Magnate Counsel and Parliament in the Late-Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: English Exceptionalism or a Common Theme?

Summary

The development of the medieval English parliament has long been central to historical perceptions of a fundamental divergence between England and ‘the Continent’. Like John Fortescue c. 1470, modern historians have often pointed to differences between the development of the English parliament and the French Estates General and the parlement of Paris. This chapter will examine the English parliament in a geographical setting which looks beyond compar¬isons with French assemblies. This approach has been prompted primarily by J.R. Maddicott's monumental book, The Origins of the English Parliament. Reviewing this, Scott Waugh concludes ‘Maddicott makes a compelling case for English exceptionalism and in the process frames the terms in which the medieval parliament will be discussed and debated for generations’. The following pages may be taken as an early contribution to the discussion which Maddicott's great work undoubtedly deserves to fuel.

The issue of whether or not the English parliament can be considered ‘excep¬tional’ arises in the final chapter of The Origins of the English Parliament. The answer to this question is pursued through a comparative study which focusses largely on the differences between English and French assembly practices. It is demonstrated that the English parliament was different from the French parlement and Estates General in numerous ways: most pertinently for this chapter, a contrast is drawn between the counsel offered to the English kings and the counsel taken by the later Capetian monarchs. Unlike in England, taxation in France was generally levied through a regional and highly varied assembly framework. By the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the parlement of Paris was first and foremost a judicial tribunal and less a consultative assembly attended by large numbers of nobles drawn from across the kingdom. Such larger consultative meetings took place far less frequently than in England.9 Although large meetings of the ‘three estates’ took place under Philip IV in 1302, 1308, 1312, and 1314, they remained irregular until the mid-1350s and always occupied a more peripheral role in the business of royal governance than the English parliament.