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Simon de Montfort, the Battle of Lewes and the Development of Parliament

John Maddicott

Every schoolboy knows that Simon de Montfort was not the founder of the English
parliament. But every schoolboy should know that he did have a major role in its
development. Probably very few schoolboys – I dare say none – would be able to tell you how
that role was connected with the battle of Lewes. To grasp the links between these three
subjects – Montfort, parliament, Lewes – we need to go back a bit and take a view of
parliament as it was 25 years or so before Lewes – say, in the years around 1240, the middle
years of Henry III. What was parliament like at this stage? Well, it was primarily an
assembly of the king’s great men: about 50 to 80 magnates, the leading churchmen, and the
king’s chief ministers, like the chancellor and the treasurer. It met regularly at Westminster,
usually two or three times a year, to advise the king and discuss the nation’s business – so it
was already a political assembly, thoroughly involved in affairs of state. The great men
attended because they were obliged to do so – and the reason for that lay in their tenure of
land. Ever since the Norman Conquest the king’s tenants-in-chief had been duty bound to
attend his councils, to give him advice, and to provide him with military service (which
doesn’t concern us). These early assemblies in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were
often known simply as ‘councils’ or ‘great councils’. But by the 1230s these councils are
coming to be known as ‘parliaments’, parliamenta in Latin – which just means an occasion
for talk or discussion, from parler. The first use of the new word in a political context comes
from 1236. We don’t know why the terminology changes, but we can make a guess: it may
have something to do with the creation at just this time of an inner ring of confidential royal
advisers which was also known as the ‘council’. ‘Parliament’ may have been increasingly
used to distinguish large periodic assemblies of magnates from this small inner circle which
was another kind of council. So, in a literal sense if no other, ‘parliament’ was an invention of
the 1230s.
Now there was one big difference between the great councils of the twelfth century and the
parliaments of Henry III’s reign. So far as we can see, great councils rarely opposed the king.
They were consensual bodies – and a king like Henry II genuinely wanted his councillors’
advice, partly, I think, in order to spread responsibility for the taking of often difficult
political decisions. Parliaments, on the other hand, were much less consensual and much more
confrontational. From the 1230s to the 1250s they often squared up to the king, criticised his
policies, and refused to do as he wanted. There were two main reasons for this, both
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connected. First, the magnates attending parliament were often hostile to Henry’s policies.
Henry pursued a foreign policy aimed at conquests in France in which his magnates had very
little interest; he promoted foreign favourites; he ran an extravagant court; and he dunned his
English subjects to pay for all this. None of this made him particularly popular. Second, to
meet his financial needs Henry’s best prospects direct taxation - taxes levied on the value of
everyone’s moveable goods, in the countryside mainly corn and livestock. But there was a
problem here. Magna Carta in 1215 had said that direct taxation could be levied only with the
consent of the great council – and by the 1230s this meant the consent of parliament. So
whenever Henry wanted a tax he had to go to parliament – and this in turn gave the magnates
a chance to criticise his policies and , more often than not, refuse to grant the tax he wanted.
So what we can see here is how, from the 1230s onwards, parliament is becoming an
occasion, not just for political discussion, as in the twelfth century, but for political disputes.
It’s a political assembly characterised by real debate between the king and his great men. This
is the origin of what you could call ‘parliamentary politics’ – and the result is that parliament
acquires a much higher public profile than the twelfth-century council had ever had. Its
proceedings were reported by the chroniclers, especially by Matthew Paris, and it became the
periodic focus of the whole political system and the whole political community.
