Abstract
Several earlier generations of historians believed that the politics of the later Middle Ages was conditioned by an innate tension between the interests of the crown and those of the baronage. They were thus able to create a coherent story of constitutional development focusing on the great political set pieces — above all, of course, the series of royal depositions — of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, they located many of the causes and preoccupations of such disputes in the developing administrative apparatus of the state. In particular, J. Conway Davies and T. F. Tout argued that there was a fundamental conflict between the agencies of the royal prerogative represented by the privy seal and wardrobe and the supposedly independent and even pro-baronial offices of state, the chancery and exchequer. For these historians, political history became, quite simply, administrative history.
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Notes
The earlier historiography and the revisionism are summarised in M. C. Buck, ‘The Reform of the Exchequer, 1316–1326’, EHR, 98 (1983) pp. 241–3.
D. Starkey, ‘The Age of the Household’, in S. Medcalf (ed.), The Context of English Literature (London: Methuen, 1981) pp. 225–90.
See the example cited by R. I. Jack, ‘Entail and Descent: the Hastings Inheritance’, BIHR, 38 (1965) p.6.
N. Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 47.
W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) p. 118 and n. 142;
K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) p. 232.
J. L. Kirby (ed.), Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (London: HMSO, 1978) pp. 2–3.
For the role of the court in directing provincial culture, see V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (eds), English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983).
C. Given-Wilson, ‘The King and the Gentry in Fourteenth-century England’, TRHS, 5th series 37 (1987) pp. 97–8.
R. A. Griffiths, ‘Public and Private Bureaucracies in England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century’, TRHS, 5th series 30 (1980) pp. 109–30.
C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) p. 245, argues against McFarlane’s thesis that Henry V attempted to secure the undivided loyalty of his annuitants. See also
G. L. Harriss, ‘Financial Policy’, in G. L. Harriss (ed.), Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 173–4.
The balance is nicely judged by R. F. Green, Poets and Princepleasers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980) pp. 27–8.
C. L. Kingsford, ‘Historical Notes on Medieval London Houses’, London Topographical Record, 10 (1916) pp. 44–144; 12 (1920) pp. 1–66.
C. Given-Wilson, ‘Royal Charter Witness Lists, 1327–1399’, Medieval Prosopography, 12, no. 2 (1991) pp. 35–94; J. Catto, ‘The King’s Servants’, in Harriss (ed.), Henry V, pp. 88–9. Given-Wilson sees the charter witness lists as evidence of participation in the council.
J. L. Watts, ‘Domestic Politics and the Constitution in the Reign of Henry VI, c. 1435–61’, University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis (1990) pp. 246–73.
See the references cited by P. A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 70.
It should be stressed, however, that the contexts were rather different: see J. G. Edwards, ‘“Justice” in Early English Parliaments’, in E. B. Fryde and E. Miller (eds), Historical Studies of the English Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) vol. 1, pp. 279–97.
G. O. Sayles, The Functions of the Medieval Parliament of England (London: Hambledon Press, 1988) pp. 423–4.
J. F. Baldwin, ‘The King’s Council’, in J. F. Willard et al. (eds), The English Government at Work1327–1336 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1940–50) vol. 1, pp. 129–39.
N. B. Lewis, ‘The Continual Council in the Early Years of Richard II’, EHR, 41 (1926) pp. 246–51;
T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920–33) vol. 3, pp. 326–50.
P. McNiven, ‘The Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, EHR, 100 (1985) pp. 747–72.
J. L. Kirby, ‘Councils and Councillors of Henry IV’, TRHS, 5th series 14 (1964) pp. 35–65; Catto, ‘The King’s Servants’, pp. 88–9.
A. L. Brown, ‘The King’s Councillors in Fifteenth-century England’, TRHS, 5th series 19 (1969) pp. 107–8.
Watts, ‘Domestic Politics’, pp. 138–219; J. L. Watts, ‘The Counsels of King Henry VI, c. 1435–1445’, EHR, 106 (1991) pp. 279–98.
R. A. Griffiths, ‘The King’s Council and the First Protectorate of the Duke of York’, EHR, 99 (1984) pp. 67–82; Johnson, Duke Richard of York, pp. 126–37.
For a powerful corrective, see S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
N. Pronay and J. Taylor (eds), Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) pp: 67–70, 80–2.
H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The English Parliament in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Press, 1981) chapters VI, XVII, XXII.
J. S. Roskell, ‘The Problem of the Attendance of the Lords in Medieval Parliaments’, BIHR, 29 (1956) pp. 153–204.
A. L. Brown, ‘Parliament, c. 1377–1422’, in R. G. Davies and J. H. Denton (eds), The English Parliament in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981) pp. 132, 138–9.
G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) pp. 233–4, 319–20; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 63–4, 168; Brown, ‘Parliament, c. 1377–1422’, pp. 138–9.
This deliberately skirts over the substantial debate on the meaning of consent summarised by M. Prestwich, English Politics in the Thirteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) pp. 109–28.
Ibid., pp. 129–45, provides a convenient summary.
For their offer in 1339–40, which implicated the villeins on their own demesnes, see Harriss, King, Parliament, pp. 255–8. The income tax of 1404 had a very different catchment: see J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London: Constable, 1970) p. 175.
Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 57–8; A. R. Myers, ‘Parliamentary Petitions in the Fifteenth Century’, EHR, 52 (1937) p. 389;
P. Wormald, ‘Lex scripta and verbum regis’, in P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Woods (eds), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977) p. 113.
F. M. Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) p. 704 and n. 1.
W. M. Ormrod, ‘Agenda for Legislation, 1322-c. 1340’, EHR, 105 (1990) pp. 1–33.
W. R. Jones, ‘Bishops, Politics and the Two Laws’, Speculum, 51 (1966) pp. 209–45; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 139–43.
D. Rayner, ‘The Forms and Machinery of the “Commune Petition” in the Fourteenth Century’, EHR, 56 (1941) pp. 213–15
M. McKisack, The Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) p. 477. For the free speech issue raised by this case, see
J. S. Roskell, ‘The Parliamentary Privileges of the Commons’, in J. S. Roskell, L. Clark and C. Rawcliffe, The House of Commons, 1386–1421 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992) vol. 1, pp. 155–6.
G. L. Harriss, ‘The Commons’ Petition of 1340’, EHR, 78 (1963) pp. 625–54; Harriss, King, Parliament, pp. 257–8, 365–75, 502–8.
G. Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) p. 196;
A. Rogers, ‘Henry IV, the Commons and Taxation’, Mediaeval Studies, 31 (1969) p. 44;
R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981) p. 380.
T. F. T. Plucknett, Statutes and their Interpretation in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).
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© 1995 W. M. Ormrod
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Ormrod, W.M. (1995). Political Institutions: The Centre. In: Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24128-6_2
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