THE EVOLUTION OF PARLIAM:ENT.e
PROFESSOR POLLARD, like the late F. W. Maitland, is a learned historian with a vivacious style. His book on the history of Parliament is at once very important and extremely readable. Some wiseacres used to doubt whether Maitland's brilliant new discoveries and suggestions ought to be taken seriously because he indulged in so many epigrams. It may be that dull people will view Professor Pollard's novel account of the growth of Parliament with suspicion because he too is a lively writer. But the truth is that this very able book sums up the results of years of quiet research, begun by Maitland and continued by several English and American scholars, especially Professor Baldwin, Professor McIlwain, Professor Tout, and Professor Pollard himself. Students of mediaeval history have gradually become convinced that the old theory of Parliament, originated for party purposes in the seventeenth century and popularized by Hallam, is no longer tenable. It is clearly unhistorical to antedate democracy in the modern sense, and to regard Edward the First's Parliaments as revivals of popular institutions which are supposed to have flourished in Anglo-Saxon England or in the Germany which Tacitus knew by hearsay. The new view is that "the High Court of Parliament," the phrase of the Prayer. book, or "the Grand Inquest of the Nation" embodies the true history of Parliamentary origins. Professor Pollard states the difference between the old and the new theory in plain terms :— " Four ideas, at least, with respect to the foundations and functions of English parliaments have become firmly rooted in the popular mind. One is that their principal object has ever been the making of laws ; another is that hereditary peerage and popular representation were indispensable elements in their original constitution ; a third that they have always consisted of two houses ; and a fourth that they were based on three estates. Like all conceptions that have been firmly grasped by the multitude, these impressions about the history of parliament are hardly less false than true ; and it is the purport of these pages to show cause for thinking that parliaments in their infancy were much that parliament to-day is not, and little that it is ; that legislation was not the original purpose of their being ; that they existed before they contained any representative elements ; that there was a time when, if parliaments compre- hended a peerage at all, that peerage was not in parliament by hereditary or any other right than royal grace ; that parliament was at first a single chamber ; that there was no " house "
lords until after the close of the middle ages ; that the "house ." of commons was not an original part of parliaments, but yet Is older than the " house " of lords ; and that the notion of three estates—so far from being the fundamental principle upon whirl' parliaments were built—was borrowed from abroad and hesi- tatingly applied in the third century of English parliamentary history to an institution to which it was foreign Li spirit and in practice."
Parliament began as a law-court, not as a taxing assembly, still less as a chamber of debate. The King in his Council held Parliaments long before any elected persons were summoned to Westminster, and the main business of Edward the First Parliaments was to do justice. Freemen seeking redress for wrongs or shires and boroughs desiring new privileges presented their petitions to the King in Council in Parliament. Most of the petitions were referred to the courts for prompt decision; others were considered by the Council, others again by the Council in Parliament, which always included the judges. "Thousands of people, many of them influential, would be con- cerned in the holding of every Parliament and would have lege,l, business to transact which could not be settled elsewhere. , [21.Titel.Elsoairion of Parliamon14 By A. F. Pollard. laraldp IMPS".
For this reason, Parliaments were normally held three times a year under Edward the First. For financial purposes, knights
of the shire and burgesses had been summoned to the council to grant aids. The practice arose of entrusting these elected representatives with the local petitions to Parliament. From 1298 it WAS customary for the knights and burgesses to assemble for the financial business during one of the judicial sessions of Parliament, but the work of Parliament could be done without the Commons and without the Barons. The growth of the Commons as a political power began when they realized that many individual petitions from different places represented common grievances which might form the subject of common petitions. The Commons from the fourteenth century eat in the refectory or chapter house of Westminster Abbey and did not come under the same roof as Parliament until they were assigned St. Stephen's Chapel as a place of meeting in the reign of Edward VI. Professor Pollard devotes a caustic chapter to " The Myth of the Three Estates," pointing out that the fourteenth-century author of the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum knew nothing of "three estates" but talked of six" grades" or orders, and that there was never any class representation in mediaeval England, as there was in France. He deals still more drastically with "The Fiction of the Peerage," by which the barons gradually asserted a right to sit as hereditary councillors and excluded the judges and other non-hereditary councillors from Parliament. Peerage law and peerage history are irrecon- cilable. Meanwhile the Commons, sitting apart and appearing in Parliament by their Speaker only at the opening and close of each session, developed a corporate sense by slow degrees. Professor Pollard shows that throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the knights of the shire alone attended with some regularity. Few boroughs oared to pay the wages of their members in every Parliament, preferring to go unrepre- sented. A change came in the troubled reign of Henry the Sixth, when the rich clothiers, as in Wiltshire, began to attach value to representation at Westminster, and the average number of burgesses in attendance rose from forty or sixty to two hun- dred. But the real maker of the modern House of Commons, Professor Pollard contends with great force, was Henry the Eighth ; the Reformation Parliament, which eat for seven long sessions and served as the King's instrument in achieving a veritable revolution, transformed the Commons into a political power which foreign ambassadors felt it necessary to watch. Even so, "the idea of deciding questions of national policy by reference to the electors can hardly be traced before 1640; and the Parliamentary debates on monopolies at the end of Eliza- bath's reign were apparently the earliest occasion on which proceedings in the House of Commons evoked any popular agitation," when Cecil remarked with horror, "Why, Parliament- matters are ordinarily talked of in the streets."
Professor Pollard emphasizes again and again the elaetioity of our Parliamentary constitution, which has gruwn naturally through the ages and will continue to grow. He devotes a valuable chapter to Montesquieu's mistaken belief in" The Separation of Powers" between executive, legislature, and judi- cature as the bases of our constitution—a belief which the framers of the American Constitution took for granted and applied whole-heartedly. The world has paid a heavy price for the separation of powers, in regard to treaty-making, between President Wilson and the Senate, Whereas under our constitution no such painful deadlock could have arisen. The sovereignty of Parliament has enabled Crisis after crisis to be surmounted with comparative ease. Professor Pollard points out that a Grand Inquest of the Nation must be superior to any sectional or group representations, such as the Syndicalists dream of. Indeed, the whole development of Parliament has been away from the "liberties "—or privileged bodies and districts--and guilds of the middle ages towards a national assembly in which the common needs of the people as a whole llre considered and the rivalries and interests of different classes ere adjusted. "it is only by contact with wider issues that the political sense of groups and individuals is quickened, and the greater the emphasis on the particular, the feebler the perception Of the general. La petite politique, &eat l'ennemi de In grande." Professor Pollard does not fear to envisage the problems of the future, and devotes his closing chapter to suggestions for an 161Penal Second Chamber, representing all the parts of the Itritish Commonwealth of Nations. It Is a fine ideal, although the immediate difficulties may seem great. Professor Pollard's 6wellent book deserves attentive reading. When we see that
Parliament as become the embodiment of the nation by natural proc...ss rather than through the initiative of this or that reformer, we shall realize how mistaken are those who think that the days of Parliament are numbered.
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