December 3, 2014
History of Parliament Trust receives £5,000 grant for ‘Making Constitutions’ conferences.
The History of Parliament Trust is delighted to announce that the Magna Carta Trust’s 800th Anniversary Commemoration has agreed to provide a grant of £5,000 towards next year’s international conference ‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliaments: Constructing Representative Institutions, 1000-2000’.
The conference will take place under the auspices of the history of Parliament and the International Commission for the History of Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI: http://www.ichrpi.com/). It marks two anniversaries of enormous significance in the history of English, and British constitutional and legal history: the 800th anniversary of King John’s acceptance of Magna Carta, the great charter of liberties of the English nation in 1215; and the 750th anniversary of the Parliament summoned by Simon de Montfort in 1265, following his defeat of King Henry III in a civil war which was the culmination of a baronial revolt.
The conference will take 1215 and 1265 as a starting point for an exploration of the initiation and development of political institutions from the early Middle Ages onwards, and an assessment of their role in state formation or nation building. It will consider the significance of foundational documents and events such as Magna Carta and the de Montfort Parliament and how these – and the historiography of Parliaments – became so important in the subsequent history of parliament and political institutions.
The conference will set the foundation of the English and British constitutional tradition alongside that of other jurisdictions elsewhere; it will explore other confrontations between communal traditions and royal powers and how these were expressed and resolved; it will seek to compare the development of the English political tradition with contemporary parallel institutions in Europe, and explore their divergence and/or convergence.
For more information on the grant, click here.