3ço Constitutional History. [chap.
■Want of rolls of parliament, in like manner, furnish scarcely a skeleton
records as to , ’ , *
the details of the proceedings of the earlier sessions. Published speeches,
the diaries of clerks and members, unauthorised and authorised
reports of debate, enable us to realise, in the case of the later
parliaments, almost all that is historically important. For the
medieval period we have no such helps ; and for some particular
parts of it we have no light at all, or what is more puzzling
still, cross lights and discordant and contradictory authorities.
PUnofthis 408. In the present chapter our design is to collect such
j>articulars as may help to complete our idea of the medieval
parliament in its formal aspect, to describe the method of sum-
moning, choosing, and assembling the members ; to trace, as far
as we can, the process of initiation, discussion, and enactment,
and to mark the points up to which the theory of privilege had
grown at the close of our period. It will be no part of our
plan to venture into the more dangerous regions of modern pro-
cedure ; but where in the earlier forms the germs of such later
developments are discoverable it will be sufficient to indicate .
them. In pursuance of this plan our first step is to recapitulate
the points of interest involved in the determination of the time,
place, and forms of summons, for parliament ; the next step is
to describe the process of election of the elected members ; we
can then proceed to the consideration of the session itself, the
arrangement of the houses, their transaction of business, inter-
course, prorogation and dissolution ; and close the survey with
a brief notice of the history of privilege.
Choiceofthe 409. The determination of the time at which the parliament
day for the ...
meeting of was to be held rested primarily with the king; but the choice
parliament. , ц
of the particular day or season of the year, as well as the fre-
quency or infrequency of sessions, and the use of adjournment
or. prorogation, were variously decided according to the cha-
racter which the assembly possessed at the several stages of its
growth. The Witenagemots of the Anglo-Saxon kings, if we
may draw a general conclusion from the scanty indications of
particular charters, were mostly held on the great festivals
of the church or at the end of harvest ɪ ; the great councils of
1 Vol. ɪ. p. 138 ; notes ɪ, 2, 3.
XX.] Parliamentari/ Terns. 391
the Norman kings generally, although not invariably, coincided Cfojn“c}™nc]
with the crown-wearinff days at Christmas, Easter, and Whit- parliament-
, . . . ary terms.
suntide1 ; and, as long as the national council retained as its
most prominent feature the character of a court of justice, so
long it must have been almost necessary that it should meet on
fixed days of the year. That character it retained until the
representation of the commons came to be recognised as an
indispensable requisite for a legal parliament, and. the name of
parliament came to be finally restricted to the assembly of the
three estates. This date can scarcely be placed earlier than
the beginning of the reign of Edward III, when the distinction
was completely drawn between a Great Council, however sum-
moned and however constituted, and the regular parliament.
But even after this date, although the administration of justice
had ceased to form the most important part of the public
business, and the granting of supplies, presentation of petitions,
and discussions of national policy, were matters which required
punctuality and certainty much less than the administration of
justice, the influence of custom, and the same reasons of con-
venience which had originally assigned days and seasons for
legal proceedings, continued to affect the choice of a day for
parliament. Under Henry II and his successors down to
Henry III, the national councils met as well on the great
festivals as on the terminal days of the law courts ; but irregu-
larly and not exclusively on those days. The provisionary
government of 1258 fixed three days in the year, which have
a less distinct reference to these points of time, the octave of
Michaelmas, October 6 the morrow of Candlemas, February 3,
and the ɪst of June, three weeks before the feast of S. John
the Baptist at Midsummer 2 : by this expedient the awkward-
ness of depending on the moveable feasts was avoided. That
arrangement however was short-lived. Edward I, during the
early part of his reign, seems to have followed the terminal
days of the courts of law.
These terminal days had their historical origin in the dis-
tinction made by the Boman lawyers between dies fasti and
1 Vol. i. p. 399. 2 See above, vol. ii. p. ⅛8.