It is a familiar theme in medieval chronicles, whether monkish or secular, that extreme weather, natural disaster or even just unusual events were, or, at least, could be interpreted as, manifestations of divine interaction with the temporal world. At the most extreme, they were seen as expressions of God’s displeasure, as punishment for some recent transgression. The chronicle of Henry Knighton (d.c.1396), a monk in Augustinian abbey of St. Mary, Leicester, provides a diverting and unsubtle example. He writes, with strong disapproval, of a recent and remarkable development. In the late 1340s troops of women, sometimes as many as 50, had taken to travelling to tournaments, riding on fine horses and ‘dressed in men’s clothes of striking richness and variety’. These women, disparagingly described as, ‘hardly of the kingdom’s better sort’, ‘wantonly with disgraceful lubricity displayed their bodies’.  From Knighton’s point of view, however, the story had a happy ending: God ‘had a marvellous remedy to dispel their wantonness’, visiting great storms upon them (Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. G.H. Martin, p. 93).  Such specific connexions were, however, rarely drawn. Much more commonly, extreme events were seen as portent rather than punishment, as predictors of some upcoming misfortune in human affairs. Curiously, one of these concerns Parliament. The Monk of Westminster relates that, on 1 February 1388 near Abingdon, the bed of the Thames was empty of water for the length of a bowshot and remained so for an hour, ‘conveying a striking omen of events that were to follow’.  He then, although without making the connexion explicit, describes in detail the violent and disturbing events of the ‘Merciless Parliament’ that began two days later (Westminster Chronicle, ed. L.C. Hector and B.F. Harvey, p.234). 

Such examples could be multiplied, but it is worth asking whether the chroniclers were as credulous and unthinking as they appear to the modern observer.  One may doubt whether the Monk of Westminster really believed that a lack of water in the Thames was a predictor of grave parliamentary events, the juxtaposition looks more like a literary device to relate human to natural events.  He was usually content simply to describe the most extreme natural phenomena free of the overt implication that they were omens. He was not moved to speculate even on the meaning of the ‘amazing marvels’ seen in Cheshire on 1 August 1388 when ‘the heavens were seen to open and angels carrying lights to flit about in the air’. This far-from sinister apparition encapsulates a difficulty chroniclers had in interpreting omens.  Imaginatively, within the thought processes of the time, it was just about coherent to see some grave natural disasters as a harbinger of some more general crisis in human affairs; it was less easy (or at least chroniclers were less ready) to see some positive natural event, like the apparent appearance of angels, as portending some happy one. Thomas Walsingham, the most sophisticated of the monastic chroniclers of the late-medieval period, overcame this difficulty by offering both positive and negative interpretations.  His account of two major political events shows his interpretative ingenuity. He reports that, as Anne of Bohemia arrived at Dover in December 1381 (for her marriage to Richard II), a sudden ‘disturbance of the sea’ caused the ship she had come in to be dashed to pieces, just after its passengers had safely alighted. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some thought this a forecast of future misfortune; others, however, took the view that it ‘showed the favour of God and presaged future happiness for the land’. Walsingham concluded that, ‘Subsequent events will show why it was a dark, perplexing omen of doubtful meaning’ (Chronica Maiora, ed. D. Preest, pp. 170-1). The same duality is apparent in his account of another event.  Although Henry V’s coronation took place in the spring, Walsingham reports that, to everyone’s surprise, there was a great fall of show.  Some feared that this harsh weather presaged an unhappy fate, for the new King ‘would be a man of cold deeds and severe in his management of the kingdom’; but others believed it to be the ‘best of omens’, predicting that the new King ‘would cause to fall upon the land snowstorms which would freeze vice and allow the fair fruits of virtue to spring up’ (p.389).

On this evidence, one must wonder whether these monastic chroniclers believed that portents, as manifestations of divine intervention in the real world, could be meaningfully discerned. Although Knighton seems to have thought that God was ready to punish female jousters by visiting storms upon them, this was an isolated expression of a belief in God’s active intervention.  Like the Monk of Westminster, he was generally content to report extreme natural events, like a fatal heatwave in Calais in August 1347, without seeking to draw any lessons from them. Walsingham, although clearly ready to believe in portents, was so playful in his interpretation of them as to reduce them almost to meaninglessness. Characteristically, he could also employ them as expressions of his own prejudices. He was hostile to the Welsh rebel leader, Owain Glyndwr, and was thus happy to report the ‘dreadful omens’ that were said to have attended his birth, namely that his father’s stables became flooded with blood. Prejudice of a different sort probably informed Knighton’s story of the female jousters.  He did not really believe that they were punished by God; he was rather claiming divine endorsement for the sexual and social prejudices of the cloister.

