It has long escaped the notice of historians that "Petitions" had much importance in the early history of English Parliament. W. Stubbs and his followers, looking from their traditional point of view of "the political assembly: of the Three Estates", treated "taxation" as the most important driving force of parliamentary history and counted petitions as naught. It owes the laborious work of Mr. H. G. Richardson and Professor.G. O. Sayles that petitions have gained a certain attention among the historians.
Richardson and Sayles produced an entirely new picture of the early parliaments, questioning, or even denying, the traditional picture of the political "representative" parliament of England. But they went too far to give a modest and. acceptable picture, by disavowing all the parts of the traditional theory both in function and in construction of parliament. The shortcomings of their theory now need to be re-considered and be corrected.
The author of this short article wants to make some arguments on this subject by considering such excellent but each isolated works on early petitions together, as the works of Richardson and Sayles, J: G. Edwards, H. L. Gray, A. F. Pollard, A. D. Mayers and D. Rayner. Thus arranging the ideas about early petitions and then re-considering them in the light of the printed rolls and documents, the author anticipates to show one more aspect of the changing phase of parliamentary function and construction than that she has already produced in another article.
The main points of this article are twofold. 1) The FUNCTION of early petitions: The earliest petitions had both judicial and executive or administrative charactors. In time, as the judicial charactor became, lost from the records of petitions on the parliament rolls, the executive or administrative records of petitions broke into two kinds, one called the "private" petitions, and the other the "common" petitions. Then even the "private" petitions faded away from the parliament rolls, and the "common" petitions became the only kind of the petitions on the rolls, . growing more and more legislative in charactor. 2) The PROCEDURE of early petitions: Keeping pace with these changes and developments of functions the procedure of petitions differentiated. There developed beside the older process of "private" petitions a new one of the "com-mon" petitions. But this could not mean that, as Richardson and Sayles thought, the former lost its real function in favour of the latter. The development of parliamentary offices in and after the late 14th century seems to show that those functional changes of petitions were, at least from one aspect, rather surface, and were only the results of differentiation of the system of record-making. Of course these differentiation is very important because this in turn suggests the emergence of certain differentiation of ideas of justice, legislation and administration. But the functioning body of parliament as a whole seemes still accumurative and attractive, rather the center of the whole government than some entirely re-constructed two Houses of political charactor.
The change and development of the function of early parliamentary petitions coincides with the change and development of the function of early parliaments as a whole, that is, from judicial to legislative. But this change and development was a very slow process, and through this process parliaments still kept and even developed to be the center of the whole government.
抄録全体を表示