Early modern English Parliaments were institutional events: institutional because they occupied a significant role in the governance of the realm, and after the Reformation Parliament statute law became omnicompetent. Furthermore, they established and followed (more or less) fixed procedures and had a permanent clerical staff. However, they were also events, summoned and dissolved at irregular intervals by the monarch, at least until the passage of the Triennial Act in February 1641. The very nature of the assembly and its power, influence and role in English society and politics has been hotly debated by historians for many years and continues today to fill the pages of scholarly journals and the catalogues of publishers. No less controversial than the nature and role of the assembly is the impact and validity of its sources, official and unofficial. It is the aim of this introduction and the ensuing editorials and documents to discuss and deconstruct the nature of parliamentary sources and how they can be utilised in the study of parliamentary history.

Although the authors of the journals and speeches reproduced below all came from the East Midlands and were loosely related to each other, they offer three widely differing viewpoints of the proceedings of the House of Commons during the parliamentary sessions of 1604 and 1606–7. The Rutland manuscript concentrates on the privilege dispute over election returns which dominated the opening weeks of the 1604 session, while Sir Robert Cotton was chiefly concerned to record procedural precedents for use in subsequent Parliaments, and Sir Edward Mountagu focussed on the House's legislative activity.

When the Parliament of 1621 convened, it had been seven years since the dissolution of the so-called ‘Addled Parliament’ of 1614, which had foundered on a fundamental disagreement between King James I and the House of Commons about the legality of impositions. The Parliament of 1621 faced more than unresolved domestic issues; it met under the shadow of the gravest international crisis of the early modern era. The defenestration of Prague in 1618 had marked the beginning of the Bohemian rebellion and the Thirty Years' War, and in the following summer James's son-in-law, Elector Palatine Friedrich V, accepted the Bohemian crown from the rebels, who had just deposed their Habsburg monarch, Ferdinand of Styria. Two days later Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor, and he was determined to retake the Bohemian dirone from the new Palatine occupant. In the autumn of 1620, the emperor's Spanish cousins aided his cause by dispatching a large portion of the Spanish Army of the Netherlands to invade the Lower Palatinate, Friedrich's rich patrimonial estates on the Rhine.

That committee membership has played a significant role in parliamentary history is beyond question. It formed an important part of the analysis of the importance of Members of Parliament in the Elizabethan History of Parliament volumes and appointments have frequendy been used to illustrate the particular interest of Members in parliamentary issues and legislation. However, much of the analysis has been undertaken in a simplistic fashion, derived solely from the Underclerk's record in the Commons Journal and subjected to little more than superficial scrutiny. Stuart historians have been slow to heed Lord Macaulay's advice that Victoria Tower is ‘that dark repository in which the abortive statutes of many generations sleep a sleep rarely disturbed by the historian or antiquary’, for it is in the House of Lords Record Office that the majority of committee lists survive. And the existence of these attendance records allows us to expand and clarify previous analyses of Commons attendance. In particular, they show the munutiae of Parliament at work on a day-to-day basis as well as providing valuable biographical information. Viewed individually or taken as a whole, the documents also allow the development of broad and far-reaching conclusions about Parliament itself. The thirty-three committee lists transcribed below cover the period 1606–1628 and offer insights into local issues, such as the presentment to the parsonage of Radipoll, Dorset, and matters which concerned the commonweal, for example, purveyance and debt collection.

The document printed below, from a notebook compiled by the prominent Kentish gentleman Sir Edward Dering of Pluckley in Surrenden, was occasioned by the prospect of an electoral contest, and probable poll, in the Kent county election for what became known as the Short Parliament in the Spring of 1640. The contest in question was between Dering and his (second) cousin Sir Roger Twysden. The circumstances surrounding the Kent election are well known, and have been explored thoroughly by scholars such as Mark Kishlansky, Derek Hirst, and Alan Everitt. Indeed, the election has been cited as evidence by historians with very different views on the nature of early seventeenth century elections.

One of the least studied aspects of the Long Parliament is its role in addressing the legislative needs of private or sectional interests such as trading companies and borough corporations. In the field of parliamentary studies, the dissolution of the 1628–9 Parliament represents a major watershed. The pioneering work of Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and others has allowed us to appreciate a long-overlooked facet of Parliaments before 1629 – their function as a ‘market-place of legislative business’. But the Parliaments called after the collapse of the Personal Rule tend to be scrutinised in a very different light. Understandably, perhaps, the focus is almost exclusively upon the debates and factionalism that attended the nation's slide into civil war and subsequent endeavours to restore peace. The general assumption among historians of the civil war period is diat the two Houses were so preoccupied with the great issues of the moment that they had little time to devote to any business of a more private nature. There is certainly no denying that the Long Parliament was often consumed with ‘greate & weightie affaires’, nor diat many of the MPs who remained at Westminster after the outbreak of war were under little pressure to promote the interests of their constituents or indeed of any private individuals. Even so, where the relationship between a serving Parliament-man and those who had elected him remained strong, it is unlikely diat he could have ignored entirely his obligation to act as their spokesman and lobbyist. One of the best and yet most neglected sources for examining the role of MPs as promoters of ‘particular businesses’ in the Long Parliament is the Hull letters.