The House of Commons, 1558-1603

The inspiration for The History of Parliament was the dictum of Sir Lewis Namier that parliamentary history should be studied through the biographies of the individual members of the House of Commons. Historical fashions have changed, however, and the publication of the long-awaited Elizabethan volumes in the series has similarities to the emergence of a dinosaur from the mists of historiographical antiquity. These volumes were the last great enterprise undertaken by Sir John Neale, the doyen of Elizabethan parliamentary history, whose death in 1975 prevented him from completing the introductory essay. He drafted only a few of the constituency accounts and biographies; as they stand, the volumes are the work of the research teams he assembled in the 1950s and 1960s and of the present editor.