Let’s now think about one particular element in that community which was just beginning
to play a more prominent part in some parliaments. I’m thinking here of the knights, the
leading country gentry and middling landowners who ran the shires and managed local
government – and this will take us a bit closer to Simon de Montfort and the battle of Lewes
(which I haven’t incidentally forgotten about!). Now it’s very likely that some knights had
always been present at meetings of the king’s council because some knights were tenants-in-
chief. It’s a mistake to think that all the king’s tenants were big men. Quite a few minor
landholders also held from the king, and the signs are that in the twelfth century some of them
turned up to at least some royal councils. But their role at council meetings was put on an
entirely different footing by Magna Carta. The Charter laid down that taxation was subject to
conciliar consent, as we’ve seen. But it also laid down that when that consent was given the
lesser tenants in chief must be present along with the greater. As far as we can tell, this rule
was generally followed in Henry III’s parliaments: when taxation was on the agenda the
knights did indeed attend in their role as lesser tenants in chief. This was how the knights
came on board the parliamentary ship – not as elected representatives of their counties, which
they later became, but as minor tenants-in-chief. They had the same tenurial obligation to
attend parliaments as their greater cousins – and that obligation was also an interest. If the
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knights could consent to taxation they could also join the magnates in refusing it. They shared
some of the other interests of the magnates – for example, in trying to ensure that the king
kept to Magna Carta – and they may also have been able to put forward some of the main
grievances of the localities against royal government. So already, before Simon de Montfort
comes on the scene, we can begin to see the knights playing a part in central politics.
As we move towards the battle of Lewes, we need to pause at three stopping places if we’re
to understand why the battle mattered to the development of parliament. The first of these
stopping places is the famous parliament of April 1254 (well, famous at least to parliamentary
historians!). The background to this was Henry III’s need for money (the background to most
things was Henry III’s need for money!). What happened was this. Early in 1254 Henry was
in Gascony, supposedly expecting an invasion from Castile. The regents at home, his wife and
brother, set about raising an army to relieve him. At the same time they ordered that two
knights should be elected from every county to attend a parliament in April. The knights’ job
was to grant a tax on behalf of all those who were not to serve in the army but to stay at home
– in other words, the great bulk of the population. So what happened? Well, we know that
knights were elected, at least in some counties. We don’t know that they actually attended
parliament, though they almost certainly did. We do know that Henry got no tax. So there are
gaps in the evidence – but two very interesting points still emerge. One is that this is the first
time that knights were elected in the counties to represent those counties. If they came to
parliament they did so as elected representatives, not as lesser tenants-in-chief. The second
point is this. In the course of these proceedings the regents told the king that he was unlikely
to get a tax from the knights unless he attended to their grievances – and those grievances
centred on the need to enforce Magna Carta and to curb the extortions of royal officials in the
localities. So the knights were identified with a particular programme for fairer local
government. But they were also reckoned to be a force in politics – men of independent mind
who could bring forward the grievances of their constituents, and by no means likely to be
push-over when it came to granting taxes.
Our second parliamentary stopping point on the road to Lewes comes with the baronial
reform movement of 1258-9. This brought a revolutionary change to the country’s
government. It main feature was the establishment of a baronial council of fifteen which took
power out of the king’s hands. This was the most revolutionary aspect of 1258-9 – and it
resulted from the misgovernment of the country, as the reformers saw it, over the previous
twenty years. But as well as the council parliament also had a big part to play in the new
scheme of things – I think in two particular ways. First of all, by the Provisions of Oxford,
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drafted in the Oxford parliament of June 1258, parliament was given a formal place in the
new constitution. The Provisions said that it was to meet three times a year, at stated times,
along with members of the baronial council, to discuss ‘the common business of the realm
and the king together’. So for the first time the role of parliament had been defined and
publicly recognised. The intention was to see that national business was discussed in public,
in a large assembly, and not simply settled by the king and a few cronies behind closed doors
– which had all too often been Henry’s way of doing business. In other words parliament was
to become the public voice of the political community.
