this campaign. Most notably, she deliberately obstructed Anglo-French peace negotiations by personally refusing to renounce her claims to the Angevin lands in France between 1258 and 1259. She did so in the hope of forcing Henry III to agree to a long-awaited financial settlement with her and her husband. Yet it was in 1264 that Simon and Eleanor’s fortunes in England were completely transformed, when Simon and his supporters defeated and captured Henry III at the battle of Lewes on 14 May, effectively wresting control of government from him. From her base in the south of England, at the castles of Wallingford and Odiham, Eleanor played a leading role as a political hostess, entertaining and sending food and wine to her husband’s allies. The sheer strength of the countess’s relationship with her husband and her personal importance to him was clearly illustrated when Earl Simon set out to join Eleanor at Odiham immediately after the great Hilary Parliament of 1265 dispersed, arriving there on 19 March for a family conference. But Earl Simon and Countess Eleanor’s political ascendancy was not to last. The true fragility of the Montforts’ position was exposed when their nephew, the Lord Edward (Henry III’s eldest son and heir) escaped from their custody at Hereford on 28 May 1265. As soon as news reached him of Edward’s escape, Simon dispatched messengers to his wife, worried about her security in the face of a renewed royalist threat. She hurriedly packed up her household and made a hasty retreat to safer territory, travelling by night to Portchester Castle on borrowed horses and covering more than 40 miles in a day. After gathering further supplies and supporters, Eleanor then headed for the greater protection offered by Dover Castle, which she reached on 15 June.

Rather than waiting passively for the gathering storm, Eleanor turned her flight into an exercise in public relations for her husband’s regime. She regularly entertained local sympathizers to the Montfort cause, attempting to buttress her family’s hold on the region, until her fortunes were shattered at the battle of Evesham on 4 August, 1265. On that day, Prince Edward was victorious, Henry III was restored to power and the rebels were trounced. Both Simon de Montfort and his eldest son were killed. In the weeks that followed, the widowed Eleanor overcame her grief and rose to her role as the matriarch of her family, sending two of her sons, Richard and Amaury, into exile in France, along with the family treasure. Once they were safe, Eleanor negotiated with Prince Edward the surrender of Dover and her own departure from England. The last ten years of her life were spent in exile in France, where she entered a Dominican convent. Even so, she still continued to fight for her English lands and rights.

LJW

Louise J. Wilkinson is Professor of Medieval History at Canterbury Christ Church University. She is the author of Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (Continuum, 2013). She is currently working on a new edition of the household rolls of Eleanor de Montfort and Eleanor of Provence for the Pipe Roll Society, and is a co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Magna Carta Project, led by Professor Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia.

You can read  all the posts so far in our ‘Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort’ series here. The series is in preparation for our, ‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliaments’ conference, which will take place in London 30 June-3 July 2015. You can see all the latest news on the conference website.

UK Parliament are also coordinating a series of events to celebrate the anniversary: ‘Parliament in the Making’. This includes ‘The Beginnings of that Freedome’ exhibition at Westminster Hall; the new digital arts project ‘Democracy Street’ and they invite you all to take part in ‘LiberTeas’ on June 14.

In December 1264 Simon de Montfort summoned his famous parliament, ‘the House of Commons in embryo’, to meet in London on 20 January 1265. This assembly marked a first in the history of England and of parliament, for its attendees were not just the earls, the lords (ecclesiastical and lay), the barons and the knights of the shires, but the townsmen of England too. Montfort, in seeking to build as wide a base as possible for his regime, required every major town to send two representatives to this assembly; but the men of the Cinque Ports and London, his most loyal supporters, were asked to send four men. The Portsmen and the Londoners were being both recognised and rewarded for their steadfast adherence to the baronial cause.

The period of Reform and Rebellion had begun at a parliament at Westminster in April 1258 when an armed baronial delegation marched in on King Henry III and demanded that the state of the kingdom ‘be put in order, corrected and reformed’. With this action Henry III’s ill-fated personal rule came crashing down around his ears. The Lond0ners had, on the whole, allied with the reformers from the start: in July 1258 the citizens had ‘immediately’ affixed London’s communal seal to a text of the Provisions of Oxford; in July 1263, following a violent outburst of pro-Montfortian rioting, the ‘whole commune’ of London had professed their support for the wider reforms now known as the Provisions of Oxford; and in December 1263 the Londoners had broken down the gate at London Bridge to allow Montfort and his army escape being trapped by the king’s forces outside of the city walls. As we shall see, however, it was to be during 1264 that the Londoners would really prove their worth to the baronial regime.

