The History of Parliament

The History of Parliament Trust, originally founded in the 1930s and still going strong, will publish this month the latest instalment in its multi-volume history, covering the House of Commons in the years immediately following the Glorious Revolution.   The format of the History remains unchanged: the body of work consists of constituency histories (in this instance stretching to one entire volume) and biographies of the Members (three volumes), prefaced by a lengthy ‘introductory survey’, explaining the methodology, discussing the sources for parliamentary history in this period, setting out the political context, and drawing together the material in the constituency and biographical entries in order to attempt definitive answers to the more important problems of parliamentary history.

The beginnings of the History of Parliament go back to 1929 and a parliamentary committee of enquiry, which recommended the provision of public funds towards systematic and scholarly research into the history of the Westminster Parliament.