S.J.P.

On 9 July 1377, a week before the day scheduled for the coronation of the ten-year-old Richard II, his uncle, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, discharged a task that had not been undertaken for a little over 50 years. In his capacity as hereditary of steward of England, he convened a hearing in the White Hall of Westminster Palace to assign to the great men of the realm, or at least mostly to those who met that description, the ceremonial functions they were to perform at the coronation ceremony.  In doing so, he had no free hand, for these functions were hereditary. His role was the more limited one of ruling on the validity of claims brought before him. But that task was not quite as simple as it sounds. The hereditary system largely removed the contention and jealousies that might have arisen had the steward had the freedom to choose whom he would, but it threw up problems of a different sort. Gaunt’s position itself illustrated one of them: the accidents of inheritance could bring one man more than one function. As steward, an office appurtenant to the earldom of Leicester, part of the great inheritance of his late wife, Blanche of Lancaster, it was his task, the most honourable of all, to carry ‘Curtana’ the principal royal sword, at the coronation, but his great accumulation of estates included the earldom of Lincoln, also his late wife’s inheritance, to which pertained the right of carving the meat before the King at the coronation feast. Perhaps sensitive to taking too prominent a part in the proceedings, he assigned the task of carving to Hugh, earl of Stafford, whose late elder brother, Ralph (d.1362), had been his brother-in-law.

Another difficulty arose when a task was inherited by one who might be deemed incapable of its discharge. Here Gaunt called upon to make a judgement. Although only 15 years old, Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, claimed, as his hereditary right, the tasks of acting as chamberlain and of serving the King with water during the coronation banquet. Gaunt conceded the claims, perhaps because the King himself was only a boy and there was a curious appropriateness to him being served by another. Another boy, however, was too young for any such concession. John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, as lord of the castle and town of Pembroke, had a strong claim to carry the second sword and the great gilt spurs at the coronation, but, as he was only four years old, Gaunt wisely ruled that, to avoid any unfortunate accident, the task should be entrusted to an earl of more mature years, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March. A further difficulty arose when the hereditary task fell to an heiress, prohibited by her sex from undertaking it in person. The office of naperer, responsible for the table linen at the coronation feast, for example, had, since the coronation of Henry I in 1100, been attached to the Norfolk manor of Ashill, and, in 1377, this was part of the dower of the earl of Pembroke’s mother, Anne. Gaunt allowed her to appoint a knight as her deputy.

Gaunt deemed others disqualified from acting in person not by minority or sex but by rank. Some appear to have been considered not grand enough to discharge personally the function that fell to them. John Wiltshire, a London grocer, claimed, by virtue of his tenure of the manor of Heydon in Essex, the right of holding a towel for the King to dry his hands before the coronation feast. Although the claim was admitted, it was Gaunt’s brother, Edmund, earl of Cambridge, who, ostensibly as the grocer’s deputy, performed the task. In respect of a man of greater rank than Wiltshire, Gaunt made another judgment that emphasised the importance of rank. William, Lord Furnival, petitioned that, by virtue of his manor of Farnham Royal in Buckinghamshire, he had the important, if rather esoteric, function at the coronation ceremony of providing a glove for the King’s right hand and then supporting that gloved hand and arm for as long as the King should hold the royal sceptre. His claim was conceded but only on condition that he took up the rank of knighthood. Although he was over 50 years old and of some military experience, he had so far failed to do what was almost de rigeur for men of his standing, but, with his coronation claim, he could resist no more, and, on 14 July, two days before the coronation, he was duly knighted.

Not all the hereditary rôles were obviously prestigious, but they were claimed nevertheless. The most curious was that which pertained to the manor of Addington in Surrey, once held by William the Conqueror’s cook, Tezelin. In 1377 this manor was held by William, Lord Bardolf, and he duly asserted his right to the function that went with it, namely providing a cook for the royal kitchen to provide a pottage (composed of almond milk, chopped chicken, sugar and spices) for the coronation banquet. Clearly any part in the coronation, however seemingly minor, was worth having, and Gaunt had a problem not in any failure to claim but in competition between claimants. Of all the coronation functions the most dramatic was that of King’s champion, deputed to ride on one of the King’s warhorses and challenge to mortal combat anyone who should dare deny the King’s right to the Crown. This was disputed between two knights, Sir John Dymmok and Sir Baldwin Freville. Gaunt ruled in the former’s favour, deeming the right as appurtenant to the Lincolnshire manor of Scrivelsby, the property of Dymmock’s wife, but reserved to Freville the right to make a new claim at the next coronation.

