justiciar’s eyre, were no doubt among the sources of the provisions
finally promulgated at the Michaelmas parliament of 1259. The Latin
‘Provisions of Westminster’ put first the limiting of the powers of land-
lords to distrain tenants to attend their courts and of the obligation of
the king’s subjects to attend sheriffs’ tourns. They were followed by
administrative provisions couched in French, ordering the appointment
of justices to go throughout the land accompanied by representatives of
the community (del commun), ‘to see that justice is done to plaintiffs
and to all others’ and ‘that the establissimenzwhich are made for the
good of the realm, both those already made and those still to be made,
are enjoined upon the counties for observance’. The four knights’
reporting of complaints against the sheriff to the justiciar was to con-
tinue, and to carry forward the business at the centre two or three
councillors were to be ‘in constant attendance on the king from one
parliament to the next’.^90
The judicial functions and political uses of parliaments ran in
parallel, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes conflicting. The
king found it difficult to accept meetings which should happen auto-
matically, without his summoning. He tried to prevent the holding of
the Candlemas parliament of 1260 while he was absent in France, and
at the midsummer parliament he put to an inquest of bishops a series of
charges against Simon de Montfort, including that the earl of Leicester
had insisted on the convening of parliament as the Provisions of Oxford
stipulated.^91 To the next Candlemas parliament there were adjourned
questions of the validity of a baron’s debt to a Jew, and the Earl
Marshal’s claim to the custody of prisoners arraigned in the justiciar’s
eyre as well as king’s bench and the profits therefrom;^92 the only other
‘parliament’ which may have met in 1261 was that which Henry
summoned to Windsor in September to forestall an assembly of knights,
three from each county, called to St. Albans by the baronial party.
Parliament did meet at normal times in 1262: the Michaelmas session
again took place in the king’s absence, and Simon de Montfort made a
dramatic intervention in it to exhibit a letter from the pope upholding
the Provisions of Oxford; Philip Basset the justiciar also called to it
a dispute concerning a franchise likely to disturb the peace ‘in the
uncertainty within the realm’. Only an autumn parliament is recorded
in 1263 as the country moved towards civil war, and in 1264 only the
parliament which the triumphant barons called after the battle of Lewes
in the name of the captive king. The famous assembly at Hilary 1265 to
English parliaments 173(^90) Sayles, ibid. 81; P. Brand, ‘The Drafting of Legislation in Mid-Thirteenth Century
England’, Parliamentary History, 9 (1990); Documents of the Baronial Movement, 137–64.
(^91) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 21–2, 86–94; Documents of the Baronial
Movement, 172–3.
(^92) Ibid. 95–6.