As part of our series on Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort’s parliament, Ian Stone, a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, discusses how a recent discovery among the records of the Corporation of London shows just how tightly bound the citizens of London had become to Simon de Montfort’s regime in advance of Montfort’s famous parliament of 1265…
In December 1264 Simon de Montfort summoned his famous parliament, ‘the House of Commons in embryo’, to meet in London on 20 January 1265. This assembly marked a first in the history of England and of parliament, for its attendees were not just the earls, the lords (ecclesiastical and lay), the barons and the knights of the shires, but the townsmen of England too. Montfort, in seeking to build as wide a base as possible for his regime, required every major town to send two representatives…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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