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he parliament that opened at Westminster in April 1376 has long been recognized as a defining moment in English constitutional history. The session broke old records and set new precedents. It was one of the longest-lived parliaments to date; it delivered more common petitions than any previous assembly ; it was the first time that the Commons selected one of its number to act as a speaker; and, most famously, it established a new procedure—parliamentary impeachment—as a means of forcing the public trial and punishment of agents of the Crown.1 Within a short time the parliament became celebrated as a moment when the polity made outspoken criticism of Edward III’s government and forced through a great purge of the courtiers and financiers who were seen to have hobbled the regime of a once great and now feeble king. It is generally accepted that the events of 1376 were responsible for creating a new public interest in the business of Parliament and prompted the development of unofficial narratives of parliamentary assemblies circulated in the form of political “pamphlets.” Clementine Oliver has recently demonstrated the applicability of that term both to the Anglo-Norman account of the Good Parliament in the Anonimalle Chronicle of St. Mary’s Abbey, York, and to Thomas Fovent’s highly developed Latin commentary on the Wonderful and Merciless Parliaments of 1386 and 1388.2 Oliver has also stressed the radicalism of such texts and the The Good Parliament of 1376: Commons, Communes, and “Common Profit” in Fourteenth-Century English Politics W. Mark Ormrod 169 T Earlier versions of this study were delivered at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Rochester. I am very grateful to the participants in those seminars for their comments, and especially to Gwilym Dodd, Matthew Giancarlo, Barbara Gribling, Christopher Guyol, and Clementine Oliver for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. 1 The standard work on the parliament of 1376 is Holmes, Good Parliament. 2 Tout, Collected Papers, 2:173–90; Oliver, “First Political Pamphlet?”; Oliver, “New Light.” See also Don C. Skemer’s contribution to the present volume. striking manner in which they represent Parliament as the principal bulwark of good governance. The tone therefore fits neatly with the reformist agenda that Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice have identified in later fourteenthcentury bureaucratic culture and associate with contemporary interest in that great medieval textbook of parliamentary procedure, the Modus tenendi parliamentum.3 In these contexts, the bold actions of the Commons in the Good Parliament can, indeed, be said to have set new standards in public life and new expectations of Parliament as a force for positive change. This optimistic view was not,however,shared by all.Thomas Walsingham’s account of the Good Parliament, written a decade or so after the event but informed by the recollections of one of its members, Sir Thomas Hoo, certainly extolled the bravery of the Commons in their stand against faction and corruption . But Walsingham was also sharply aware of the affront to traditional authority represented in the assembly and saw the Commons’ actions as legitimate only because of the blatant unreasonableness of the Crown’s chief representative , John of Gaunt.4 The undoing of so many of the acts of 1376 by Gaunt in the so-called Bad Parliament of 1377 called seriously into question the ability of Parliament to enshrine political constraints to which the Crown was resistant. In the B-text of Piers Plowman, written in 1377, William Langland adapted an existing fable of the belling of the cat to reflect the hopelessness that had overwhelmed the reformist agenda. When a “rat of renown” (Peter de la Mare, speaker in the Good Parliament) argues the case for putting a bell on the cat (John of Gaunt) so that they can better know his actions and avoid his threats, a mouse “that had good sense” (perhaps Thomas Hungerford, speaker in the Bad Parliament) launches a disillusioned counterproposal, remarking that it would be better for the rats and mice to let the cat continue its depredations against another group, the rabbits, than to attract his attention and thus turn him against their own kind.5 Above all, the appropriation of the reformist agenda by the rebels in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 forced the elite to reconsider the wisdom and legitimacy of political opposition. Well into the reign of Richard II, the parliamentary Commons continued to espouse some of the issues raised both in 1376...

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