The
Parliament of England was the
legislature of the
Kingdom of England. The English Parliament traces its origins to the
Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot. In 1066,
William of Normandy brought a
feudal system, by which he sought advice of a council of
tenants-in-chief and ecclesiastics before making laws. In 1215, the tenants-in-chief secured
Magna Carta from
King John, which established that the king may not levy or collect any taxes (except the feudal taxes to which they were hitherto accustomed), save with the consent of his royal council, which slowly developed into a parliament.
Over the centuries, the English Parliament progressively limited the power of the English monarchy which arguably culminated in the English Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649. After the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the supremacy of parliament was a settled principle and all future English and later British sovereigns were restricted to the role of constitutional monarchs with limited executive authority. The Act of Union 1707 merged the English Parliament with the Parliament of Scotland to form the Parliament of Great Britain. When the Parliament of Ireland was abolished in 1801, its former members were merged into what was now called the Parliament of the United Kingdom. This makes the current Parliament of the United Kingdom one of the oldest legislative bodies in the world. Due to the history and influence of the British Empire, the British parliament has become a model for many other national legislatures. This model is referred to as the Westminster system because the UK Parliament is located in the City of Westminster within Greater London.
Under a monarchical system of government, the monarch usually must consult and seek a measure of acceptance for his policies if he is to enjoy the broad cooperation of his subjects. Early Kings of England had no standing army or police, and so depended on the support of powerful subjects. The monarchy had agents in every part of the country. However, under the feudal system that evolved in England following the Norman invasion of 1066, the laws of the Crown could not have been upheld without the support of the nobility and the clergy. The former had economic and military power bases of their own through major ownership of land and the feudal obligations of their tenants (some of whom held lands on condition of military service). The Church - then still part of the Roman Catholic Church and so owing ultimate loyalty to Rome - was virtually a law unto itself in this period as it had its own system of religious law courts. In order to seek consultation and consent from the nobility and the senior clergy on major decisions, post-1066 English monarchs called Great Councils. A typical Great Council would consist of archbishops, bishops, abbots, barons and earls, the pillars of the feudal system. These Great Councils were loosely based on the structure of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, although the importance of the latter institution to the later development of parliament can be exaggerated.[citation needed]
When this system of consultation and consent broke down it often became impossible for government to function effectively. The two most notorious examples of this prior to the reign of Henry III are the cases of Thomas Becket and King John.
