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foundation of the Chapel of St. Stephen; and the under Chapel, of curious construction, has survivedthe conflagration, and forms a portion of the present site, to which we shall hereafter refer, merelyremarking in this place, that the crypt formed the roof of the Speaker’s State Dining-Room, and theHouse of Commons was the upper part of the wing of the Speaker’s residence, which was in a smallcourt of the Old Palace, with a garden fronting the Thames, and his dinin g chair was directly under hisofficial seat.
It may not be deemed amiss if we now enter into a brief history of the origin and progressof Parliaments in the two Houses, with a few details as to the business and the forms pursued ineach of the Parliamentary Chambers.
The word ‘ Parliament ’ is of more modern origin than the existence of Legislative Assemblies in thiscountry; and we know that the Saxons called their meetings (which more resembled Privy Councilsof our day) Witan-ge-mot.* Parliament is obviously derived from the Drench, and JParlement wasfirst applied to the general assemblies of the state in the reign of Louis VII . The first use ofthe word in this country, according to some authorities, occurs in the preamble to the statute of West-minster, 3rd Edward I. , A.D. 1272: but Coke disputes this, and asserts, that the word { Parliament ’ wasused in the reign of Edward the Confessor . Be this as it may, there was nothing at all approaching tothe representative system similar to that now in operation until “ some years after the Conquest,”according to Hume. We may fix the period as nearly as possible during the reign of Henry III. , whoassembled his Parliament whenever he wanted an excuse to extract money from the Londoners. Wemay, indeed, go higher for the earliest form of Parliament , as the principles of the existing ParliamentaryConstitution were certainly existing as early as the reign of King John ; for he, in the Great Charter ,promises to summon all the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and great barons, personally, and all othertenants in chief under the Crown, by the sheriffs and bailiffs, to meet at a certain place, with forty days’notice, to assess aids and scutages, when necessary.
It is also certain that the representative system for the Commons was in actual operation in thereign of Henry III. ; for there still remain writs of the date 1266, to summon knights, citizens,and burgesses, to Parliament . There are some writers who believe Parliaments were formally summonedas early as the time of Henry I.f
* The constitution of this great council of the Heptarchy—one of the earliest of which was assembled by Ina, King of the West Saxons, A. D. 690-1—hasbeen much disputed. It was not a representative body, but consisted mainly of the spiritual and temporal thanes who held immediately of the crown, and whocould command the services of military vassals. In fact, the Witan was the hereditary Council of the Crown, and resembled the House of Lords rather than theCommons.
f There was a ‘ Parliament ’ held 1189 at Westminster in the first year of the reign of Richard I . This was an assembly of the “ bishops, earls, and barons,”convened by that monarch for the purpose of considering the propriety of acceding to an invitation of the King of France , who sent an ambassador to notify, thathe and his nobles had determined to embark in the enterprise of delivering the Holy Land from the hands of the Saracens , and inviting Richard and his Peers toconcur in this sacred undertaking. The assembled nobles very readily agreed to the proposal: they assumed the cross, took the customary oaths of the crusaderson the spot, and soon after left England to fulfil their vows.