which Earl Simon summoned two knights from each shire and two
burgesses from each borough, and which was consequently long
regarded as the first true parliament, faced the intractable political
problem of how to release Prince Edward from captivity and make a
true peace. But even as Simon de Montfort’s position began to crumble
the trials of disputes involving leading barons were being adjourned to
‘our next parliament at London on the first day of June’.^93
The parliaments held by Henry III in the two years after de Mont-
fort’s defeat and death at Evesham on 4 August 1265 were engaged in
pacifying the country, a task of which the settlement of landed disputes
arising from ‘the time of war’ was a major part. The Londoners had to
go to a parliament at Northampton in April 1266 to seek restoration of
the ‘state’ which they had lost after the battle of Evesham because of
their adherence to de Montfort. In his parliament outside the still resist-
ing Montfortian stronghold of Kenilworth in August 1266, the king
appointed a commission of reliable prelates and barons to make recom-
mendations on ‘the estate (status) of the disinherited by occasion of the
late war in England, saving the estate of the king and his dignity’. By
their award (the ‘Dictum of Kenilworth’), made ‘to the honour of the
church’ and for ‘the good, prosperous and peaceable state of King
Henry’, de Montfort’s supporters were to redeem their lands by pay-
ments proportional to their offences. Then, in a parliament at Marl-
borough in November 1267, Henry ‘provided for the betterment of his
realm of England’ as his royal office demanded, in fact by a statute
which largely re-enacted the baronial Provisions of Westminster of eight
years before. In 1270, an Easter gathering in London (exorbitantly
described by a local source as of ‘almost all the bishops, earls, barons,
knights and freeholders of the whole realm of England’) was continued
as a parliament at Westminster, because it was necessary to provide for
the kingdom’s state and rule (de statu et regimine) before Henry and
Edward departed on crusade. (In the event Henry did not go with his
son, because of his ill health and the dangers in their both leaving the
realm together.)^94
The development of English parliaments and French parlements
diverged from a common judicial root established in the third quarter of
the thirteenth century. In 1268 parliament fell back into a regular
pattern of sessions at Westminster or (less frequently) London, usually
at Easter and Michaelmas, though special parliaments were held as
required at other places. After his accession in 1272 while on crusade
174 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^93) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 97–109; Handbook of British Chronology,
3rd edn., ed. E. B. Fryde, D. E. Greenway, S. Porter, and I. Roy (London: Royal Historical
Society, 1986), 541–2; Close Rolls, 1264–8, 96, 118.
(^94) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 110–15, 126; Handbook of British
Chronology, 543–4; Close Rolls, 1264–8, 558–9.