And, secondly, parliament was central to the work of reform in another way. The reform
movement was partly a movement for the reform of the law – and the major legal reforms of
the 18-month period when the reformers were in power were very largely discussed and
promulgated in parliament. The centrepiece of these reforms was the Provisions of
Westminster, the great reforming code published in October 1259 which capped the reformers
work. The Provisions dealt with some of the main grievances arising from Henry’s
misgovernment in the years before 1258, particularly his government of the localities, and, as
we’ll see in a minute, they were hugely popular. They were not only made in parliament, but
they were afterwards read out in Westminster Hall, one chronicler says ‘in the presence of
many earls and barons and innumerable people’. So one major way in which the reform
movement enlarged the role of parliament was by associating parliament with legislation –
and not just a single piece of legislation but a whole legislative programme.
We can see from all of this that parliament was central to the reformers’ plans. It was part
and parcel of their scheme for imposing checks on royal power; it provided a platform for the
working out of legal reforms; and its meetings three times a year created opportunities for the
voice of the political community to be regularly heard. But the missing element here was the
knights. As far as we can see, the parliaments of 1258-9 were entirely baronial assemblies –
but it was still true that they dealt with the sort of local grievances which, in 1254, had been
associated with the knightly representatives of the counties. The probability is that the knights
were present in and around parliament but not in any formal way. The Oxford parliament, for
example, coincided with an army muster for a campaign against the Welsh, and there must
have been hundreds of knights present in Oxford at parliament time as members of baronial
retinues. That was the kind of informal knightly information source which may have
underlain the work of purely baronial parliaments.
Our third parliamentary stepping stone towards Lewes brings the knights back on stage and
associates them for the first time with Simon de Montfort. In 1258 Montfort had been one of a
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group of leading baronial reformers, but by 1261 he’d become the leader of the opposition to
Henry as his former baronial colleagues dropped away. Henry meanwhile had thrown off the
baronial controls of 1258-9 and resumed power. Part of Montfort’s counter-tactics to Henry’s
resumption of power came in September 1261, when he summoned three knights from each
county to meet him at St Albans to discuss what the king called ‘the common business of our
realm’. Henry applied his own counter-tactics by summoning the knights simultaneously to
another parliament at Windsor – which must have been very confusing for them! – but we
don’t know that either parliament, Montfort’s at St Albans or the king’s at Windsor, ever
actually met. So why does this phantom parliament matter? Two reasons, I think. First, the
knights are being summoned to discuss political business, ‘the common business of our
realm’, probably meaning the current state of play between the king and his opponents. Now
note here that taxation, which had sometimes brought them to parliament before 1258, along
with the other tenants in chief, is not an issue in 1261. Both sides think the support of the
knights is worth having, and both sides are seeking that support through discussion in an
assembly. And, second, Montfort summons them on a county basis, three knights from each
county, probably after local elections, though we can’t be sure about that. The precedent here,
of course, is the parliament of April 1254, when we’ve seen that two knights were elected in
each county. We know that Montfort himself had been present in the 1254 parliament, and in
1261 he probably had the 1254 precedent very much in mind.
This brings us at last to the battle of Lewes and the development of parliament. There’s no
need to say anything about the battle itself except this. Montfort’s great victory had solved
some problems but created others, and those problems were of two sorts, military and
ideological. The military problems comprised continuing threats to Montfort’s position: many
castles were still in royalist hands, the barons of the Welsh marches militarily active on the
king’s side, and an invasion force backed by the pope and the king of France was gathering
across the Channel. This last was the most immediate threat. The ideological problem was
how to convert power into authority. Montfort had power: he’d captured the king and the
king’s son and effectively ruled in Henry’s place. But his authority rested only on victory in
battle - on the successful deployment of force. It’s true that many people saw this as a
judgement of God and therefore in itself a legitimation of Montfort’s power – but not
everyone was likely to be convinced by this argument. Montfort’s power needed some more
concrete sanction – and this, of course, is where parliament came in.