Of more interest, or at least more diverting, is a dispute over a role claimed not by an individual but by a corporation. According to the formal record of the hearings before Gaunt, the city of London successfully claimed that its mayor should serve the King with a gold cup and ewer at dinner in the hall after the coronation and then when he took spices in his private chamber; and that the city’s nominees should serve the lords as assistants to the chief butler at both dinner and afterwards. The contention, as far as the official record goes, was a minor one: whether the gold cup and ewer should go, as a fee, to the chief butler, Richard, earl of Arundel, or to the Londoners.  Gaunt referred the matter, or so the record goes, to the adjudication of the young King, who ruled that the latter should have the cup and ewer. The St. Albans chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, however, tells a much more interesting story. He claims that it was the judges who ruled on the city’s ‘butler’ claim. When the citizens put that claim before the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Robert Belknap, they received an answer they did not like. With a lawyer’s precision, the chief justice condescendingly told them that, given the range of functions taken by butlers from pouring wine to washing up dishes, ‘there is no point in you asking to be assigned the office of butler, unless you specify which duty it is you want’. Not surprisingly the citizens did not take kindly to this, remarking that ‘it was not their duty to wash the dishes’ and adding, irrelevantly and gratuitously, ‘that they had better dishes …  than he did, which they wanted to test out on his head’. Later, according to Walsingham, they adapted their threat, making an effigy of Belknap’s head and placing it above the aqueduct in Cheapside, ‘so that it would be pouring out wine from its mouth on the arrival of the King and the people’. 

This controversy aside, and even it may owe more to a chronicler’s affection for a good story than to reality, Gaunt’s efforts ensured that, in Walsingham’s words, the day of the coronation a week later was one ‘of light-hearted gladness’.

S.P.

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

Thanks to the actions of Donald Trump’s political opponents in the United States, impeachment is very much in the news at the moment. It is therefore an opportune moment to consider the English parliamentary origins of the process.

The first recorded example of parliamentary impeachment dates back to the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376. This, the penultimate Parliament of Edward III’s reign, was an assembly of great consequence which also saw the first record of the election of a Speaker by the Commons. Highly critical of the government, the Lower House submitted the longest list of petitions ever sent to a King in a medieval Parliament, conducted its own investigations into maladministration and demanded the appointment of a new council. Through their spokesman, Sir Peter de la Mare, generally recognised as the first Speaker, the Commons voiced their grievances and demands and initiated the procedural novelty of impeachment; that is, they drew up a formal set of allegations against those whom they suspected of incompetence and corruption at the centre of power, forming charges for the Lords to try in their role as a high court. A group of courtiers and merchant-financiers, those impeached in 1376 included Edward III’s chamberlain, William, Lord Latimer, and the wealthy London merchant and financier, Richard Lyons.

The impeachment process was an also important feature of parliamentary history under Edward’s successor, Richard II. Its use epitomised the serious political divisions of Richard’s reign, with a series of savage crises ending in his deposition.

During the so-called ‘Wonderful Parliament’ of 1386, Richard’s unpopular chancellor, Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, was impeached and the King threatened with deposition, unless he agreed to attend Parliament and accede to its demands. Forced to suffer the imposition of a continual council to govern the kingdom for a year, Richard overturned this arrangement by securing legal rulings in defence of his prerogative in 1387. Yet events soon put him back in the mercy of his opponents, led by the ‘Lords Appellant’, and the following Parliament, the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1388, attacked his most prominent courtiers through appeals of high treason and impeachment.

The impeachment and execution of his former tutor, Sir Simon Burley, was a particularly grievous blow for the King who pleaded in vain for the knight’s life. Richard struck back against his opponents a decade later, and the Parliament of 1397-8 annulled the acts of the Merciless Parliament and brought down the original Lords Appellant, the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick. But he subsequently went too far in reasserting his prerogative. By banishing two of his greatest lords, the dukes of Hereford and Norfolk, he set in train his own downfall, for Hereford would return from exile and seize the throne as Henry IV in 1399. Impeachment also loomed large in the reign of Henry IV’s inept grandson, Henry VI: the Parliament of 1449-50 impeached William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, himself the grandson of the impeached chancellor of Richard II.

