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Updated: May 1, 2025
As the 'Pares' of the empire, the Witenagemot decided' the disputes between the great vassals of the crown. The jurisdiction exercised in the Parliament of Edward I., when the barony of a Lord-Marcher became the subject of litigation, is entirely analogous to the proceedings thus adopted by the great council of Edward, the son of Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon king.
Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion, introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries.
The royal court, containing the tenants-in-chief of the crown, both lay and clerical, and entering into all the functions of the witenagemot, was the supreme council of the nation, with the advice and consent of which the King legislated, taxed, and judged.
Solemn and imposing was the meeting of the Witenagemot, or "assembly of the wise." It was divided into three estates.
Edward, upon hearing, by a swift messenger sent by Harold, of the failure of his attempt to induce the Northumbrians to lay down their arms, reluctantly abandoned the pleasures of the chase, and proceeded to Bretford, near Salisbury, where there was a royal house, and summoned a Witenagemot.
In 1275 I note the first use of the word parliament. I have used it from the beginning, but it is important to remember that the thing was not called parliament until 1275. Before that it was called the Great Council or the King's Council, and in Saxon times the Witenagemot.
I doubt if there was any giving of new law, anything that we should call legislation, made by the English Parliament, then called the Witenagemot, before the Norman Conquest. I have never been able to find any.
The earls of Mercia and Northumberland united their forces to those of Eadward at Gloucester, and marched with the king to a gathering of the Witenagemot at London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but Swein's outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of Wessex, declining with his usual prudence a useless struggle, withdrew over sea to Flanders. But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall.
And this ran up into the highest grades of organization; the King's court of counsellors was composed of his feudal tenants; the ownership of land was now the qualification for the witenagemot, instead of wisdom; the earldoms became fiefs instead of magistracies, and even the bishops had to accept the status of barons.
Athenodorus seems to have been of Hamlet's mind: "I do not set my life at a pin's fee, And, for my soul, what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal, as itself?" A superstition, as its name imports, is something that has been left to stand over, like unfinished business, from one session of the world's witenagemot to the next.
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