There were two parliaments which met after Lewes, one in June 1264, which met within a
few weeks of the battle, and another which met eight months later in January 1265. Both had
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the same general purpose: to consolidate Montfort’s power and sanction his authority. What
we notice about both parliaments is the key role of local representatives. To the June
parliament four elected knights were summoned from each county. Now note that number.
Only two per county had been summoned in 1254 and only three in 1261. Four knights from
each county would give a total of about 140 if they all turned – far more than the likely
number of magnates and churchmen – and that in itself was a mark of the importance which
Montfort attached to knightly support. To the January parliament were summoned not only
two knights from each county, but also two burgesses from an unknown number of towns –
and that’s an apparently new feature of parliament that we’ll come back to.
Now let’s look at the work of each of these parliaments. The main work of the June
parliament was to endorse a new constitution. A new council of nine was set up, but real
power lay with an inner ring of three headed by Montfort – and we’re told that parliament
consented to this. So Montfort had now got at least a measure of legitimation through consent
– the consent of a very large parliamentary body (think again of all those knights). Just as a
baronial parliament had endorsed the new constitution of 1258, with its baronial council of
fifteen, so now a representative parliament endorsed the much narrower constitution of 1264.
That narrowness was a measure of the extent to which magnate support for Montfort had
fallen away - and compensation was now being sought from the knights of the localities.
We don’t know much about the knights’ particular activities in this parliament, but we do
know a bit. We know that they consented to the new constitution – or at least that their
consent was claimed. We know too that the papal legate, who was Henry’s ally and no friend
to rebels, tried to get entry into England during the parliament, but that his request for entry
was refused by ‘the earls, barons, knights and communities of England’. Presumably the
‘communities’ here are the counties which the knights represented. In both these cases, with
the constitution and with the legate’s entry, we’ve got the knights playing a political role
which has nothing to do with their tax-granting role before 1258. They’re involved with
political affairs at the highest level. Emergency circumstances had made the scope of their
activities much wider than it had been before 1258. In return, Montfort’s government was
prepared to make concessions to them. For example, during the parliament it seems very
probable that new sheriffs were nominated by the county representatives and accepted by the
government – and since the sheriff was the key figure in local government, and usually the
most unpopular, this was an important concession. The great desire of the counties was for
honest and equitable local government, and Montfort was prepared to go a long way to meet
that demand.
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We can now move on to look at the second post-Lewes parliament, the parliament of
January to March 1265. Here the circumstances were slightly different. Montfort seemed
finally to have triumphed. He’d consolidated his victory at Lewes by seeing off the threat of a
French invasion and he’d contained the threat from the marchers. The new parliament had two
main themes: the nurturing and maintenance of the Provisions of Westminster, which
embodied the main local government reforms of 1259, and the working out of the terms for
the release of Edward, the king’s son and Montfort’s captive since Lewes. The parliament
itself was a partisan body of Montfortian supporters – very few magnates, very many friendly
churchmen, 2 knights from each county, and burgesses from the towns. The apparently new
element here were the burgesses. I say ‘apparently’ because we can’t be absolutely sure that
men from the towns hadn’t been summoned to earlier parliaments – and I think it’s quite
likely that they had been. The towns were such an important source of taxable wealth that
their representatives may well have been summoned to at least some of the pre-1256
parliaments when taxation was up for discussion. One or two of the issues which had come up
in these parliaments had been specifically urban ones, making it likely that they’d been put
forward by urban representatives. But all we can be sure of is that townsmen were summoned
to parliament in 1265 and that they must have been reckoned to be on Montfort’s side.