In January 1264 the country hovered on the brink of civil war and, in a last ditch attempt at reconciliation, the rival parties agreed to submit all matters to King Louis IX of France for arbitration. First among the baronial reformers’ list of ‘grievances which had oppressed the land of England’ was the complaint that the king was not upholding Magna Carta. Doubtless many in London would have been fully in agreement with the reformers here: after all, clause nine of Henry III’s Magna Carta promised London its ‘ancient liberties and free customs’, yet on ten occasions between 1239 and 1257 the king had suspended London’s liberties, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. When Louis’s judgment came down emphatically in Henry’s favour, the London alderman and chronicler, Arnold fitz Thedmar, writing his account of these events within a few months of Louis’s judgment was equally as emphatic: the Londoners, the men of the Cinque Ports and ‘almost all the ordinary people of England’ objected to Louis’s award. The attempt at arbitration had failed and across the country civil war broke out.

By 10 March 1264, if not earlier, bands of Londoners led by Hugh Despenser were attacking exchequer and royal officers in London, as well as ravaging the lands of not just royalists but even members of the royal family in the home counties. In his chronicle Arnold fitz Thedmar wrote that soon afterwards the barons and men of London were joined together by oath, but historians have made little of this rather jejeune entry. However, the text of this remarkable oath has recently been discovered in a document found among the records of the Corporation of London [subscription required]. What this document shows is that twenty-one leading Montfortians, of whom one was Thomas fitz Thomas, mayor of London representing the commune of the city, swore an oath on 31 March 1264. In taking this oath these reformers promised faithfully that ‘from this hour [we] will hold together, both us and all those who hold themselves with us in all rightful quarrels. And to save our liberties and customs and maintain them against all those who would wrongfully wish to do us violence’. Moreover, this document also confirms that subsequently every man in London over the age of twelve made a similar pledge on the gospels that he would ‘maintain the same oath’. In a repeat of the events of May 1215 which led up to the sealing of Magna Carta, the Londoners and the reformers had allied themselves together by a solemn oath; this time, however, in defence of their cherished liberties.

How seriously the men of London were to keep to the terms of this oath was soon to be tested. On 14 May 1264 many hundreds of Londoners lined up with their baronial allies on the battlefield at Lewes in Sussex. Against them, outnumbering them, and with superior weaponry were the royalist forces. Despite this inferiority it was the Montfortians who won the day with a victory so complete that not only did they capture the king, they also took his eldest son, Prince Edward; Henry’s brother Richard, king of Germany and earl of Cornwall; and Richard’s son, Henry of Almain. Montfort now took control at the centre and it was in an attempt to secure the peace and legitimise his regime that he called his famous parliament six months later. According to one contemporary chronicler, however, the victory at Lewes had been bought with the blood of the men of London. Oath-bound to the Montfortian regime, and having proven their worth on the field of battle, Montfort made sure that the Londoners were rewarded for their unfaltering support.

IS

Ian is currently working on a new edition of Arnold fitz Thedmar’s chronicle; he also teaches Latin and history at Morley College London.

You can read  all the posts so far in our ‘Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort’ series here. The series is in preparation for our, ‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliaments’ conference, which will take place in London 30 June-3 July 2015. You can see all the latest news on the conference website.

UK Parliament is also marking the 2015 anniversaries with a series of events: ‘Parliament in the Making’. This includes an exhibition in Westminster Hall, The Beginnings of that Freedome’, which we were delighted to work with them on the accompanying text. 

Our series begins with a post by Dr Sophie Ambler, a Research Associate at the University of East Anglia on the Magna Carta Project, a landmark investigation of Magna Carta 1215 to mark the 800th anniversary of the Charter’s issue. Dr Ambler here discusses the importance of Magna Carta in the Montfort Parliament…

2015 sees several big anniversaries, among which the 750^th year since Simon de Montfort’s 1265 Parliament deserves to rank highly. The assembly is seen as a landmark in the development of parliament, for it included two knights elected in every county as well as two representatives from the major towns and four from each of the Cinque Ports (and probably four from London), foreshadowing the later ‘county and borough’ franchise that was to determine representation in the House of Commons through to 1832 and beyond. This was not the first time that either knights or townsmen had come to parliament (indeed knights had been attending for centuries) but 1265 was different for an important reason: it was the first time such men were summoned when there was no tax being mooted that required their consent. They were there purely to have their say on how the kingdom should be governed. For this reason, the Parliament was momentous.

