ABSTRACT
Modern historians have focused on the idea of parliaments as a point of contact between crown and people, an opportunity for monarch and subjects to come together, to make each other aware of their respective needs and concerns, and to offer mutual assistance. The triumph of parliamentary law destroyed the independent jurisdiction of medieval church, and produced a conscious declaration of national independence. The Repeal Act 1547 introduced the principle of due process to an area traditionally governed by arbitrary force. It shared the common assumption of liberty that informed the parliamentary attack on the arbitrary nature of heresy proceedings in the early 1530s and echoed thereafter through the work of Henry Brinkelow and William Turner. Turner, Brinkelow and A Discourse all espoused the proposition that disputes about the truth could not be settled by force but might be settled by argument and debate. The notion of liberty most distinctively associated with the English is a rather more bourgeois concept.
