The Hundred Years' War and the English Parliament
The Hundred Years’ War made the English Parliament. The war required taxation on a scale that the crown could not raise from its own demesne, from feudal incidents, or from credit; the war therefore forced the crown into a regular, institutional relationship with the Parliament, and the Parliament used that relationship to extract concessions on the conduct of government. The English Parliament of 1453 was a different body from the Parliament of 1337: it met more often, it had a stronger sense of its own authority, it controlled the power of the purse in a way that no previous English Parliament had, and it had begun to develop the instruments of impeachment, of petition, and of statute that would shape the English constitution for the next four centuries.
The argument is conventional but worth defending. England was one of the most heavily taxed kingdoms in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, and the taxes were parliamentary taxes. The English Parliament of the 15th century was, by contemporary standards, an unusually powerful body, and the war was the principal cause of that power.
Parliament before 1337
The English Parliament of the early 14th century was a relatively minor institution. The model parliament of 1295, summoned by Edward I, was a recognition of the political weight of the barons, the bishops, and the burgesses; but the king could, in theory, govern without it, and the practice of regular sessions was not yet established. Parliament met on average once or twice a year in the 14th century, and the great bulk of its business was judicial, not legislative.
The Commons, the parliamentary representatives of the knights of the shire and the burgesses of the towns, were the junior estate. They had been summoned to Parliament since 1265 (de Montfort’s parliament) and regularly since 1295, but they had not yet acquired the political weight that they would acquire in the war generation. The king’s ministers did not yet answer to them, the great offices of state were not yet subject to parliamentary scrutiny, and the grant of taxation was a privilege that the king might or might not solicit.
The Edwardian phase and the parliamentary taxes
The war changed the relationship in two ways. First, the cost of the war was much higher than the cost of any previous English war, and the king was forced to seek parliamentary consent for new taxes on a scale unprecedented in English history. Second, the king’s need for parliamentary consent was regular and continuous, and the Parliament was able to use that need to extract concessions.
The most important of the new taxes was the subsidy, a tax on movable property granted by the Commons and confirmed by the Lords. The subsidies of 1338, 1340, 1344, 1346, and 1352 were the financial backbone of the Edwardian war effort; the wool customs of 1340 (the so-called maltôte) were the largest single grant of the reign. The Parliament of 1340, in the session known as the “Unlearned Parliament,” used the king’s need for money to extract a major reform of the household and the administration. The political lesson — that the king’s need for money was a lever that could be used to constrain the king — was learned early and was not forgotten.
The most striking example of the new parliamentary authority was the Good Parliament of 1376. The Parliament met in the spring of 1376, in the wake of the loss of most of the Brétigny gains, the political dominance of John of Gaunt, and the king’s dependence on his mistress Alice Perrers. The Commons, led by Peter de la Mare, impeached a number of the king’s ministers, including Lord Latimer and the financier Lyons, and forced the king to dismiss Alice Perrers from court. The Good Parliament was the first English parliament to use the procedure of impeachment — a procedure that would, in the 17th century, be the principal instrument of parliamentary control over the executive.
The Lancastrian phase and parliamentary consent
The Lancastrian phase of the war strengthened the Parliament further. Henry IV, who had taken the throne in 1399 by deposing Richard II, was dependent on parliamentary support for the legitimacy of his new dynasty. The Parliament of 1399, in the so-called “Parliament of Deposition,” had formally recognised the new king; the Parliament of 1401, in the statute De heretico comburendo, had given the new regime the religious authority it needed. Henry V, who reopened the war in 1415, was able to secure large parliamentary grants for the French war, but the Parliament used the grants to extract concessions on the conduct of the war. The Parliament of 1416, in particular, imposed reforms on the royal household in exchange for a subsidy.
The Parliament of 1422, summoned after the death of Henry V and the accession of the infant Henry VI, made the regency government of John, Duke of Bedford, possible. The Parliament continued to meet regularly through the 1420s and 1430s; the grant of subsidies in 1428, in particular, was the financial precondition of the conquest of Normandy. The Parliament of 1439, which granted the tax that would finance the reconquest of Normandy and Gascony, was a critical moment in the development of parliamentary authority.
The loss of France and the decline of Parliament
The end of the war in 1453 had significant consequences for the Parliament. The king no longer needed to seek parliamentary consent for war taxes, and the political weight of the Parliament declined. The incapacity of Henry VI after 1453, the loss of the French possessions, and the financial crisis of the 1440s and 1450s destroyed the political consensus on which the parliamentary authority had rested. The Wars of the Roses (1455–1485) further weakened the Parliament: the meetings of the 1460s and 1470s were brief, infrequent, and politically subordinate to the crown.
The decline of the Parliament in the 15th century was, however, a temporary phenomenon. The Tudor parliaments of the 16th century inherited the institutional and procedural legacy of the war generation — the regular sessions, the control of taxation, the procedure of impeachment, the use of petition and statute — and built on it. The Parliament of the 17th century, in the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, was the Parliament that the war had made.
The historiography
The argument that the war made the English Parliament is the work of three generations of constitutional historians. The first generation — William Stubbs, T. F. Tout, and J. E. A. Jolliffe — established the basic chronology. The second generation — G. L. Harriss and J. R. Maddicott, in particular — refined the chronology and complicated the picture. The modern consensus, in the work of Chris Given-Wilson, Andrew Prescott, and Gerald Harriss’s Cardinal Beaufort (1988), is that the war was the principal cause of the parliamentary development of the 14th and 15th centuries, but that the development was not linear: the Parliament of 1422 was more powerful than the Parliament of 1338, but the Parliament of 1455 was weaker than the Parliament of 1422. The institutional legacy of the war survived the political decline of the institution.
The site treats the decline of feudalism, the legacy of the war, and the Edwardian and Lancastrian phases in detail. The financial development of the Parliament is treated in the taxation and parliament cluster article.