Why were knights and townsmen summoned when their presence wasn’t strictly necessary? Because Simon de Montfort understood better than any previous politician the value of their support. The position of Montfort’s government was precarious. He’d won a great victory at the Battle of Lewes in May 1264, taking King Henry III captive and setting up a council of bishops, barons and knights to rule in the king’s name. This revived the programme, first set out following a court coup in 1258, that promised to reform central and local government and improve the lot of England’s people. But, in a world where monarchy was the only thinkable form of government, Montfort’s regime lacked legitimacy. He needed to reach out to a wider public, the knights and townsmen who ran local affairs on behalf of the crown and whose support would underpin his regime in the localities. Montfort would give these men what they had long wanted: a voice in parliament. Such a vast gathering would also allow him to advertise his regime – the representatives would carry home news that the new government was inclusive and just.

The Parliament was one of the longest of Henry’s reign, lasting from 20 January until 11 March. It culminated in a grand ceremony in Westminster Hall, where the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of attendees had gathered. Whilst the king stood in silence, letters were read out proclaiming that Henry had placed himself under the council. Then nine bishops pronounced a sentence of excommunication (the Church’s equivalent of outlawry) against anyone who violated Magna Carta and the Montfortian provisions for the kingdom’s governance. The sentence was enacted through a dramatic ritual: dressed in full liturgical garments, the bishops held lighted candles, which they turned over onto the floor to seal their pronouncement. This was a powerful visual statement of the burden placed upon everyone to preserve the Parliament’s acts.

The anniversary of Montfort’s Parliament thus links with another big commemoration: the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta’s original issue in 1215. Indeed, it is thanks to the Magna Carta Project (a major investigation of the Charter funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) that the text of ‘Simon de Montfort’s Magna Carta’ has come to light. This is a confirmation of the 1225 (definitive) version of the Charter, nominally granted by Henry III but naming in its witness list Montfort and his chief supporters (you can read the text, as well as a fuller account of the parliament, on the Magna Carta Project website). But why confirm Magna Carta, which had nothing to say about either conciliar rule or the new improvements to government that were central to the reform programme? Magna Carta was a valued symbol of lawful rule in the eyes of the knights and townsmen whose support Montfort strove to win. The new regime, which set a council above the king, was shockingly radical. Aligning it with Magna Carta gave it the flavour of something already ancient and established. It also sent a message about how the council would govern: by the principles of the Charter, which placed the ruling power under the law.

The parliament saw Montfort’s regime at its height, but it was not to last. Within five months of their most triumphant display of power, seven of those Montfortians named in the witness list to the 1265 Magna Carta were to be captured, while five more – including Montfort himself – were to be butchered at the Battle of Evesham. But elements of the 1265 parliament endured. One, of course, was the attendance of elected knights and townsmen. But another was the strategy (pursued by Edward Coke in the 1620s, and the American revolutionaries in the 1770s) of cleaving to Magna Carta as if it represented some ‘Ancient Constitution’ above and beyond the authority of any particular king. These were 1265’s two major legacies to parliamentary history.

SA

Dr Sophie Ambler is a Research Associate at the University of East Anglia on the Magna Carta Project, a landmark investigation of Magna Carta 1215 to mark the 800th anniversary, in 2015, of the Charter’s issue.

‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliaments’ will take place in London 30 June-3 July 2015. Programme details will be announced shortly. You can see all the latest news on the conference website.

UK Parliament is also marking the 2015 anniversaries with a series of events: ‘Parliament in the Making’. This includes an exhibition in Westminster Hall launched today: ‘The Beginnings of that Freedome‘, and we were delighted to work with them on the accompanying text. The exhibition charts 18 movements and moments that shaped British parliamentary heritage. You can find out more here.

750 years ago today, the enigmatic Simon de Montfort won his greatest victory against Henry III: defeating the King at the Battle of Lewes and taking him and his heir Edward captive. To mark the anniversary a new play, ‘Montfort’s March’, is being performed on the Sussex Downs. Performers and the audience take the route of de Montfort’s army the night before the battle, exploring the causes of the rebellion.

