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( Parliament of England)
The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England. Its roots can be traced back to the early medieval period. In a series of developments, it came increasingly to constrain the power of the monarch, and went on after the Act of Union 1707 to merge with the Parliament of Scotland and form the main basis of the Parliament of Great Britain, and later the Parliament of the United Kingdom. This makes the modern Parliament of the United Kingdom one of the oldest legislative bodies in the world - arguably the oldest - and, for this reason, it is sometimes referred to as the "Mother of all Parliaments". The roots of the Parliament of England can be traced back to the reign of Henry III. However, the institution does not have an exact founding date and the concept of a king seeking consent for his laws and decisions was not new to this period. Under a monarchical system of government, the monarch must consult and seek a measure of acceptance for his policies if he is to enjoy the broad cooperation of his subjects. Early Kings of England had no standing army or police, and so depended on the support of powerful subjects. The monarchy had agents in every part of the country. However, under the feudal system that evolved in England following the Norman invasion of 1066, the laws of the Crown could not have been upheld without the support of the nobility and the clergy. The former had economic and military power bases of their own through major ownership of land and the feudal obligations of their tenants (some of whom held lands on condition of military service). The Church - then still part of the Roman Catholic Church and so owing ultimate loyalty to Rome - was virtually a law unto itself in this period as it had its own system of religious law courts. In order to seek consultation and consent from the nobility and the senior clergy on major decisions, post-1066 English monarchs called Great Councils. A typical Great Council would consist of archbishops, bishops, abbots, barons and earls, the pillars of the feudal system. These Great Councils were loosely based on the structure of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, although the importance of the latter institution to the later development of parliament can be exaggerated.[citation needed]
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