Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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Wikipedia
The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England. The English Parliament traces its origins to the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot. In 1066, William of Normandy brought a feudal system, by which he sought advice of a council of tenants-in-chief and ecclesiastics before making laws. In 1215, the tenants-in-chief secured Magna Carta from King John, which established that the king may not levy or collect any taxes (except the feudal taxes to which they were hitherto accustomed), save with the consent of his royal council, which slowly developed into a parliament.
Over the centuries, the English Parliament progressively limited the power of the English monarchy which arguably culminated in the English Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649. After the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the supremacy of parliament was a settled principle and all future English and later British sovereigns were restricted to the role of constitutional monarchs with limited executive authority. The Act of Union 1707 merged the English Parliament with the Parliament of Scotland to form the Parliament of Great Britain. When the Parliament of Ireland was abolished in 1801, its former members were merged into what was now called the Parliament of the United Kingdom. This makes the current Parliament of the United Kingdom one of the oldest legislative bodies in the world. Due to the history and influence of the British Empire, the British parliament has become a model for many other national legislatures. This model is referred to as the Westminster system because the UK Parliament is located in the City of Westminster within Greater London.
Annotations
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Parliament now consists of the House of Commons http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/292.php and the House of Lords http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/293.php
The “Rump Parliament” features early in the diary. For more on what this means, see this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20030219024928/http://www.skyhook.co.uk/civwar/glossary/rump.htm
For some history of Parliament leading up to 1660, see this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20030207090359/http://www.skyhook.co.uk/civwar/glossary/longparl.htm
[Links updated 13 Jan 2009. P.G.]
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Parliament Glossary
from the official Parliament website
http://www.parliament.uk/glossary/glossary.cfmSome of these entries are historical, most have explanations of one to three paragraphs, and there are often links to related entries.
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My Lord Montagu’s scheming, recorded on March 14 1659/60, is to influence the election of the two members for the County of Huntingdonshire. Each County sent two members to Parliament, while many other places sent one member.
These were not modern elections. The franchise was limited, and there was no secret ballot. Some of the infamous “Rotten” boroughs, once thriving towns, were already small villages.
The system was reformed in the 19th Century, starting in 1832 with the Great Reform Act. Perhaps the last vestiges of the old system were the university seats for Oxford and Cambridge, which survived until the middle of the last century.
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Sidelight on public attitudes toward the Rump:
Those with access to a research library’s periodical department might want to look up an article appearing in the 50th anniversary issue, November 2002, of “Past and Present: A journal of historical studies,” from Oxford Univ. Press.
In it, “Mark Jenner employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the cathartic function of laughter and the scatology of carnival to enrich our understanding of what people were doing when they burned carcasses and sang bawdy songs on the London streets of 1659-62 in mockery of the Rump Parliament.”—-Adam Fox, 7 March 2003 Times Literary Supplement, p. 27.
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who sat in the commons:there are cd’s for who sat with whom:
at;-
http://www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/hop/period6.html
…..The CD-ROM provides for the first time a full indexing facility for the History. The search engine provided with the text will rapidly locate and display all instances throughout the entire twenty-three-volume sequence of any word or string of letters, enumerating the instances found and showing where they fall. It will search by constituency (so that, for example, the entries for all members who sat for the parliamentary constituency of King’s Lynn in the periods covered can be called up within seconds); and by place of origin (calling up entries for all members who originate or reside in King’s Lynn). There is proximity searching (to home in on, say, Joseph Taylor of Devon but not on his contemporary Joseph Taylor of Middlesex; or to find mentions of Chaucer within the context of the wool trade). Boolean and wildcard searching are fully supported.
…….>
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house of lords sessions.
pick a date
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.asp?pubid=37
this may 30 61
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=14113 -
the period H of C[ommons] mar 1643 to 1644 dec
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.asp?pubid=9
References in the diary
- 1660
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Jan: 1, 2, 3
Feb: 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 28
Mar: 1, 2, 3, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 29
Apr: 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 29
May: 3, 4, 21, 22
Jun: 1, 19, 21
Jul: 5, 19
Aug: 4, 10, 20
Sep: 11, 12, 20
Oct: 15
Nov: 5, 6, 10, 12, 30
Dec: 4, 5, 6, 8
- 1661
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Jan: 1, 2
Feb: 1, 2, 4, 7, 19, 23, 27
Mar: 5, 18, 20
Apr: 22, 23
May: 26, 28, 30, 31
Jul: 26, 27, 30
Aug: 4
Oct: 17
Nov: 13, 21, 30
Dec: 10
- 1662
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Jan: 8, 15, 22, 29
Feb: 7
Mar: 3
Apr: 7
May: 19, 23, 29
Jun: 13
Sep: 30
Dec: 31
- 1663
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Jan: 25
Feb: 8, 16, 18, 19, 25, 28
Mar: 1, 3, 20, 22
Apr: 1, 4, 14, 25, 29
May: 6, 7, 10, 23, 27, 31
Jun: 12, 13, 21, 23, 26, 30
Jul: 1, 14, 21, 22, 25, 30
Oct: 26
Nov: 6, 9
- 1664
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Feb: 1, 15, 22
Mar: 16, 17, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30
Apr: 1, 13, 27, 30
May: 31
Jun: 4
Aug: 17, 20
Nov: 22, 24, 25
- 1665
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Jan: 27
Mar: 27
Sep: 3, 9
Oct: 3, 4, 11, 15, 16, 28
Dec: 5
- 1666
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Jan: 17, 28
Feb: 21, 25
Mar: 2, 19
Apr: 7, 23, 25
Jun: 27
Jul: 3, 27
Aug: 3, 26, 27, 28
Sep: 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30
Oct: 1, 2, 6, 8, 13, 15, 16, 19, 24, 25, 31
Nov: 5, 10, 14, 18, 19, 23, 25, 26, 30
Dec: 1, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 31
- 1667
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Jan: 2, 7, 9, 27, 31
Feb: 6, 8