The triumphant Song of Lewes written after the battle did not downplay its significance, nor that of de Montfort: ‘the faith and fidelity of Simon alone is become the security of peace of all England’. But both then and ever since, de Montfort has been difficult to understand: the so-called ‘father of English democracy’ who rebelled to settle his own family’s grievances; the cosmopolitan, French-born earl who fought for Englishmen against ‘alien’ nobles.

The origins of the Battle of Lewes lie in the discontent about Henry III’s foreign favourites and his expansionist plans overseas. In 1258 a group of barons, de Montfort among them, marched to the King and demanded reform. The subsequent ‘Provisions of Oxford’ were truly radical. The country was to be governed by a council chosen partly by the King and partly by the barons, parliaments were to be held regularly, and grievances against royal and baronial officials throughout the country addressed.

Although Henry initially agreed to the Provisions, he went back on the agreement and the following years were marked by civil war. Simon de Montfort emerged as the rebel leader. His own motives for rebellion were complicated. Many now argue that his initial involvement was caused by his own grievances against Henry, in particular securing a dowry for his wife Eleanor (the King’s sister), and lands for his family. But de Montfort seems to have had a genuine commitment to political reform, demonstrated in his unusual summons of burgesses to represent towns and cities in the Parliament he called for 1265.
At the Battle of Lewes his army fought in the white cross of crusade. Taking up his commanding position on the Downs by cover of night, his army initially suffered heavy losses at the hands of Lord Edward, the future King ‘Longshanks’. But Edward’s men left the battle, leaving his father’s forces to be cut to pieces. Henry himself had two horses killed from under him. Edward and Henry were forced to flee to Lewes priory and to accept de Montfort’s terms.

His rule did not last. Just a year later his army was massacred and he was killed, his body mutilated, at the Battle of Evesham. Yet he had a lasting impact on English politics. The future Edward I chose to call frequent Parliaments. The political nation became broader, with minor knights and gentry increasingly included in government. No-one would now call the 1265 parliament the start of democracy, but burgesses were summoned to more and more Parliaments. By the 14th century they had become an indispensable feature of English government in the House of Commons.

Next year is the 750th anniversary of the 1265 parliament, as well as the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. To mark these anniversaries we will be hosting the annual conference of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI) with the help of UK Parliament, King’s College, London and Royal Holloway, University of London. The conference, ‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliaments: Constructing representative institutions 1000-2000’ will explore the initiation and development of political institutions from the early Middle Ages onwards, and consider the significance of foundational documents and major events in their subsequent history. Today we launch the conference’s website which includes more information on themes, speakers, and how to attend. We’ll update this regularly over the next year, so keep watching for further information.

EP

For more on ‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliaments’ conference, visit the new website.

You can still catch ‘Montfort’s March’ on the South Downs until 18 May. For more, see The Company’s website.

Further reading: David Carpenter, ‘The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain, 1066-1284’ (2003); J.R. Maddicott, ‘Simon De Montfort’ (1994).

The year 2015 marks two anniversaries of enormous significance in the history of English, and British constitutional and legal history: the 800th anniversary of King John’s acceptance of Magna Carta, the great charter of liberties of the English nation in 1215; and the 750th anniversary of the Parliament summoned by Simon de Montfort in 1265, following his defeat of King Henry III in a civil war which was the culmination of a baronial revolt.

To mark these anniversaries, the History of Parliament Trust will in 2015 host the annual conference of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI) with the help of UK Parliament, King’s College, London and Royal Holloway, University of London. The conference will take 1215 and 1265 as a starting point for an exploration of the initiation and development of political institutions from the early Middle Ages onwards, and an assessment of their role in state formation or national building. It will consider the significance of foundational documents and events such as Magna Carta and the de Montfort Parliament and how these – and the historiography of Parliaments – became so important in the subsequent history of Parliament and political institutions.

The conference will have a strong comparative element, and will incorporate contributions from continental scholars and scholars of continental traditions.

An advance notice of the conference has been published on our website, which gives more details on the conference themes and focus.

The conference will take place at King’s College, London, Royal Holloway, London and Portcullis House, Palace of Westminster between 30^th June and 4^th July 2015. A formal call for papers will be issued in the New Year, but we would be delighted if you wish to contact us now to register an interest in either speaking at or attending the conference. Please contact Paul Seaward (pseaward@histparl.ac.uk) or Emma Peplow (epeplow@histparl.ac.uk)

EP