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J. R. Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-ipj (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). xvi + 526 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-958550-2. £30.00.
The Origins of the English Parliament restores a central aspect of the 'Whig interpretation of history' - that venerable account of England's political development. That parliament had pre-Conquest roots, that it acquired institutional coherence in the thirteenth century, and that the Commons became the people's bulwark against the excesses of the Crown and the nobility alike: these ideas are especially associated with Stubbs's great Constitutional History. The bishop's interpretation was precisely critiqued by Maidand, and then extensively attacked by H. G Richardson and G O. Sayles. In his Ford Lectures at Oxford University in 2004, however, J. R. Maddicott revived the two central planks of Stubbs's interpretation: continuity...