The introductory survey for the 1386-1421 volumes of the History was compiled by Professor J.S. Roskell, with additional material by Linda Clark.

The survey remains the most comprehensive guide to the procedures and activities of Parliament in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century.

Most of the sets of History of Parliament volumes have included an introductory survey which analyses and discusses the Members of the House of Commons and constitutencies and elections during the section period that they cover. One set, 1509-1558 was published without a survey, because of the death of its editor, S.T. Bindoff, before it could be completed.

At the beginning of this period Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry, in place since 1812, faced and survived the popular and parliamentary campaign on behalf of George IV’s estranged wife Caroline (1820-1). Meanwhile the Whig opposition ‘Mountain’ made strenuous attempts to secure economies, retrenchment and reduced taxation (1821-2), backed, in a display of truculence, by some of the government’s traditional country gentlemen supporters seeking a remedy for intensified agricultural distress.

In 1790 George III had reigned for 30 years and had apparently fully recovered from the bout of insanity which, only a year before, had precipitated a political crisis over the question of a Regency.

When this period opens George II had been on the throne for nearly 27 years; and Henry Pelham, first lord of the Treasury and leader of the House of Commons, had held these offices for nearly 11 years. The nation was at peace; Jacobitism no longer menaced the Hanoverian dynasty; and no deep-seated party divisions disturbed the House of Commons.

Politics remained extremely partisan in the immediate aftermath of the accession of George I, with a large number of contests at the general election of 1715 (and an even higher proportion in 1722). Yet, following the arrival in England of the new monarch, the proscription of most Tories from central and local offices, and the defeat of the Jacobite invasion of Scotland (‘the ’15’), the Court Whig regime quickly entrenched itself on a stable basis.

The period between the Revolution of 1688-9 and the peaceful accession of George I was dominated by the legacy and consequences of the Revolution. One was war: under the joint monarchy of William III and Mary I England became a participant in the European war against Louis XIV, which lasted - apart from the few years' peace after the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 - until 1713.

When the Convention Parliament met in March 1660 there was still some doubt about what action it would take to settle the country, and what influence the army under General Monck would have. It quickly decided, though, that the government of the country should be by ‘king, Lords and Commons’. Despite attempts by prominent Presbyterians, it failed to demand limitations on royal powers of the kind which had been discussed between Parliament and Charles I in the late 1640s.

Eleven years after he dissolved Parliament following the rows surrounding the levying of Tunnage and Poundage and religion in the 1628-9 Parliament, Charles I was finally compelled to summon Parliament again as a result of his failure to crush rebellion in Scotland. But he found the Short Parliament of May 1640 unprepared to grant supply as swiftly as he had hoped.

The difficulties James I and his son Charles I both experienced with their Parliaments had much to do with the circumstances of the early seventeenth century: war at least partly inspired by confessional conflict on the continent and the constant difficulties of royal finance had a very powerful impact on English domestic politics. But poor parliamentary management, and deficiencies in the arts of kingship both contributed to the successive impasses which both monarchs seemed destined to arrive at with Parliament.