For the first twenty years Edward's Parliaments were great assemblies of barons and knights, and it was not till 1295 that the famous Model Parliament was summoned. "It is very evident that common dangers must be met by measures concerted in common," ran the writ to the bishops. Every sheriff was to cause two knights to be elected from each shire, two citizens from each city, two burgesses from each borough. The clergy were to be fully represented from each cathedral and each diocese.
Hitherto Parliament, save in 1265, had been little else than a feudal court, a council of the King's tenants; it became, after 1295, a national assembly. Edward's plan was that the three estates—clergy, barons, and commons: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work—should be represented. But the clergy always stood aloof, preferring to meet in their own houses of convocation; and the archbishops, bishops, and greater abbots only attended because they were great holders of land and important feudal lords.
Although the knights of the shire were of much the same class as the barons, the latter received personal summons to attend, and the knights joined with the representatives of the cities and boroughs. So the two Houses of Parliament consisted of barons and bishops—lords spiritual and lords temporal—and knights and commons; and we have to-day the House of Lords and the House of Commons; the former, as in the thirteenth century, lords spiritual and temporal, the latter, representatives from counties and boroughs.
The admission of elected representatives was to move, in course of time, the centre of government from the Crown to the House of Commons; but in Edward I.'s reign Parliament was just a larger growth of the King's Council—the Council that Norman and Plantagenet kings relied on for assistance in the administration of justice and the collection of revenue. The judges of the supreme court were always summoned to Parliament, as the law lords sit in the Upper House to-day.
Money, or rather the raising of money, was the main cause for calling a Parliament. The clergy at first voted their own grants to the Crown in convocation, but came to agree to pay the taxes voted by Lords and Commons, And Lords and Commons, instead of making separate grants, joined in a common grant.
"And, as the bulk of the burden fell upon the Commons, they adopted a formula which placed the Commons in the foreground. The grant was made by the Commons, with the assent of the Lords spiritual and temporal. This formula appeared in 1395, and became the rule. In 1407, eight years after Henry IV. came to the throne, he assented to the important principle that money grants were to be initiated by the House of Commons, were not to be reported to the King until both Houses were agreed, and were to be reported by the Speaker of the Commons' House. This rule is strictly observed at the present day. When a money bill, such as the Finance bill for the year or the Appropriation bill, has been passed by the House of Commons and agreed to by the House of Lords, it is, unlike all other bills, returned to the House of Commons."[[22]] The Speaker, with his own hand, delivers all money bills to the Clerk of Parliaments, the officer whose business it is to signify the royal assent.
In addition to voting money, the Commons, on the assembly of Parliament, would petition for the redress of grievances. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were not legislators, but petitioners for legislation; and as it often happened that their petitions were not granted in the form they asked, it became a matter of bitter complaint that the laws did not correspond with the petitions. Henry V. in 1414 granted the request that "nothing should be enacted to the petition of the Commons contrary to their asking, whereby they should be bound without their assent"; and from that time it became customary for bills to be sent up to the Crown instead of petitions, leaving the King the alternative of assent or reaction.
The Nobility Predominant in Parliament
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the power of Parliament was strong enough to force the abdication of two kings—Edward II. and Richard II.—but not strong enough to free the land of the turbulent authority of the nobles. This authority went down in the struggles of the Lancastrians and Yorkists.
"The bloody faction fights known as the Wars of the Roses brought the Plantagenet dynasty to a close, weeded out the older nobility, and cleared the way for a new form of monarchy."[[23]]