The Witan, or Witenagemot, was a council of the important people in medieval England, primarily made up of: the king, the princes and kinsmen of the king, bishops and other religious representatives, earls/ ealdormen, and thegns. Witan literally means wise men, while gemot simply means assembly in Old English.
When the German tribes started to settle in England from AD 410, they brought German traditions, laws, and culture, which gained prevalence in the UK because these settlers established what is known today as the Heptarchy – the seven kingdoms that later merged to create England. It is likely that the idea of a royal assembly was brought to England by Jute settlers, modern day Denmark, because the concept of the king assembling a court of the great men of his kingdom was common in the Germanic lands. The earliest mention of a Witenagemot in England comes from about AD 600, according to Felix Liebermann, in the court of King Æthelberht of Kent. The King of Kent gathered this assembly to approve what we believe to be the first ever set of Germanic law codes. Written in AD 604, this set of laws is the earliest surviving document written in what would later become Old English.
The idea of a Witan survived through to the unification of Englalond in c. AD 954, when it was adopted as part of the system of governance. Initially, the Witan travelled and was held in different county towns across England owing to the ad hoc nature of meetings, used by the king for advice on new laws as and when they came up. As a result, they met wherever the King was at the time. As England stabilised into its new form as one United Kingdom, the king no longer had the necessity to travel as much, the Witan gained a new function. Kings now placed trust in the earls, powerful men in Anglo-Saxon England who controlled several counties, to adequately administrate their respective regions.
In stable England, the role of the Witan was “primarily consented to the laws the King had already decided to enact”, according to the UK Parliament website, on which they trace the current House of Lords to the Witan. There is direct evidence of this when in AD 1188, King Henry II had to seek consent from the Witan to levy the Saladin tithe. The fact that the king had to seek the consent of the Witangemot to levy a tax shows the power that the Witan had in medieval England.
This would later become very important and transform into the Magnum Consilium or Curia Regis (lit. Great Advice or the King’s Court), the Norman kings’ renamed Witan that would go on to hold Kings accountable to the rule of law and basic rights, first in the Charter of Liberties and then with the Magna Carta. This was, however, not the only new role of the Witan. It gained the power of ‘ceosan to cynige’, which meant that the Witan could choose the next monarch. It was not however, as important a role as it appears, because there were very strict rules for who could be made the new king. In effect, all this rule meant was that the Witan could choose from the previous king’s sons, and succession normally just followed male-preference primogeniture (first born male is the heir). The Witan as acted as a witness for charters, or gifts of land from the king to one of his subjects, normally won through merit. With this new settled function, Witenagemot began to shift towards a pattern which did not become fully implemented until about 1042, under the reign of Edward the Confessor, of meeting three times a year, and the great Christian festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide (Pentecost), at Winchester, Westminster and Guildford.
In 1100, after the Witan selected Henry I as king, he was forced to sign the Charter of Liberties. The Charter of Liberties set out the limitations of royal authority, particularly offering basic rights to nobles and the church. Every subsequent king until Richard were also forced to sign up to this charter if they wanted to gain the support of their nobles. The Charter of Liberties also meant that the king must seek consent to levy a tax. The breach of this clause was what likely caused the barons to force Magna Carta upon King John I, which suggests that this consent was very important to the medieval government.
The role of the Witan in maintaining rule by consent and holding the monarch accountable in medieval England was essential because the Witan were the only men in the country powerful enough to oppose the king. When the monarch attempted to overreach, the Witan’s function was to challenge the monarch and resolve the issue. This is exemplified by King John I in 1215, where he was forced to sign the Magna Carta because the Barons refused to pay a string of taxes. King John’s reign was characterised by harsh economic policies, which many historians attribute as his strategy at funding his war against the French King Philip Augustus II. Seeing the way in which the war was heading, (King John lost all of the English land in France that had originally been won by William the Conqueror, including the entirety of Normandy and Brittany, except for a small section of Aquitaine) many nobles refused to provide men and gold for their liege lord in 1214. King John broke into incredible anger and sought revenge by attacking Rochester Castle and Northampton Castle, in what became the Barons’ wars.
The end of the First Barons’ War came on June 15th 1215, when King John I signed the Magna Carta. This document was set to him by the barons and the church as a safeguard that checked his power and subjected him to the rule of law. The document addressed the issue of the king raising scutage against the consent of the nobility by preventing scutage form being levied without common counsel. The document also rejected unlawful imprisonment, which John used throughout his reign, such as Geoffrey de Mandeville and Joscei of Bayeux, in Article 39. In summary of Magna Carta, the nobility and the church expected the king to act in line with the Charter of Liberties – the Witan’s precursor to the Barons’ Magna Carta.
In 1295, King Edward I of England convened what is widely regarded as the first representative parliament in English history. Edward I institutionalized the practice of calling commoners to the Witan and gave them royal authority in the same manner the original members of the Witan had, making this practice a formal part of the governance of the English realm. This became the first ever parliament of common citizens in England.
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Bibliography:
| SOURCE TITLE | Source Author | Source Type |
| Charter of Liberties | Britanica | Website |
| King and Parliament in Medieval England | Teach Democracy | Website |
| What are the main principles of the UK Constitution? | Prechewed Politics | Podcast |
| Anglo-Saxon Origins | UK Parliament | Website |
| Magna Carta and the Counselling of the King | Dr Jessica Nelson | Blog |
| Medieval | History of Parliament online | Website |
| Crown, City, and guild in late medieval London | Matthew Davies | Book Chapter |
| Fifty Things you need to know about British History | Hugh Williams | Book |
| Magnum Concilium | Wikipedia | Website |
| Middle Ages | Wikipedia | Website |
| Anglo Saxon Chronicles | Various clergymen | Chronicle |
| The History of Rochester Castle | English Heritage | Website |