usurpation of liberties, and petitions to the king for the restoration of
franchises which the sheriffs were overriding could not be answered
without consulting the exchequer at Westminster and its records. By
1238 the king was regularly adjourning matters ‘complained of’ or
‘shown’ to him and his court on progress at Windsor, Clarendon, or
Woodstock to a few working days after the beginning of an exchequer
session: that is, to the octaveor quindeneof St. Hilary (near to Candle-
mas), Easter, Trinity, or (most frequently) Michaelmas. The name of
‘parliaments’ seems to have been first applied in a technical sense to
these judicial sessions at Westminster, which in the 1250s were thus
being held at regular times in England as well as in France. Whether
final judgment in a case was given by the barons of the exchequer, or by
royal justices sent into the country to hear the querelae, or as a result of
an inquest by the king’s escheators, the process was controlled by king
and council (which included the judges), and the final decision in a case
could be described as made ‘in our court before us [the king] and our
whole parliament’.^86
The evidence suggests that political debate and the mustering of
troops at parliaments, the activities bound to strike the chroniclers, were
additions to the original judicial functions which were what made
parliament an institution distinguishable from essentially political ‘great
councils’. In any event, justice easily merged into politics in ‘whole’,
‘great’, or ‘general’ parliaments. Did the chancery clerk who wrote the
order to the sheriffs in 1244 not to admit baronial franchises unless they
had been enjoyed at the time of the ‘parliament of Runnymede’ under-
stand the famous assembly of 1215 as political or judicial in its framing
of the Great Charter of English liberties?^87 Matthew Paris introduced
the term to his Great Chroniclein 1246 in an obviously political sense:
he says that Henry III ‘called the whole nobility to London for a general
parliament of the English realm (ad parlamentum generalissimum regni
Anglicani), that is the prelates, abbots, and priors, as well as bishops,
earls, and barons, to deliberate effectively concerning the precarious
state of the kingdom, as urgent necessity demanded’. The proceedings
of a parliament in February 1251 shows how political significance
attached to originally judicial proceedings. An accusation made to the
king and his council against a leading royal justice, Henry of Bath, of
taking bribes and giving false judgments while on eyre, was adjourned
English parliaments 171(^86) Close Rolls, 1237–42, 447; Close Rolls, 1247–1251, 104, 107; Close Rolls, 1251–3, 468;
Close Rolls, 1254–6, 43, 60, 83, 118, 128–9, 132, 136, 196, 212, 223; J. E. A. Jolliffe,
‘Some Factors in the Beginnings of Parliament’, TRHS, 4th ser. 22 (1940), 108–39, and
R. F. Treharne, ‘The Nature of Parliament in the Reign of Henry III’, EHR74 (1959),
590–610: both articles reprinted in Historical Studies of the English Parliament, 2 vols., ed.
E. B. Fryde and E. Miller (Cambridge UP, 1970).
(^87) Close Rolls, 1242–7, 242; cf. Close Rolls, 1247–51, 539; Close Rolls, 1253–4, 43.