Britain’s House of Lords traces its history back to the 11th century, which means it predates the country itself, because although Britain did eventually show up at the party, it was unforgivably late.

The part of the 11th century that we happen to be talking about is the Anglo-Saxon part of the century, before the Norman invasion, when the king had a witan–a group of advisors to consult if and when he wanted to. It would’ve been made up of the king’s ministers plus the most powerful of the lords and religious leaders–you know, the country’s big bruisers–and a wise king sometimes made sure they’d support whatever he had in mind before going too far out on a limb.

Although having said that, there’s some debate about who got invitations to the witan and who got to stay home and sulk. A lot of Anglo-Saxon history is subject to debate, but we’re going to rampage through this quickly because we were looking for Britain, remember? And Britain isn’t here yet.

Irrelevant photo: morning glories, a.k.a. bindweed

Before we leave, though–have a drink while I’m messing around, why don’t you?–I should mention that whatever the Witan did (and that sounds a little hazy too), it did get to select the king. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t automatically go with the oldest son. 

Then the Normans invaded and everything changed…

…except for what didn’t. Kings still summoned the country’s big bruisers once or twice a year. Because in theory the kings might’ve been all-powerful, but they couldn’t govern without the backing from their lords–at least not well and not for long. It’s not hard to find examples of English kings offending the nobility more than they were willing to be offended and ending up in history’s large and unsentimental trash can. 

After one of those not-quite-all-powerful kings was forced into signing Magna Carta (1215, and yes I did have to look it up), he and all the kings who came after him were committed to asking the barons’ consent before they imposed taxes. This gave his proto-parliament–that yearly or twice-yearly gathering of lords–a well-defined power. 

As the thirteenth century wore on, locally elected representatives of counties, cities, and boroughs also began to be summoned when taxes needed to be approved. Among other things, this made the taxes easier to collect. 

Representatives of the towns and cities were called burgesses and tended to be rich lawyers and merchants. Representatives of the counties were called knights of the shire and were mostly from the landed gentry. I haven’t a clue what representatives of the boroughs were called. They may also have been called burgesses, since the root word looks the same and a borough was nothing but a town with a fancy hat. 

The burgesses outnumbered the knights and were paid two shillings a day when parliament met, but the knights (probably) dominated the proceedings because they were better connected and, as everyone at the time would’ve agreed, more important and better looking, and in recognition of all that were paid four shillings a day. 

After 1325, no parliament met without the commoners.

Now let’s get to the small print: When I said these assemblies could approve taxes, that doesn’t mean it was easy for them not to approve them. They had to go pretty far out on a limb to say no. In 1376, when they did refuse one, they had to claim that funds had been misappropriated by some of the king’s courtiers. 

Short of saying no, though, they could negotiate. They could drag their feet and sulk. They could, in general, be a pain in the neck. 

Never underestimate the power of being a pain in the neck.

Much to the monarch-of-the-moment’s annoyance, he (or the occasional she) needed Parliament. The monarchy’s income from its own lands had decreased over the years–hey, it’s tough up there at the top of the heap. And they kept taking the country to war, which is an expensive little habit. So however annoying parliament became, the monarch was constantly driven to call it back and ask for some new tax. 

Parliament was also the place where communities and individuals, high and low, could go to petition the king, and it was petitions involving the affairs of the country gradually drew parliament into a law-making role. At first, it was the king’s prerogative to initiate a law, but in the 14th century parliament began petitioning the king about this or that and making gradual moves into what the king’s territory.

The houses separate

But we’ve spent entirely too much time brushing our refined elbows against the commoners elbows. We should be talking about lords.

If we can duck back for a minute to the 13th century, we’ll see a forerunner of the House of Lords in a small group of councilors clustered around the king. And by councilors, of course, I mean important people, and by important people I mean nobles. By the 14th century, they’d become a larger group that began meeting separately. These were dukes, earls, barons, marquesses, viscounts, and the top layer of the clergy. They were called, collectively, the peerage. 

And I’m sure the peers were much happier meeting that way. The commoners had been getting too big for their little bootsies. An anonymous publication from the 1320s argued that parliament’s barons could only speak for themselves, unlike (as the BBC puts it) “the knights, citizens and burgesses who represented ‘the whole community of England’ . . . who alone should grant taxation on behalf of the people.”

Yeah. A pesky lot, those commoners. 

As the two groups separated, the king’s key officers–the chancellor of the exchequer, the treasurer, the senior royal judges and key members of the royal household–met with the lords, not the commoners, and the real business was done there, at the top. As someone put it in 1399, the commons were merely “petitioners and suitors,” and all judgments of parliament “belong solely to the king and lords.”