What the burgesses said or did in parliament we’ve no idea, but we can say something
about the role of the knights. For one thing, we can see them playing some part in political
debate, just as they’d done in the June parliament. They were summoned specifically to
discuss with the king and the magnates the terms for Edward’s release. When those terms
were finally drafted they were said to rest on the consent of ‘the great men and the community
of the land’ – ‘the community of the land’ presumably being the knights and possibly the
burgesses. Equally interestingly, we can also see the knights taking a more proactive line by
putting forward some of the grievances of their constituents. For example, it was reported in
parliament that the counties felt themselves heavily burdened by defence costs incurred
during the French invasion scare of the previous year. It’s difficult to see how this could have
been made known except by oral information passed on by the counties’ representatives, the
knights. Montfort’s government reacted to this complaint by agreeing to pay the knights’
expenses in attending parliament rather than letting the constituents pay, which would have
been more normal.
This last point about expenses how far Montfort would go to conciliate local interests, just
as he’d done in the June parliament. The focus of those interests was the Provisions of
Westminster. The Provisions had come to embody all the aspirations of the localities for
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justice in local government and in particular for restraints on local officials. Now ever since
the battle of Lewes Montfort had taken great care to defend the Provisions, to publicise them,
and to make known his government’s respect for them. When he’d been negotiating with the
papal legate in the autumn of 1264 the one absolutely non-negotiable element in the
discussions had been the inviolability of the Provisions – and this was a policy followed
through in the January parliament. Several legal cases which came up during the parliament
were judged according to the terms of the Provisions – and when the terms for Edward’s
release were finally settled in parliament in March 1265, once again the Provisions were
confirmed, all royal officials were to be sworn to observe them, and those who broke them
were to be excommunicated. All this demonstrated Montfort’s concern to keep the knights on
board the Montfortian ship. You could, of course, see this as a measure of Montfort’s
weakness rather than his strength. Only 23 magnates were summoned to the January
parliament and that very small number showed how far he’d lost magnate support. In these
circumstances he had to look for support where it was most likely to be found, and that was
among the knights and gentry of the counties.
So what was the general importance of these two post-Lewes parliaments? We can look at
this in the short term and in the long term. In the short term perhaps the most important point
is that these two parliaments, but especially the June one, were rooted in a particular set of
immediate circumstances – Montfort’s need for legitimacy and support to consolidate his
victory in battle and to compensate for his declining support among the magnates. Parliament
was a way of drawing together the Montfortian sector of the political community in the face
of danger. It was also a way of buttressing Montfort’s personal position, as it showed by
endorsing the new constitution which Montfort headed. The most important role in this
buttressing operation was played by the knights, summoned in extraordinary numbers to the
June parliament and on a rather smaller scale in January 1265. The knights mattered because
they were a potential fighting force, but more particularly because they were the leaders of
their local communities. They were men whose local influence and access to local offices
gave them the means to create a Montfortian tide in the localities. Henry III’s government
before 1258 had antagonised local interests as much as baronial interests. Local power had
gone to the king’s friends, the courts had been used to screw money out of local communities,
and extortionate local officials had been given free rein. The Provisions of Westminster
offered some defence against all this, and they formed the terms of a sort of contract between
Simon de Montfort and the local communities whom the knights represented. What we also
notice about the knights is that Montfort gives them a new and larger role in parliament.
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They’re not there to discuss taxation, which never came up in these two parliaments. They’re
there to contribute to wide-ranging political business – the new constitution, the coming of the
papal legate, the terms for Edward’s release. In that sense they’re now fully participating
members of the political community – not just in the localities but at Westminster as well.
