The Ecclesiastical Roots of Representation and Consent

A new body of scholarship has revisited the medieval origins of representative institutions or parliaments, which have been highlighted as crucial for the later “Rise of the West.”¹ Different definitions of representative institutions have been used in this research.² However, as Boucoyannis³ and Stasavage⁴ have recently argued, the conceptual key to understanding medieval parliaments lies in the twin practices of proctorial representation and consent.⁵ These innovations were to form “the bedrock of modern democracy”⁶ and, as historians have long emphasized, they allow us to identify where representative institutions first arose and how they spread.⁷

The principle of proctorial representation entailed that a corporate group such as a town, a shire, or a cathedral chapter sent one or more agents (proctors) with full (plenipotentiary) powers to an assembly, normally based on a written mandate from which these representatives could not deviate. The other side of the coin was that the decisions made in the assembly or council bound the corporate group that had appointed the representatives. The principle of consent entailed that corporate groups whose rights were affected by decisions made in assembly had to be consulted (though not necessarily to influence the decisions).⁸ This mainly—but not exclusively—happened when taxation, which by definition affected the property rights of these groups, was imposed.⁹ The summons that were sent to the corporate groups clearly stated the purpose as this determined the “scope of the council’s agenda.” This information was needed to ensure that representatives came with a mandate that allowed binding decisions to be made.¹⁰

As Boucoyannis¹¹ and Stasavage¹² observe, medieval historians have shown that proctorial representation and consent were originally judicial concepts derived from the Roman Law that had been revived in the twelfth century. But both Boucoyannis and Stasavage ignore another long-standing insight of medieval and legal historians: Proctorial representation and consent were first developed within the Catholic Church following the eleventh-century Gregorian Reforms and the subsequent Investiture Conflict and only then migrated to secular polities.¹³ More generally, we find no appreciation of these ecclesiastical roots of representation and consent in the burgeoning comparative politics literature on medieval representative institutions. Van Zanden, Buringh, and Bosker¹⁴ list virtually all other reasons for...