Paper su “Statehood and the home of Parliament: some remarks on the establishment of the Tudor House of Commons’ meeting place”, presentato il 12 settembre 2018 nella 70a Conferenza annuale della International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI), Vienna, 10-13 settembre 2018.

Institutions are identified with a fixed place in space, which also reflects their constitutional standing and significance. In English history, one of the higher judicial institutions was assigned a fixed place quite early, even before representative institutions: as early as 1215, chapter 17 of Magna Carta stated that ‘Common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be held in some fixed place’ [Communia placita non sequantur curiam nostram, sed teneantur in aliquo loco certo]. Though unnamed, the place was Westminster Hall, at the heart of the Kingdom’s political and administrative system. Parliament instead, despite being born long before the Court of Common Pleas, gained later the right to meet in Westminster Palace. While the Lords began to meet in Westminster Palace in fourteenth century, the Commons met in Westminster Abbey (first in the Chapter House, then in the Refectory) until 1549, when King Edward VI granted the use of St Stephen’s Chapel, located within the palace. The establishment of a meeting place for the Commons’ debates in the same building as the Lords means that the Lower House thereby achieved a new constitutional standing. Simultaneously the Commons, from the sixteenth century onwards, began to perceive themselves as the interpreters of public interest, or common good – a role that also the common law courts considered it was theirs. This paper thus aims to highlight the relationship between the royal grant of a meeting place to the Commons in 1549 and the development of statehood (i.e. the political organization of society in view of the public interest) in early modern England.