Although impeachment played a prominent part in such late medieval political crises, it happened that its use between the Middle Ages and its last occurrence in the nineteenth century was rare. It was nevertheless a process which enhanced the Commons’ involvement in high politics, being a means for them to hold anyone, save the King, responsible to the nation at large. It was with the monarch’s exemption in mind, that the Constitutional Convention which drew up the constitution of the new United States in 1787, determined that the President should not enjoy a like immunity, so making possible the actual impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998, and the initiation of proceedings against Donald Trump.

C.E.M.

For more on impeachment in later centuries see this earlier blog and more information on our new Medieval project can be found on our website.

The brief Parliament, which met at Coventry between 20 November and 20 December, 1459, marked a determining moment in the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian regime, in the political ascendant after the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge, resorted to an extreme measure. By parliamentary Act it pronounced the legal deaths of its leading opponents and annexed their extensive estates to the Crown. This was, however, achieved at significant political cost.  Not only did the Act create widespread sympathy for the Yorkists, but it justified to Richard, duke of York, an extreme measure of his own. In the next Parliament, he took a measure he had long forsworn, publicly asserting his hereditary claim to the throne. A struggle for the control of a hapless King’s government was thus transformed into one for the Crown itself.

As significant, however, as this Parliament was in the history of the Wars of the Roses, it had as least as great a longer-term significance. It saw the first systematic use of the brutal legal weapon of attainder, one which retained its political currency into the seventeenth century. Without any trial at common law, this condemned the attainted to legal extinction and the forfeiture of property. In constitutional terms, this subversion of common-law process was achieved through, and validated by, Parliament’s preeminent legislative function; in functional terms, its justification, lay in the Crown’s need to proscribe enemies who had died in open rebellion or, as in the case of the Yorkist lords, fled abroad or into hiding.

In 1459 attainder was not a new concept. Its conceptual evolution had begun as early as the Parliament of 1401 when the  Lords with the assent of the King declared five leading supporters of the deposed Richard II, all killed while in rebellion, to be traitors and condemned them to  forfeiture under common law (in other words, excluding the lands entailed to their heirs or held in trust). The Commons had no part in the process, and the judgement was thus open to the objection, that, since acts of Parliament depended upon the assent of both Houses, then that judgement could not be understood as such.

This explains why, when attainder was next employed, the Commons played a full role. In 1450 they successfully petitioned that Jack Cade, the dead leader of the rebellion of the previous summer, be ‘atteynt’ of treason. Here attainder is understood as the process it was to be for the rest of the period and beyond, namely a petition either presented by or assented to by the Commons, declaring a person or persons guilty of specific acts of treason. The royal assent was then all that was needed to condemn the accused to death (if they still lived) and forfeiture.

This chain of development culminated in the great Act of 1459. No fewer than 27 Yorkists, including three of the greatest lords of the land, the duke of York, and the Neville earls of Salisbury and Warwick, were victims of an act of a then unprecedented scale. In legal terms, at least in respect of most of these victims, their condemnation was justified. Of the 27 attainted, 19, including the three principal Yorkist lords and York’s two sons, the earls of March and Rutland, had been in arms at Ludford Bridge with banners displayed in face of the King, a treason of which they could be convicted by the King’s record alone, and a further eight had been at the battle of Blore Heath, an act of open war enough in itself to condemn them as traitors.

Although, however, the Act could be justified in legal terms, contemporaries had doubts about its justification in moral ones.  One contemporary saw it as the result of the ‘malicyows conspiracye’ and ‘vengeable labowr’ of various senior Lancastrian lawyers, and the need to repudiate this view is found in two contemporary texts. These describe a debate between ‘Justice’, stating the case for condemnation, and ‘Mercy’, setting the case for pardoning the Yorkist lords. Although in both texts the case for the latter is firmly repudiated, the need for such a repudiation reveals the degree to which the case for the former was circulating.

