About the History of Parliament

The History of Parliament is a research project creating a comprehensive account of the parliamentary politics in England, then Britain, from their origins in the thirteenth century. Unparalleled in the comprehensiveness of its treatment, the History is generally regarded as one of the most ambitious, authoritative and well-researched projects in British history.

It consists of detailed studies of elections and electoral politics in each constituency, and of closely researched accounts of the lives of everyone who was elected to Parliament in the period, together with surveys drawing out the themes and discoveries of the research and adding information on the operation of Parliament as an institution.

Twenty-eight volumes covering eight periods have already been published. They deal with 1386-1421, 1509-1558, 1558-1603, 1660-1690, 1690-1715, 1715-1754, 1754-1790 and 1790-1820: in all about 20million words, 20,000 pages, 17,000 biographies, covering 281 years of parliamentary history.

All of these volumes are still in print; please click on Publications for details.

With the exception of the 1690-1715 volumes published in 2002, the other twenty-three volumes with revisions and additional material were reissued in 1998 as a CD-ROM in collaboration with Cambridge University Press.

The History’s staff of professional historians is currently researching the House of Commons in the periods: 1422-1504, 1604-1629, 1640-1660, 1820-1832 and 1832-1868. When these are complete, the History will provide a continuous and authoritative account of the House of Commons and electoral politics over four hundred and fifty years, from 1386 to the Reform Act of 1832. In 1998, the History also began to research the House of Lords in the period from 1660-1832, developing a new approach for the different type of institution this represents.

Since 1995, the History has been funded principally by the two Houses of Parliament. It is based close to its original host, the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. It was originally founded before the Second World War, the brainchild of Josiah Wedgwood MP, a Labour parliamentarian and minister, and revived after the war when a number of the greatest British historians of the day, including Sir Lewis Namier, Sir Frank Stenton and Sir John Neale, were involved in its re-establishment. For further details click on The History of the History of Parliament.

The project is governed by its Trustees, who are mainly Members and Officers of both Houses of Parliament. The quality of the project's research and writing is monitored by an Editorial Board of historians.

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The History of the History of Parliament

Josiah Wedgwood

The History of Parliament was originally conceived by Josiah Wedgwood (1872-1942), MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire from 1906, and a Minister in the Ramsay Macdonald Government of 1924. Wedgwood was a keen local historian and particularly interested in his forebears as MPs, and from 1928 began to try to persuade the government to fund a national dictionary of parliamentary biography, to record and identify all of the 75,000 members who had sat in all the Parliaments down to 1918. Despite the recommendation of a committee comprised of historians and MPs no funding was forthcoming from the government: instead, some private funding enabled Wedgwood to produce two volumes in 1936 and 1938 on an amateur basis. The History of Parliament Trust was founded in 1940 and determined to take the work forward on a more professional footing. Not until well after the war was it put on a secure foundation when in 1951 the Treasury finally agreed to fund the project. A committee of historians was established to direct it, a general editor and staff were taken on and eminent historians were invited to edit a number of sections. The project was based at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London.

"The man who steps into the English Parliament takes his place in a pageant that has ever been filing by since the birth of English History"

Sir Lewis Namier

The first results of the project were a set of volumes covering the House of Commons in the years 1754-90.It was edited by Sir Lewis Namier, the distinguished Professor of History at the University of Manchester who had been a friend of Wedgwood and had served on the original pre-war Committee. The project came to be closely associated with Namier's approach to the history of politics - the stress on personal connection and its influence on politics - although these also reflected Wedgwood's original concerns.

The 1754-90 volumes set the pattern for later ones: the core of the books contained biographies of all members of the House of Commons in the period concerned; these were accompanied by an account of the elections in and the politics of each constituency and an introductory survey analysing the information provided about members and constituencies, and discussing the Commons as an institution.

For more information on the History of Parliament, and on Namier, click here

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"The rise of 'interests' and classes can be traced through the personnel of the House of Commons, the forms of English gregarious existence can be studied, the social structure of England is reflected in it, the presence or decay of independent political life in boroughs and counties can be watched in the representation"

The History of Parliament Trust: 18 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NS tel: +44 (0) 207 636 9269, email: info@histparl.ac.uk