The Evolution of Parliament

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EDWARD I's PARLIAMENTARY MODELS Enough has been said in the previous chapter to indicate the inadequacy of the view which sees in parliament nothing but the development of the principle of political representation; but before we proceed to discuss that infelicitous phrase, the three estates, which has been commonly used to describe the form that representation took in parliaments, it may be well to examine a little more in detail the various assemblies to which the word parliament was applied in the latter half of the thirteenth century. Hitherto we have generalized mainly from the proceedings of one of the parliaments of 1305, the records of which have come down to us in a completer form than those of any previous parliament. But the importance of the subject, and the efforts still being made by the house of lords to discover the first real parliament and to elaborate a principle of discrimination, by which to decide peerage claims based upon Edward I's writs of summons, justify an attempt to elucidate the meaning of the word parliament, to illustrate the variety of its applications, and to prove the impossibility of drawing hard and fast lines. There is little to comfort the committee of privileges in this investigation; but the idea, upon which peerage-law has been grounded, that Edward I created or dreamt of creating hereditary peerages by special writs of summons to parliaments is historically so fantastic that no historian need feel compunction in adding to the difficulties which lawyers haw created for themselves by their defiance of history.1 1 Cf. J. H. Round, Studies in Peerage and Family History, 1900, and Peerage and Pedigree, 1910; Gibbs, prcf. to 2nd ed. of G. E. Cokayne's Complete Peerage, p. xiii: it is impossible to reconcile the facts of...