Did any of this matter in the long term? Or were the post-Lewes parliament simply
episodes, rooted in circumstance and transmitting nothing forward? They were, of course, the
last parliaments before Montfort’s death at Evesham in August 1265. So if we’re to answer
our questions we need to look ahead, to Henry III’s later parliaments and Edward I’s early
ones. In Henry’s later parliaments we can certainly see the ghost of Simon de Montfort at
work. The first major parliament after Montfort’s death was the Marlborough parliament of
1267, and the most important work of the Marlborough parliament was to enact a new statute,
the statute of Marlborough, which effectively confirmed the Provisions of Westminster. We
don’t know that the knights were present in this parliament, but there are some signs that they
may well have been – and certainly the statute was very much in their interests and the
interests of their communities. But much more definitive was the series of parliaments, seven
of them, which met between 1268 and 1270. These parliaments were intended by the king to
make money available to enable his son Edward to go on crusade. To get this money Henry
had to bargain, and one major party to the bargaining were the parliamentary knights. Knights
were present in most of these seven parliaments and in at least one as the elected
representatives of their counties. What the knights wanted this time was not so much reform
of local government, which wasn’t quite the issue that it had been in 1264-5, but instead relief
from Jewish debts. Many local knights and their constituents were heavily in debt to the Jews,
and Henry was prepared to move against the Jews and in favour of the knights in order to
ensure that his son got his crusading tax – which he finally did in April 1270. This whole
process was very instructive. It perpetuated the Montfortian system of electing county
representatives; it showed that the consent of the knights was essential for tax grants –
something which had been rather less clear before 1258; and it demonstrated that the knights
could bargain effectively in politics. As in 1264-5, so in 1268-70, they had a key role as
members of the political community, at Westminster as well as in the counties.
So, perhaps rather surprisingly, Henry had taken on Elijah’s mantle, aligning himself
closely, though of course without acknowledgement, with Montfortian policies. The
parliaments of 1268-70 ran parallel in some ways to those of 1264-5; and Henry recognised
the political weight of the knights just as Montfort had done. In normal circumstances, of
course, the knights were not yet essential to the political process, and Henry’s last six
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parliaments, in stable conditions between 1270 and 1272, were entirely magnate assemblies.
If we go on to look at Edward I’s reign, we find that there were 30 parliaments between 1274
and 1294, but knights and burgesses were present at only two and knights alone at another
two. At this stage the knights were summoned primarily when the king wanted money, and it
was only in the fourteenth century that the commons, as they were then beginning to be
called, were summoned regularly to parliament. But there were other ways of recognising
knightly and local interests besides summoning the knights to parliament. In the 1270s
Edward ran a programme of local government reform which was partly designed to conciliate
just those local interests that Montfort had appealed to – but it didn’t necessarily need the
presence of the knights in parliament. So even if the knights came to parliament relatively
rarely in Edward I’s early years we don’t have to go back on our view that Montfort’s post-
Lewes parliaments gave them a degree of political recognition which proved to be permanent.
Finally, we can take an even longer view. Yes, the post-Lewes parliaments were especially
important – but they were also part of a continuum of episodes and developments in the
history of the medieval parliament. Parliament itself had evolved from the great councils of
Anglo-Norman and Angevin England. From the time of William the Conqueror to the time of
Edward I magnates were summoned to parliament on the basis of tenure, as the king’s tenants.
Long before Simon de Montfort was born some knights had been coming to parliament on the
same basis, as the king’s tenants. Already when he was a young man knights were present in
parliament when taxation was up for discussion. The 1258-9 reform movement had
recognised their interests even though they seem to have been absent from its parliaments. If
we look at things in this way, the post-Lewes parliaments take their place in a long series of
related developments. I’ve already said more than enough about their particular importance in
giving recognition at the centre to the knights as a political force, but there’s one last point
which perhaps I haven’t emphasised enough. The post-Lewes parliaments, along with
Montfort’s phantom 1261 parliament at St Albans, established county elections as the
standard way of bringing the knights to parliament. After 1265 we hear no more about the
summoning of the lesser tenants-in-chief. From then on when the knights come to parliament
they do so because they’re elected in the localities, so giving weight to local voices and local
interests over the mere randomness of summoning the lesser tenants, who might be almost
anybody. The election of two knights from each shire ordered by Montfort in 1265 was
followed by Edward I and indeed by every medieval king – and it lasted broadly speaking
until the Representation of the People Act of 1918, when two-member county constituencies
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were finally abolished – which just goes to show how a device born out of expediency can
sometimes last for a very long time indeed.

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