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The kind of man who will fight a battle with a broken leg, and win it, Simon de Montfort makes a daring break with history and with Henry III by summoning a parliament and inviting the people to attend.
His move is a political calculation, but it is also a defence of the rights to a parliament granted in Magna Carta and the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster. In December 1264, Montfort sends messengers to every county and many cities and towns, asking them to send two elected representatives to a parliament. They are happy to do so.
For the first time, men across England vote in parliamentary elections. (In the counties they have to meet a 40-shilling property qualification. In the towns there are different voting requirements.) Representatives of the yeomen of the shires and the people of the big towns join archbishops, bishop, earls and barons on January 20, 1265, in Parliament. Nothing like it has been seen since Rome was a republic fifteen hundred years earlier. (Thanks to Beautiful Britain's On This Day for the date.)
Montfort will have to defend the reforms with his life. (See the Liberty Timeline and scroll down). But his astonishing new creation will be confirmed in 1275 and in the Model Parliament of 1295 by Edward I, his godson, and the man who kills him.
The son of a Frenchman, the grandson of an Englishwoman, Montfort has received some negative reviews, but not from the bachelor knights who fought with him to defend reform. His last recorded words, also in the Timeline, inspire Brits for a long time.
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