ABSTRACT
The House of Lords emerged out of the Anglo-Saxon Witangemot and the Norman Curia Regis as gatherings which advised the King. By the fourteenth century it comprised earls and barons on a hereditary basis, plus leading churchmen: the church was probably the country’s richest institution after the monarch and also wielded considerable political power. It met separately from the ‘lower’ House of Commons, which was elected and hence was more representative of the nation as a whole. During the nineteenth century the ramshackle elections to the Commons, vulnerable to corrupt pressures and with huge differences in voting qualifications, were reformed along democratic lines to create a uniform and coherent system.
