We are often critical in general terms of the way in which Crown agents operate these days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The extract below is taken from the ‘History of Parliament<\/strong>‘ web pages; you may feel that very little has changed in real terms since the 13th Century. Then, as now, the now modern adage – ‘Whatever colour party you may vote for, the government always gets in’<\/strong><\/em> remains pretty close to the mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘All long-lived institutions have their antecedents, and the antecedents of the Lords are to found in the Anglo-Saxon witan <\/strong>which brought the leading men of the realm periodically together with the King for ceremonial, legislative and deliberative purposes.\u00a0 In its earliest history \u2018Parliament\u2019, first used as a technical term in 1236<\/strong>, 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.\u00a0 So it remained for much of the 13th century.\u00a0 Occasionally, however, these assemblies were afforced by the summons of a wider grouping.\u00a0 At first these extended assemblies \u2013 the first known dates from 1212 – served as the 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 of local grievances.\u00a0 Had the Crown been able to function financially from its lands and feudal revenues alone, these representatives of the localities, the precursors of the Commons, might have remained no more than a source of information for the Crown and a conduit through which it could liaise with its subjects.\u00a0 The decline in the real value of the Crown\u2019s traditional revenues and the financial demands of war, <\/strong>however, transformed these local representatives from an occasional to a defining component of Parliament because the levy of taxation depended on their consent.<\/strong> \u00a0The theoretical principle of consent had been stated in Magna Carta,<\/strong> but that consent was conceived on the feudal principle that it need come from the King\u2019s leading subjects, his tenants-in-chief, <\/strong>(barons) alone<\/strong>.\u00a0 But as the 13th century progressed this principle gave way to another, namely that consent must also be sought from the lesser tenants as the representatives of their localities.\u00a0 There was both a theoretical and practical reason for this: on the one hand, there was the influence of the Roman law doctrine, \u2018what touches all shall be approved \u00a0by all\u2019,<\/strong> cited in the writs that summoned the 1295 Parliament; and, on the other, there was the practical consideration that the efficient collection of levy on moveable property, the form that tax assumed, depended on some mechanism of local consent.\u00a0 Hence, from the 1260s, no general tax was levied without the consent of the representatives of local communities<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 The Crown\u2019s increasing need for money<\/strong> meant it was a short step to the Commons becoming an indispensable part of Parliament.\u00a0 After 1325 no Parliament met without their presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘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.\u00a0 In so far as that policy was determined<\/strong> in Parliament, it was determined in a dialogue between the King and the Lords<\/strong>, who came to Parliament not through local election, as was the case with the Commons, but by personal writ of summons from the monarch.\u00a0 Further, the Commons\u2019 right of consent was as much an obligation as it was a privilege.\u00a0 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.<\/span> \u00a0What did, however, remain to them was some scope for negotiation.\u00a0 To make demands on his subjects\u2019 goods, the Crown had<\/strong> to demonstrate an exceptional need, a need<\/strong> generally arising from the costs of war<\/strong>; 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 royal policy, at least in so far as concerned expenditure.\u00a0 Hence the Crown had to measure its demands to avoid exciting criticism of its government.\u00a0 The consequences of its failure to do so are exemplified most clearly by the \u2018Good Parliament\u2019 of 1376, when the Commons, in seeking to legitimize the extreme step of refusing to grant direct taxation, alleged mis-governance, accusing certain courtiers of misappropriating royal revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘Aside from the granting of taxation, the other principal function of the medieval Parliament was legislative.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the course of the medieval \u00a0period, however, the assent of Parliament, first of the Lords and then of the Commons, became an indispensable part of the legislative process.\u00a0 Here, however, the question was not, as in the case of taxation, simply one of parliamentary assent, it was also one of initiative.\u00a0 New law came to be initiated not only by the Crown but also by the Commons.\u00a0 In the early 14th century, in what was a natural elaboration of Parliament\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The King\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Not only could it deny the Commons\u2019 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘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.\u00a0 It bargained with the Crown over taxation and formulated local grievances in such a way as to invite legislative remedy, and, on occasion, most notably in 1376, it opposed the royal will. Yet this is not to say that Parliament had yet achieved, or even sought, an independent part in the polity.\u00a0 The power of the Lords resided<\/strong> not in their place in Parliament, but in the landed wealth of the great nobility.<\/strong>\u00a0 For the Commons<\/span>, 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);<\/span> and their right of assent to new law was a theoretical rather than a practical restraint on the King\u2019s freedom of legislative action.\u00a0 Indeed, Parliament amplified rather than curtailed royal power, at least when that power was exercised competently.\u00a0 Not only were the Crown\u2019s financial resources expanded by the system of parliamentary taxation<\/strong>, so too was its legislative force and reach extended by the Commons\u2019 endorsement of the initiatives of a strong monarch, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the legislative break with Rome during the Reformation of Parliament 1529-1536<\/strong>.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are often critical in general terms of the way in which Crown agents operate these days. The extract below is taken from the ‘History of Parliament‘ web pages; you may feel that very little has changed in real terms since the 13th Century. Then, as now, the now modern adage – ‘Whatever colour party… Continue reading ‘Plus ca change…’ – Tuesday 13th Feb 2024<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,24,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active","category-political","category-tyrannical","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingstones.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}