MODUS TENENDI PARLIAMENTUM (Medieval Ireland)

Modus Tenendi Parliamentum is a later medieval treatise describing the workings of parliament. It exists in both an "English" and an "Irish" version. Both claim a spurious antiquity for their descriptions, perhaps in order to enhance their authority. The longer English version claims to be an account compiled for William the Conqueror of how parliament had functioned in the reign of Edward the Confessor; the shorter Irish version to contain instructions from Henry II to his Irish subjects on the holding of parliaments in Ireland. The earliest surviving manuscripts of the English version were probably written in the 1380s; the earliest surviving manuscript of the Irish version is contained in an official inspeximus dating from 1419, which now forms part of the Ellesmere manuscripts, at the Huntington Library in California. Historians used to believe that the English version itself belonged to the 1380s, but almost all modern historians (other than Richardson and Sayles) have accepted Maud Clarke’s arguments for composition in the 1320s on the basis of similarities between the treatise’s description of parliament’s working and the workings of the English parliament in that period, though not her specific suggestion of a date of 1322. The Irish version probably belongs to the early fifteenth century. Clarke suggested a specific connection with Archbishop O’Hedigan of Cashel (1406-1440). Sayles argued for a lost Irish original treatise dating from shortly after 1381 behind both English and Irish versions, but this view has not met general acceptance. Historians have also disagreed about the nature of the original treatise. Some have argued for an underlying political purpose; others suggested that it provided a generally honest, if sometimes tendentious, description of parliament in the 1320s; still others that it was intended only to provide an ideal picture of how parliament ought to be run.