Unreformed House of Commons

In England, by the 7th century, these ancient folkmoots had developed into convocations of the land's most powerful and important people: ealdormen, thegns, and senior clergy, to discuss matters of national and local significance.

Through missionaries (later made saints) sent by Gregory the Great (such as Augustine of Canterbury and Paulinus of York) the seven Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, mainly with quasi-Witenagemots, officially converted to the church, by the mid-7th century.

In England, cross-sea Viking Kingdoms made raids and soon invasions – such times and places of conflict favoured stronger leadership, and effective autocracy.

The latter's semi-relatives, being the people (predominantly men) of the Norman Conquest, swept aside the remnants of the witenagemots and replaced most of the nobility, while continuing to seize and defend settled lands, vassal states, abroad.

[citation needed] The Normans regularly seized on an orthodoxy of medieval times which ended with ascendant Roundhead philosophies at the start of the Age of Enlightenment.

This was, as taught and professed by established people, that sovereignty (including the rulers of ancient tribes and modern kingdoms) was a birthright, by divine grace.

Reciting the more worldly origin of kingship: upward from the people, seeing a King's glorification, crowning and ongoing assent to his rulership by successful men-of-arms, most transparent in the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, became High Treason.

[citation needed] Very wealthy nobility aligned with foreign powers, for example, completely thwarted a cross-kingdom powerhold for the 18+3⁄4-year reign of Stephen, King of England.

[2] Parliament emerged from such consultations (or parleys), representatives of local communities (the Commons) being added to those of the Lords (peers; senior bishops and all those ennobled, whether for loyalty or gallantry, who generally already had wealth and influence) – a process aided by the practical consideration that it was easier for the King to collect the taxes he needed if the people consented to pay them.

[citation needed] Court-attending or royally-invested nobles and the Western church created and perpetuated much historiography – including shrines and hagiography of "good kings" – such as to Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr.

Elaborate royal tombs and regular prayers for the dead were features of Windsor Castle, Westminster Abbey and Bury St Edmunds.

[6] He believed that his own authority to rule had been due to the divine right of kings given to him by God, and by the traditions and laws of England when he was crowned and anointed, and that the power wielded by those trying him was simply that of force of arms.

A large number of borough members were sponsored into office by the government and thus gave it support: these cronies were known as "placemen", and it was a long-standing objective of parliamentary reformers to eliminate them in the House of Commons.

In practice most Catholics were prevented between the reign of Elizabeth I and the Papists Act 1778, as they could not own or inherit land, making them unable to meet the property requirement.

This would not be accepted as a description of the situation in the reign of George III, when it was frequently said that the Commons was full of lazy time-servers, talentless dependants of peers, and corrupt placemen and government agents.

John Brooke's studies of division lists led him to comment: "The majority of Members voting with Government held no office and did so through honest conviction."

[8] To be a candidate or elector for a county seat, a man had to own (not rent) freehold property valued for the land tax at two pounds a year.

This rule was established by the Electors of Knights of the Shires Act 1429, and as the value of money gradually declined, a slowly increasing number of landowners were admitted to the franchise.

Exceptions were Middlesex, an odd concentration of big city merchants, financiers and industrialists for a county – it had several notable contests and the 1784 to 1812 unbroken returns of William Wilberforce for Yorkshire.

[8] Even in medieval times a significant proportion of the King's revenue came from taxes paid by people living in towns, and thus the House of Commons had representatives of boroughs as well as counties from an early date.

Mediaeval kings could and did grant and revoke charters at their pleasure, often to create seats in the House for their supporters, and frequently regardless of the size or importance of the town.

The franchises for the Welsh boroughs were freemen, scot and lot and corporation but in practice they were under the control of local patrons and contested elections were rare.

[24] While an uninhabited hill such as Old Sarum in Wiltshire elected two members of Parliament, cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bolton, Bradford and Huddersfield had no direct representation.

[citation needed] In addition, Glasgow in Scotland – which grew into a major industrial and commercial centre in the 18th century, increasing in numbers from some twelve thousand to eighty thousand[25] – although technically represented in the House of Commons, was part of a district of burghs that meant it was in practice without representation, and since none of its citizens met the county franchise none of them had a direct vote.

[26] The Cromwellian system that eventually emerged featured a modest increase in the franchise, and a sharp reduction in the overall number of seats, with a shift in balance to county over borough members.

There followed a long period during which any challenge to the system of representation was equated with republicanism and treason; and the political classes remained largely content with the alliance of landowners, urban merchants, and small town electorates which underpinned it.

[31] However Tory resistance, and the English reaction against the excesses of the French Revolution, stifled all real attempts to raise the issue until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

[33] The disenfranchisement for corruption by Lord Liverpool's of Grampound in Cornwall, when the borough's patron had been convicted of bribery, saw its two seats given to Yorkshire, which thus elected four county members from 1826 to 1832.

The accession of a new, and less hide-bound monarch precipitated a general election, which – galvanized by news of the French Revolution of 1830 with its middle-class power-brokers – produced a swing of 30 seats against Wellington's Government, to a coalition (including the Ultras) on 15 November.

[37] At this election the Whigs won a landslide – a result that, as Elie Halevy put it, "by its condemnation of the existing franchise went near to justify the plea of its Tory defenders".