There can be no question that the redistribution of land after the Norman Conquest amounted to a tenurial revolution of the most far-reaching kind. It affected the lower classes of society less than their superiors. The Normans possessed no clear-cut system of manorial economy which could be applied as a whole to a conquered country. The later history of England proves that no attempt was ever made to apply a uniform method of estate-management to the various forms assumed by English rural life. The social differences between Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Saxon England were as strongly marked in 1150 as in 1066. But it is equally clear that the Conquest had come to the higher orders of English society as a catastrophe from which they never fully recovered. It was completed within twenty years from the landing of Duke William, and Domesday Book, which is its record, gives conclusive evidence of its intensity and range. In 1086, although many Englishmen were still in possession of considerable estates, it was the rarest of exceptions for an Englishman to hold a position which entitled him to political influence or gave him military power. Two Englishmen only, Thurkill of Arden and Colswein of Lincoln, held tenancies of the first order under the king himself. The English lords of 1086 are clearly survivals from a society which had been shattered by foreign conquest and their place in the new order which had superseded it was obviously insecure.

Twenty-eight years ago Professor Pollard, in a short note in the English Historical Review, gave a seemingly definitive explanation of the meaning of the phrase in pieno parlamento. His explanation has not, however, satisfied some later writers; there are still a number of different interpretations of the phrase current, and it seemed worth while to attempt a fuller statement. In seeking to establish a sound definition, however, a fresh problem was encountered, which remains unsolved after application to a wide circle of authorities, historical, legal and linguistic, and the following paper, which is in broad outline an elaboration of Professor Pollard's thesis, is therefore neither original nor complete.

The history, as distinct from the antiquities, of English monastic life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has received far less attention than has the story of the earlier times or that of the Dissolution. The reasons for this neglect are not far to seek: it is enough to mention the lack of personalities of outstanding influence or sanctity and the absence of literary records at all comparable in number and interest to those of the Anglo-Norman or Angevin periods. As a result, the whole sweep of time between Magna Carta and the accession of Henry VIII is often treated in handbooks and essays as one long slow decline unrelieved by developments or changes of any kind.

‘Edward I’, said Stubbs, ‘had made his parliament the concentration of the three estates of his people; under Edward II, Edward III, and Richard II, the third estate claimed and won its place as the foremost of the three.’ While the resounding emphasis is Stubbs's own—his common sense was of the kind called robust—the sentiment expressed was then and for long afterwards the traditional one. It is only of late years that opinion has swung to the opposite pole and maintained with an equal want of compromise the absolute insignificance of the commons in the political struggles of the later middle ages. The first open challenge to tradition came, I think, from Professor J. E. Neale in 1924. Mainly concerned to trace the growth of free speech in parliament under the Tudors, he found himself confronted with a medieval background to his subject which seemed to him at variance with the course of its later development. The prologue, as it were, anticipated too much of his play. In a bold attempt to refashion it, he outlined a theory which did not at first attract much attention from medievalists, but which has recently, thanks to Mr. H. G. Richardson, begun to enjoy a considerable vogue among them.