History of parliamentary procedure

The history of parliamentary procedure refers to the origins and evolution of parliamentary law used by deliberative assemblies.

Demeter's Manual traces the origins of parliamentary law, by which is meant orderly deliberation and action by an assembly of persons or a body of citizens, to c. 750 BC in Greece. It was during that era that the idea of self-government, with the right to deliberate in assembly and to speak and vote on public questions, was conceived. The Greeks instituted the Athenian agora, equivalent to the American town meeting, consisting of the whole body of male citizens above eighteen years of age, which met forty times each year on the Acropolis. Any citizen could address the meeting from the Bema and vote on questions before the assembly.

Circa 450 BC, the Romans adopted the concept of self-government and expanded it with the institution of the Roman Forum, where Roman orators addressed the General Assembly from the Rostra and the people afterward voted on pending questions.

According to Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR), one commonly held view is that "our own tradition of parliamentary process may be traced to ways of life in Anglo-Saxon tribes before their migration to the island of Britain starting in the fifth century A.D. Among these peoples on the continent of Europe, the tribe was the largest regularly existing political unit." Each of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had its own witenagemot, which was a national assembly consisting of freemen who owned land. The structure of the Anglo-Saxon governmental machinery was left largely intact even after the Norman Conquest in 1066, with the Norman kings assembling a "Great Council" of court officials, barons, and prelates that was constitutionally a continuation of the witenagemot.

In the 13th and early 14th centuries, the Great Council was converted into the English Parliament. The distinguishing feature of these early parliaments was that the barons were invited to not only express their opinions individually to the king, but to discuss with each other the business "of king and kingdom" rather than only "the king's business." The earliest parliament clearly identifiable as of this character was held in 1258. It was during the Thirteenth century that the rules of parliamentary law started taking form as a science. The clerk of the House of Commons began writing the Journal of the House of Commons on his own initiative in 1547, which became a source of precedent in parliamentary procedure.Legislative Procedure: Parliamentary Practices and the Course of Business notes that "many usages were crystallized, so to speak, by the ruling of a Speaker or by some formal action of Parliament, such as a resolution or simple vote."

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