Duration of English Parliaments before 1660

This article augments the List of Parliaments of England to be found elsewhere (see link below) and to precede Duration of English, British and United Kingdom Parliaments from 1660, with additional information which could not be conveniently incorporated in them.

The definition of which bodies should be classified as Parliaments becomes increasingly problematic before the accession of the Tudor monarchs, starting with King Henry VII. Different sources may vary in the number of Parliaments in a particular reign.

The columns in the tables below count backwards from the Parliament elected in 2005. This is not the conventional way of numbering Parliaments. The No. column contains the number counting forward from the accession of particular monarchs of England before 1660 (or the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes of the 1650s).

The duration column is calculated from the date of the first meeting of the Parliament, to that of dissolution, using a year-month-day format.

Parliament grew out of the Curia Regis, which was a body which advised the King on legislative matters. It had come into existence after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It replaced the earlier Anglo-Saxon institution of the Witenagemot, which had a similar mix of important clerical and lay members, but different powers.

The Curia Regis (known in English as the Council or Court) was composed of prominent church leaders (Archbishops, Bishops and some Abbots) and the King's feudal tenants-in-chief (in effect the landowning aristocracy, the Earls and Barons).

The point at which some meetings of the prelates and lay magnates became known as Parliaments is difficult to define precisely.

The term parliamentum was used in the general sense of a meeting at which negotiations took place. The word began to be used to refer to meetings of the Council in the 1230s and 1240s. The earliest known official use was by the Court of King's Bench which in November 1236 adjourned a case to be heard at a parliamentum at Westminster due on the following 13 January.

A meeting of the Council was held at Merton Abbey in 1236. This gathering became known as the Parliament of Merton. It passed certain legislation, which constitutes the first entry in the official collection of the statutes of England, published in the nineteenth century.

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