The mysterious shrinking peerage

This isn’t strictly relevant, but it’s interesting: during the Tudor period (start counting in 1485 and stop when Elizabeth I dies), the number of peers shrank. Part of that was the War of the Roses–the count dropped from 64 to 38–but nobles had always died in wars; under normal circumstances dead ones would’ve been replaced with live ones who were either their heirs or, if no heir was to be had, someone the king owed a favor to. Or liked or wanted to placate or hoped to control. Or whatever motivated that particular king at that particular moment. 

Henry VII, though–the first of the Tudors–didn’t replenish the stock, probably because he didn’t want a group of powerful nobles who might challenge him, starting another war. He’d seen enough of that, and the country was out of roses anyway. 

So start there, then run through the rest of the Tudor kings and queens and count the number of nobles executed for treason whose titles were taken from them, which meant their heirs didn’t inherit them. I doubt being a Tudor-era peasant was a barrel of laughs, but belonging to the nobility had its own dangers. Romanticize it all you want, the Tudor era was a dangerous time to be part of the nobility.

For the last 30 years of the Tudordrama, the country had zero dukes, in spite of the after-VII Tudors (not to be confused with After Eight Mints) having created some new peers as they went along, and most of the 16th-century nobility were of recent coinage. 

With the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the number of abbots in the House of Lords (no surprise here) shrank, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign there wasn’t an abbot to be found in the Lords, and only 26 bishops. For the first time, the secular lords formed a majority. Semi-relevantly, the secular lords were and still are called the Lords Temporal, because everything needs a fancy name.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled drama.

From the Civil War to the 19th century

From the Tudor period, it’s a short march to the Civil War, when Parliament seized power. In 1642, it excluded bishops from the House of Lords. Then in 1649, it abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords. I’m sure that made the bishops feel better about having been tossed out. Guys, the party ended just a few years after you left, so don’t feel bad.

When the monarchy was restored, everybody pushed the Reset button and Parliament was reconstituted in its old form–Commons, Lords, Church worthies–and when (you thought we’d never get there, didn’t you?) Scotland and then Ireland were folded into the batter that became first Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, the Scottish and Irish peers elected representatives to the Lords. 

Now we do a couple of fancy steps until we get to the 19th century, when the number of bishops in the House or Lords was limited to 26 and the monarch got to create life peers. That’s as opposed to hereditary peers. Once they’re appointed, they can put down roots and make themselves at home, but they can’t shoehorn their kids in after them.

20th century

In the 20th century, the story gets interesting enough that I’ll slow it down again. By the beginning of the century, it was standard for the prime minister to govern from the House of Commons, so basically the power had shifted. The last PM to govern from the Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

Then we get to 1906, when the Liberals won a big honkin’ majority in the Commons–132 seats–and figured they’d use it to introduce radical things like sick pay and old age pensions.

Horrors, the Lords said in one aristocratic voice. And double horrors because the programs would be paid for by a tax on the rich–especially on the landed rich: in other words, on the people sitting in the House of Lords.

You might have already figured out that the House of Lords had a built-in Conservative–and lower-case conservative–bias. So predictably enough, the Lords refused to pass the budget. After a bit of back and forth, including a general election, the Lords did pass the budget, though, along with the Parliament Act of 1911, which limited  the Lords’ power. 

Why’d they do that? Because the government threatened to flood the house with 400 new Lords, all of them Liberals. 

The bill left the Lords with the power to, at best, delay money bills by a month, and it completely lost the ability to veto bills. It could delay non-budget bills for two years, but that was the limit.

The two years have since been reduced to one.

That takes us to 1958 and the Life Peerages Act, which poured in a group of life peers, including experts in various fields and for the first time–gasp; horrors–women. It was a gesture in the direction of counteracting the house’s built-in rightward tilt. 

Then we skip forward again. Tony Blair had a three-stage plan that would fold the House of Lords into a paper airplane, sail it out to sea, and replace it with a fully elected house. 

How did that fare? Well, the House of Lords started 1999 with 758 hereditary lords and ended the year with 92, but then it all bogged down. The plan’s probably still stashed on some governmental shelf, gathering dust, and we still have 92 hereditary peers. They’re chosen by all the country’s hereditary peers, making the aristocrats, in a nice little piece of irony, the only elected members of the Lords.

People who think seriously about these things, along with people who don’t but who shoot their mouths off anyway, have suggested all sorts of ways to reform what’s clearly an antiquated system, including setting a limit on the number of lords, but tradition allows outgoing prime ministers to shovel in new members, and we’ve been through a lot of prime ministers lately. Each one got a shovel of their very own. A committee’s supposed to weed out anyone who’s inappropriate, but the committee doesn’t get the final say. 

At the moment, 779 people sit in the House of Lords. Or don’t sit there. Nothing says they have to show up.