The Provincial Decisions of Westminster of 1259 are part of a series of legislative constitutional reforms that arose during the confrontation between King Henry III of England and his barons.
Content
- 1 Background
- 2 Contents
- 3 Execution
- 4 notes
- 5 Links
Background
The unsuccessful military operations in France in 1230 and 1242, the influence of royal relatives and favorites at court, as well as active participation in the confrontation between the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire through gaining the throne of the Sicilian kingdom caused the emergence of opposition from the nobility and churchmen. Also, the negative gave the expensive lifestyle of the monarch, who began to raise taxes.
Contents
The decisions themselves were an enlarged scheme of government reform initiated by an elected committee from the highest nobility. This authority appeared due to Oxford decrees, which the new document significantly supplemented and replaced.
The Westminster decrees symbolized the development of the reformers movement, which was initially interested in the relationship between the barons and the king to rethink the problem of tenants and mutual rights and obligations, as well as the work of the courts of local feudal lords. As a result, the document also included changes in the tax system (among them the first legislative decrees on the right of the dead hand ), the work of the royal court and some changes in the field of criminal justice.
Execution
Henry III managed to avoid the full implementation of the decree due to the lack of unity among the nobility and foreign intervention: issued in 1261 by the Pope of Rome , repealing the decree, and the essentially identical Amiens agreement of 1264 from the French king Louis IX .
The military confrontation, which began in 1263 and went down in history as the Second Baron War , ended with the victory of supporters of the royal power in 1267. The portion of the Westminster decrees that limited the monarch’s power was annulled, but the legal decrees were confirmed by the 1267 Marlbor Statute .
Westminster ordinances have been described as an important part of English law since the re-issuance of the Magna Carta in 1225. [one]
Notes
- ↑ Brand, Paul (2006) Kings, barons and justices: the making and enforcement of legislation in thirteenth-century England , Cambridge studies in medieval life and thought: 4th series, 56 , Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-02585-0
Links
- England Calling | The Provisions of Oxford (1258) and Westminster (1259) | (most) of these texts have been translated into modern English