The History of Parliament was initiated in the late 1920s by Josiah Wedgwood, a Liberal and later Labour Member of Parliament and cabinet minister. He secured funding and support, and with a small team, published the first two volumes in 1936, covering the years 1439–1509. These early works, though impressive, were based on limited scholarship and written largely by amateur historians.
It was not until after Wedgwood’s death, and after the Second World War, that work was begun on a systematic and fully scholarly basis. The Trust, set up by Wedgwood in 1940, was provided with funding from the Treasury in 1951; an Editorial Board, led by historian Sir Frank Stenton, was formed and a team of professional historians was hired, and the first volumes, covering 1754-90, were published in 1964.
Those volumes were edited by Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, although they appeared after Namier’s death in 1960. The project has been long associated with Namier; he and Wedgwood both believed in telling history through the lives of individuals—Wedgwood out of romantic attachment to MPs, Namier out of a belief in the power of personal ambition over ideology in shaping history. The term “Namierise,” meaning to compile detailed biographical data on many individuals, was coined from Namier’s work, though the proper term is “prosopography.”
Many other historians have contributed to the project, and many of its researchers are acknowledged as leading experts in their field. Originally focused on just the House of Commons, in 1998 the project expanded to include the House of Lords and the first Lords volumes (1660–1715) were published in 2016. The History also began a separate project in 2011 to create a basis for future biographies by conducting oral history interviews with former MPs. This project, in collaboration with the British Library’s Life Histories, has already produced an archive of well over 250 interviews.
The History of Parliament has now produced over 27,000 biographies and more than 3,200 constituency histories—about 40 million words in total. It covers almost 400 years of the House of Commons and 80 years of the House of Lords, and is undoubtedly the largest project of its kind. Much of this content is available online. The project continues to work to fill the gaps; current research focuses on the House of Commons in the late 15th and mid-19th centuries, the House of Lords in the Elizabethan and Civil War periods and in the 18th century, and interviewing for the contemporary oral history project.
Dr Paul Seaward, Emeritus Director