Modern historiography reflects these contemporary doubts. In general, the Act has had a poor historical reputation. Not only was it passed by a partisan assembly, meeting away from Westminster and from which the sympathisers of York were excluded, it also extended forfeiture to entailed land. Such an extension was not unprecedented, but it was here employed to an unprecedented degree. In political terms too, it proved to be disastrous. Just as Richard II’s similar condemnation of his enemies in the Parliament of 1397-8 weakened his regime while appearing, in the first instance, to strengthen it, so did the attainders of 1459 prepare a fertile ground for the Yorkist invasion in the following summer. Yet there is a case to be made in its defence, or at least for the view that it was, at the time, a rational choice. Henry VI’s government had every reason to suppose that, without the proscription of the Yorkist lords, there could be no security, as there had been none since Cade’s rising in 1450 (although, as it transpired, there was none with it). Further, although seemingly an extreme measure, it was comparatively modest compared with the Act of Attainder of the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, which had 123 victims extending, unlike the Act of 1459, far beyond the leaders of the defeated side.

S.J.P.

For more about our medieval project and for biographies from our published projects head over to the History of Parliament Trust online.

Perhaps richer in colourfully named parliaments than any other period in English history is the last quarter of the 14^th century. Not only are we fortunate in having at our disposal a number of eloquent narratives penned by chroniclers with a keen interest in Parliament and its activities, but the numerous short assemblies of the period and their often dramatic proceedings lent themselves to pithy characterization. Four of the Parliaments that met in the twelve years between 1376 and 1388 are thus today known respectively as the ‘Good’, the ‘Bad’, the ‘Wonderful’ and the ‘Merciless’ Parliaments. Unusually for the medieval period, we owe several of these names to contemporary chroniclers, rather than to later historians. The nomenclature and its origins are, nevertheless, less straightforward than they would at first sight appear.

The Wonderful and the Merciless Parliaments (1386/88)

Ten years after the Good Parliament (see last week’s blog), another such assembly attracted the poetic instincts of the chroniclers. In the autumn of 1385, Parliament had once again demanded reform of both Richard II’s household, and his administration, but the King and his advisers had ignored these demands. Not for the first and certainly not for the last time in English history, it was an external military threat that brought matters to a head. During the spring and summer of 1386 the French had assembled a large fleet, ostensibly with the intention of invading England. In the late summer, finally, Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster on 1 October. When the assembly gathered, the Commons were already restive, and in subsequent weeks matters went from bad to worse, as proceedings descended into an open test of power between the 19-year-old King and the Commons. The King’s attempt to dismiss Parliament was met with an unveiled threat that he might share the fate of his great-grandfather Edward II in being deposed, although in the event it was the chancellor, Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, who had to be sacrificed. Moreover, the King was forced to agree to the establishment of the Commission of Government, a body of lords empowered to control the administration, and thus in effect the King, for a period of one year. These were certainly dramatic events, and it is not altogether surprising that the opening of a contemporary tract should have – apparently – described the assembly as the ‘Wonderful Parliament’ (‘mirabilis parliamentum’), the name by which it is known today. Yet, it has been argued that the tract’s title ‘Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti’ is not contemporary with the text, which is in fact mainly concerned with a later Parliament, that of February 1388, and it was to this that the soubriquet ‘wonderful’ properly pertains.    

It was this latter Parliament, now more commonly known as the ‘Merciless Parliament’, that was also styled wonderful by another contemporary chronicler, Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon from Leicestershire. Richard II had put a brave face on the need to accept the impositions of the Parliament of 1386, but almost immediately began to plot ways of freeing himself from its strictures. To this end, he began to raise armed men in his palatinate of Chester, and to enter into secret peace negotiations with the French. When rumours began to circulate that the King was proposing to bring French soldiers into the kingdom to reassert his rule, the Lords who had sought to restrain Richard for their part assembled an army, and formally appealed a number of the King’s councillors and supporters of treason. Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster on 3 February to hear the appeal. Within a few weeks the accused had been condemned, and two of them – the former Chief Justice Robert Tresilian and the former mayor of London, Nicholas Brembre – executed at Tyburn. Two further series of trials were conducted in March and, during the second session which commenced in April after the end of the Easter festivities, followed by further executions: the victims included Thomas Usk, the undersheriff of Middlesex, and four knights of Richard II’s household, among them the King’s old tutor Sir Simon Burley, the steward of the household Sir John Beauchamp of Holt, and Sir James Berners. This brought an end to the blood-letting although a number of other men were sentenced to exile. Nor were the state trials the exclusive business of the Parliament, which passed a number of other measures, but they certainly dominated the popular perception of the Parliament which – as Henry Knighton also recorded – was widely, and not without justification, referred to as the ‘parliamentum sine misericordia’.

H.K.

