THE GRAND INQUEST
By SIR ERNEST BARKER
IT was on November 27, 1295—or 650 years ago on Tuesday of this week—that what has been called "the Model parliament" met, heard the King's request for an aid, and took measures to meet the request. Our Parliament has no certain birth-year: it grew too gradually for that ; but the year 1295 will serve. The Parliament of that year first drew all Englishmen (or at any rate all who were "free men ") together in a plenary assembly. There were bishops, abbots and clerical proctors ; there were earls and barons (and also judges); there were knights of the shires and bur- gesses of the towns. Those who were representatives—the clerical proctors, the shire-knights and the burgesses—were furnished with "full and sufficient power" to bind their constituents : in a word, all England was there to do something (ad faciendum), as well as to speak and debate. None the less, "the Model Parliament" was not exactly a model, and there had to be further growth before the English Parliament (the word " English " in this connection is accurate) could assume its permanent shape. The Parliament of 1295 was a parliament of estates or classes ; and it acted on that basis—the different classes sitting separately and voting separate amounts—in the measures which it took to meet the King's request for an aid. If that had continued to be the model, and our parlia- ment had continued to be a parliament of estates, we should never have got very far. It was a great thing—a very great thing—when, during the reign of Edward III our Parliament became a Parliament of Houses instead of a Parliament of Estates. Two Houses—not divided by class (though they might be divided in other ways, and could quarrel as recently as 1911)—were a genuine microcosm of the land, set firmly on mother earth. The knights of the shire went with the burgesses—or, in other words, agriculture was married to com- merce and a nascent industry—to form the House of Commons, which represented the communities of shire and borough ; the bishops and abbots went with the earls and barons—or, in other words, the high clergy were married to the haute noblesse—to form the House of Lords. The knights of the shire—the key-men of England—went there to unite the two Houses ; and so the Parlia- ment of England could march on a long and continuous journey through the centuries.
A common basis, rising superior to the antinomies of class—and, on that basis, a continuous life of more than six centuries—these have been the marks of the Parliament of England ; and these have made it unique. It was not unique in its origins. There were C,ortes in Spain at an early date ; there was a meeting of Etats Generaux in France within a few years of the meeting of "the Model Parliament." England only became unique when it shed the principle of class from Parliament, and When, on that basis, it established a Parliament which has lasted continuously since the middle of the Middle Ages. How did we come to do these two things—to shed the principle of class from Parliament, and to cling tenaciously and without interruption (except for a risky period at the beginning of the Tudor dynasty and another in the reign of Charles I) to a system of parliamentary institutions? Obviously the two things go together: we should hardly have kept continuity if we had not shed class-division. It would therefore seem that the major question is the question of how we came to shed the principle of class from Parliament. Was it because we lived on an island? Or was it because we had some gift of social understand- ing between classes, and because our system of economy (which, for instance, interested all classes in the production and marketing of wool) and our system of primogeniture (which sent younger sons of the nobility to join the commons to the common benefit of both) united to encourage the gift? It is a large question ; but the answer may be found in Trevelyan's English Social History.
Anyhow, once we had developed an institution in which we were all interested—" tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man," and the rest—we had some reason for sticking to it. And here another gift came into play—a gift for "pottering on" steadily with things, and making the best of them, and trying to make them work, and using what tools you had (with a sort of affection for them) as best you could. Oaks grow well in English soil—or they used to do, when we wanted them, in the days before Forestry Commis- sions and conifers. So do yew-trees. Our courts of law, which go back to Henry II, are something like oaks and yew-trees. (Per- haps they need a little pruning.) In this sort of soil Parliament found a congenial "habitat," as the oecologists say. Perhaps it had a particular congruity with the courts of law. After all, it was a court itself—the High Court of Parliament. Mixed mysteriously with the other courts—a place of pleas and a resort of lawyers (who have always liked to be Members of Parliament, for good and sufficient reasons)—Parliament has drawn strength, in the course of its history, from the mixture. It has never stood alone, as an institution per se. Mixed with the courts and the lawyers, it has also been mixed—if only in the Upper House—with the Church and the clergy ; and it has also been mixed, even before the wise Solomon, James I, introduced University burgesses into its sessions, into the life of the Universities. It was easy for English conserva- tism to stick to it, because it was sticlsing to so much else when it did so.
This essay started with "the Model Parliament." It seems to have travelled a long way from it. Red eamus ad propositum. If "the Model Parliament" was not a model "on which every suc- ceeding assembly bearing that name was constituted" (the words are the words of Bishop Stubbs, in that volume of Select Charters which so many of us have conned so diligently), it was yet a great and plenary Parliament. It assembled all the ingredients, even if it left them imperfectly mixed. And it included that cardinal idea of the "full and sufficient power" of every representative member- " so that business should in no wise remain undone for defect thereof "—which is the life-breath of every representative body. We may justly salute it for what it was—even if it was destined to be something more and something greater. And we may justly adopt the year 1295 as a sort of symbolic birth-year (just as the King may have a symbolic birthday), and celebrate this week the 65oth birth-year of Parliament, that microcosm of our island world where every man "is intended to be present, either in person or by procu- ration and attorney (which is to say, through a representative) . from the prince (be he king or queen) to the lowest person of England." . . . For "the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the richest he"; and Parliament is based on that simple and solemn fact.
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