England's Parliament grew from the council that replaced a Saxon meeting of wise men
Anglo-Saxon kings took advice from the Witenagemot, Old English for a meeting of wise men, whose first recorded act was King Æthelberht of Kent's law code around 600. After the Norman Conquest, William I scrapped it for a council of great landholders and churchmen, the Curia Regis, from which Parliament, the high courts and the Cabinet all descend.
The Curia Regis brought Norman feudal habits: its members were mostly tenants-in-chief, the handful of nobles who held vast estates directly from the king. Tension between barons, bishops and crown produced Magna Carta in 1215, which barred the king from levying new taxes without a council's consent. Under Henry III, parliaments began including elected men from the shires and towns.
The decisive innovation came from a rebel. In 1265 Simon de Montfort, fighting Henry III, summoned a parliament of his supporters with no royal authority, calling not only prelates and barons but two knights from every shire and, for the first time, two burgesses from every borough. Edward I borrowed the idea for his Model Parliament of 1295, which set the template by including elected representatives of rural landowners and townsmen. In 1307 Edward agreed not to raise certain taxes without the consent of the realm. England's Parliament has kept essentially the same structure since 1265, almost without break.
It was not the only medieval pioneer. The Cortes of León summoned representatives of common people in 1188, and in 1283 the Corts of Catalonia became the first European parliament officially recognised as a legislative body. The word itself came into English in the fourteenth century from the Old French parlement, a discussion, and by the fifteenth century in Britain it meant specifically the legislature.
Parliament's weight grew in stages. Under Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell reshaped its workings, and the Acts of Supremacy made the monarch head of the Church of England. Conflict between Crown and Parliament ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649 and a brief commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 finally established parliamentary sovereignty, and its steady authority helped Britain ride out succession crises that had once meant civil war. Much of the modern parliamentary model then took shape in the Kingdom of Great Britain between 1707 and 1800 before being exported abroad.
Source: Parliament