Complaints over the length of the parliamentary summer recess (much like teachers’ summer holidays) are a time-honoured staple of the political commentariate struggling to fill the summer hole with anything more exciting than a couple of party leadership elections. Nevertheless, the temporary absence of the Lords and Commons does provide an opportunity for the long-suffering support staff of Parliament to make at least minor repairs to the fabric, fixtures and fittings of the Palace of Westminster. Those charged with this task in the summer of 2015 may take some comfort, however limited, from the knowledge that they are following in the footsteps of generations of others faced with similar chores, dating all the way back to the early centuries of Parliament.

In the later middle ages, care for the chambers of the lords and commons and their preparation for the sessions fell to their porters (or ushers). While these men were Crown servants of considerable status, who clearly carried out their duties by using a staff of menials, the tasks they oversaw included the routine (such as the provision of fresh straw on the stone floor of the chambers) as well as the whimsical (like a chair for the king to sit in, which was required in the absence of a throne for Parliament’s meeting at Leicester in 1450).

While not a normal meeting place of the medieval parliament, William Rufus’s great hall, today very much an integral part of the post-1834 Palace of Westminster, deserves a mention here. In the middle ages, the hall provided the venue for three of the principal law courts of England – the courts of King’s bench, common pleas, and Chancery, which sat in wooden structures partitioned off the main hall. The care of these structures and their furnishings was the responsibility of the undersheriff of Middlesex, an officer who in the fifteenth century was usually drawn from the ranks of the clerks of one of the benches. The works he carried out were funded from some of the fines imposed by the justices, and the undersheriff in his turn compiled short accounts detailing them.

Wear and tear was considerable in the courts. In the summer of 1459, as on an almost annual basis, the undersheriff accounted for the ‘mendynge and ioynynge togedir of the bordis of the … Kynges bench’, as well as the cleaning of the courts. New benches and tables for the justices and clerks of the courts had to be procured on a regular basis, and the cushions for the justices’ comfort were also renewed from time to time. Routine consumables included, apart from candles and ink, the matting that covered the stone floor, which had to be replaced on a quarterly basis at a not inconsiderable cost of about 2s. per term. The various cloths that covered some of the furnishings and stonework around the courts suffered both from wear and from the smoke of the candles and torches used for lighting the courts. They periodically had to be repaired, and more frequently laundered, a task which in 1466 provided a modest additional income for the cryer of the King’s bench.

On occasion, the fabric of the building itself required attention. In 1504 the stairs between the King’s bench and the court of Chancery had to be repaired; in 1605 various workmen were paid for brickwork, making windows and carrying away rubbish; while a year later exceptional expenditure was incurred for the repair of both the ‘great window’ and a further window on the south side of the hall.

Not all of these works could wait until the law courts were out of session. In 1499 Undersheriff Richard Coton not only had to pay five carpenters for working after noon and at night, but also had to find 6d. for the keeper of the hall to let them in after dark.

The story of the annual refurbishment of the Westminster law courts and their surroundings has a footnote that resonates in the light of the major works that the present Palace of Westminster needs to undergo in the near future. In the 1390s, Richard II ordered a complete remodelling of Westminster Hall, covering up some of the surviving Norman features in the masonry, and installing the splendid hammer-beam roof that forms one of the hall’s most striking features to the present day. This, of course, meant that the hall was unavailable for use when Richard’s final Parliament (not counting the aborted assembly of 1399) gathered at Westminster in September 1397. While the lords and commons might have met in their normal meeting places, a bigger venue was needed for the state trial of the earl of Arundel. To overcome this problem, a ‘longe and large house of tymbur…that wasse called an hall, keuerde with tiles and open atte bothe sidez and atte the endez’ was constructed in the courtyard between the north end of the Great Hall and Edward III’s clock tower, and it was here that the earl was tried.

According to several chronicle accounts, King Richard, himself seated on an elevated throne, had deliberately left the sides of the building open to provide a clear field for the Cheshire archers with whom he had surrounded the structure. Intended as a hardly veiled threat to anybody who should defy the royal will, the archers nearly caused an unplanned bloodbath (with the monarch caught up in the middle of it) when they wrongly assumed that a quarrel had broken out in the assembly, and began to prepare to shoot. Only the King’s hurried personal intervention prevented a further escalation.

In spite of the inauspicious nature of the precedent of 1397, the special construction of a temporary building to house parliament was a device to which Henry V took recourse at Leicester in 1414 (when the buildings of the Franciscan friary were evidently found wanting).

HK