all his other seneschals and baillies in 1309 on how they should
requisition supplies (prises) for the royal household (a perennial subject
of grievance to the people) was ‘given at Paris, in our parlement’; as was
the order of 1313 regulating ‘the estate and officers’ of the Châtelet and
forbidding that court to hear any case concerning inheritance, personal
estate or condition, or involving sums of more than sixty shillings.^81 The
seeds of parlement’s claim to register all royal edicts appear in Olimin
a note appended to a royal letter of 1310 ordering the king’s agents in
Périgord to stop exactions complained about by the inhabitants: the
clerk wrote that the precise terms of the ordinance had not yet been
seen, and it was good that they should be recorded.^82
English parliaments
The antiquary William Camden ended his Britannia, a book which went
through four editions within eight years of its publication in 1586, with
an account of the ‘Law Courts of England’, ecclesiastical, temporal, and
‘one mixed of both’, that is Parliament. He knew that in the thirteenth
century the name of this high court was ‘of no great antiquity, and the
same borrowed out of France’, but he insisted that it was only the name,
since he was intent on carrying the origins of the politically active
parliament of his own time back to the Anglo-Saxons.^83 Yet the parallels
between the development of what the legal writer ‘Fleta’ describes in the
1290s as the English king’s new ‘court in his council in his parliaments’
and the growth of the French king’s parlement are unmistakeable.^84
‘Parliament’ first appears in official records in the 1230s to mean a
meeting of the king and his councillors acting as a court of last resort.
In November 1236 a law-suit about the ownership of an advowson (the
right to present a clerk to a living) was adjourned from the court coram
rege(the court ‘with the king’, or ‘king’s bench’) at Woodstock ‘to the
octaves of Saint Hilary at Westminster at the parliament (ad parlia-
mentum)’.^85 Cases of political importance would naturally come before
judges reinforced by lords who happened to be present in the king’s
court. Disputes between the king and the magnates became particularly
intense after Henry III launched a campaign against the baronial
170 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^81) Les Olim,ii. 497–500 (x), 587–9 (xx).
(^82) Ibid. ii. 506 (v).
(^83) Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century, 23.
(^84) Fleta, ed. H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, Selden Soc. 72, 89, 99 (London, 1953–83),
ii. 109–10.
(^85) Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, xv. 1233–7 (London: HMSO, 1972), no.
2047; H. G. Richardson and G .O. Sayles, ‘The Earliest Known Official Use of the Term
“Parliament’’ ’, EHR82 (1967), 747–50; Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century,280.