The language of the late medieval English Parliament Rolls reflected
the same exaltation that is found in French writers of a kingship
exercised for the good of the whole community. The record of the
chancellor’s initial ‘pronouncement’ and sermon might describe the
business of a parliament as provision ‘for the state and defence [pro
statu et defensione] of the kingdom of England and the English church
[ecclesiae Anglicanae]’, and contain lectures on ‘royal majesty’, the
obedience due to the king, and the different sorts of law (of nature,
nations, and the gospel; Mosaic, civil, and canon). And it would repeat
injunctions to sustain the king’s ‘high and royal estate’, and to keep the
peace and duly execute the laws of the land, ‘without which no realm
or country can long be in prosperity’.^5
In the fifteenth century, ‘commonwealth’ became established as the
favourite term for polity in the English vernacular, which it would
remain down to the actual establishment in the seventeenth century of
‘a Commonwealth and Free State’ without any king or House of Lords.^6
John Gower’s huge philosophical poem, Confessio Amantis(written in
English, despite its Latin title, and probably between 1386 and 1390,
though it exists in versions dedicated to both Richard II and Henry IV)
sets out in book seven the three divisions of philosophy as Aristotle
explained them to Alexander the Great, and under the third division
(Practique) has a discussion of the ethics, economics, and ‘policy’ of
kingship. Gower emphasizes that rule should always be for the
‘common profit’, a phrase which is taken straight from French and
indeed appears in French in the declaration in Henry IV’s first parlia-
ment that the king wished especially to have the Commons’ advice and
assent for the making of statutes, grants, and subsidies, and all such
things as were to be done pur commune profit du Roialme. It appears
again in 1414 in Henry V’s first parliament, when the Commons pre-
sented (in English) a crucial claim that the king should grant or refuse
their petitions without altering them, and the king is recorded as assert-
ing that the statutes of that parliament were made by the advice and
assent of the lords and ‘at the request of his Commons’, for ‘the state of
Holy Church and of the Realm’ and for ‘the Peace and la commune
Profit’.^7
Comparing and criticizing states of commonwealths 2971–3, 46–7, 885–6, 897–913, 1002–3, 1041, 1092–5; J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of
Kingship(Cambridge UP, 1996), 16 ff.
(^5) RPiv. 3, 15, 34, 62, 94, 106, 116, 123, 129, 150, 169, 197, 210, v. 214, 239, 278, vi. 3,
167, 196, 458.
(^6) The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, ed. S. R. Gardiner, 3rd edn.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 388.
(^7) John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. R. A. Peck (New York, 1968), 368–414; R. A. Peck,
Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Southern Illinois UP, 1978);
A Concordance to John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, ed. J. D. Pickles and J. L. Dawson
(Woodbridge, 1987), 486–7; RPiii. 427, iv. 22.