The Crown’s increasing need for money meant it was a short step to the Commons becoming an indispensable part of Parliament. Hence, from the 1260s, no general tax was levied without the consent of the representatives of local communities specifically summoned for the purpose of giving their consent, and only Parliaments in which the Crown sought no grant of taxation met without these representatives. There was both a theoretical and practical reason for this: on the one hand, there was the influence of the Roman law doctrine, ‘what touches all shall be approved by all’, cited in the writs that summoned the 1295 Parliament and, on the other, there was the practical consideration that the efficient collection of levy on moveable property, the form that tax assumed, depended on some mechanism of local consent. But as the 13th century progressed this principle gave way to another, namely that consent must also be sought from the lesser tenants as the representatives of their localities.
The theoretical principle of consent had been stated in Magna Carta, but that consent was conceived on the feudal principle that it need come from the King’s leading subjects, his tenants-in-chief, alone. The decline in the real value of the Crown’s traditional revenues and the financial demands of war, however, transformed these local representatives from an occasional to a defining component of Parliament because the levy of taxation depended on their consent. Had the Crown been able to function financially from its lands and feudal revenues alone, these representatives of the localities, the precursors of the Commons, might have remained no more than a source of information for the Crown and a conduit through which it could liaise with its subjects. At first these extended assemblies – the first known dates from 1212 - served as the means by which the King could communicate with men who, although below the ranks of his leading tenants, were of standing in their localities and well-informed of local grievances. Occasionally, however, these assemblies were afforced by the summons of a wider grouping. So it remained for much of the 13th century.
In its earliest history ‘Parliament’, first used as a technical term in 1236, was a gathering of the same type, an assembly of prominent men, summoned at the will of the King once or twice a year, to deal with matters of state and law. All long-lived institutions have their antecedents, and the antecedents of the Lords are to found in the Anglo-Saxon witan which brought the leading men of the realm periodically together with the King for ceremonial, legislative and deliberative purposes.
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