PARLIAMENTS, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

_(For the Mirror.)_


Chamberlayne in his _Notitia Angliæ_, says, "Before the conquest, the
great council of the king, consisting only of the great men of the
kingdom, was called _Magnatum Conventus_, or else _Prælatorum Procerumque
Concilium_, and by the Saxons in their own tongue _Micel Gemote_,[3] the
great assembly; after the conquest about the beginning of King Edward I.,
some say in the time of Henry I., it was called by the French word
_Parlementum_, from _Parler_, to talk together; still consisting (as
divers authors affirm) only of the great men of the nation, until the
reign of Henry III. when the commons also were called to sit in
parliament; for divers authors presume to say, the first writs to be
found in records, sent forth to them, bear date 49 Henry III. Yet some
antiquaries are of opinion, that long before, nothing of moment wherein
the lives or estates of the common people of England were concerned, ever
passed without their consent."

[3] Or Wittenagemote, i.e. assembly of wise men.

In Edward the Third's time, an act of parliament, made in the reign of
William the Conqueror, was pleaded in the case of the Abbey of St.
Edmund's Bury, and judicially allowed by the court. Hence it appears that
parliaments or general councils are coeval with the kingdom itself.

Sir Walter Raleigh thinks the Commons were first called on the 17th of