V.: Powers of the Council.

It was not until long after the days of Magna Carta that Parliament secured the most important of those functions now deemed essential to its existence. No claim was made on behalf of the commune concilium to be consulted in the making of laws or in the performance of administrative duties by the Crown: no effort was made towards formulating any doctrine of ministerial responsibility. This assembly, narrow and aristocratic in composition, had only one right secured to it, a limited control over taxation. Even here, as we have seen, no general claim was put forward. It had no right to control the national purse: the barons merely protected their own individual pockets against an increase of feudal burdens. A modern Magna Carta would have contained a careful list of the powers and privileges of “the common council of the realm.”

It would, indeed, have been an evil thing for England, if this narrow baronial assembly had established a claim to tax the important classes of the community, townsmen and vassals of mesne lords, who were totally unrepresented in it. Doubtless, it would have been ready enough to substitute, if it could, a scheme of taxation that relieved Crown–tenants of the burden of scutages and aids, at the expense of their humbler neighbours.