Welsh Journals

PARLIAMENTARY TEXTS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. Edited by Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Pp. 230. £ 16. Fourteenth-century Englishmen excelled at producing how-to-do-it handbooks, and no technical treatise of the age was more useful or popular than that document which came to be known as the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum. Despite its more general title, the present volume is largely a new critical edition of that important manual on later medieval parliamentary procedure, augmented by several less celebrated parliamentary records which have survived outside the official rolls themselves. The Modus has been the subject of considerable controversy since the parliamentarians of the sixteenth century invoked its authority for their view that parliaments antedated the Norman conquest. When the scholarly William Prynne denounced it as a Lancastrian forgery, he inaugurated a debate which lasted into this century, and which this volume attempts to resolve. Numerous medieval and Tudor statesmen and lawyers seem to have known and accepted this treatise as a generalized handbook to parliament, but modern scholars from Stubbs onward have differed markedly on its purpose, its reliability, and even on its date of composition. The editors' introduction to this edition furnishes a judicious summary of these issues and generally favours the conclusions of V. H. Galbraith and Maude Clarke. Following most modern authorities, they date the work to the reign of Edward II, specifically to the early-1320s, but reject suggestions that it was intended as a political pamphlet and reconcile its discrepancies from the records of particular parliamentary sessions by suggesting that it was meant as a synthetic procedural guide for the use and training of lawyers. In this spirit, the English translation which they provide ought perhaps to have been entitled 'How to hold a parliament'. These prefatory remarks are comprehensive, sensible and scrupulous, though the obligatory speculation on the possible authorship of the treatise understandably fails to advance much beyond the conjectural conclusions of Professor Roskell. The volume prints both Latin recensions of the Modus and the text of the influential Irish version, each with a full critical apparatus and a straightforward translation. Three brief related documents cast further light on parliamentary procedure: an account of disputes at the parliament of 1321, the report of Colchester's representatives to the parliament of 1485, and a draft of the speaker's formal protestation which probably dates from 1504. Each of these has been given a useful textual and substantive commentary. None, though, approaches the value of the Modus as a unique legacy of the medieval parliamentary machinery. The curiosities which have raised doubts about that document will almost certainly continue to provoke scholarly differences, but its latest editors have solidly confirmed both its essential credibility and its rightful place in the canon of classic legal and political treatises. Haverford College, J. W. McKENNA Pennsylvania