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U.K.: THE PARLIAMENT PROJECT


FIVE CENTURIES OF MPS: THE HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT PROJECT


How do you find out who occupied the Benches of the British Parliament centuries before accurate record-keeping was thought necessary? The Director of a major project – inspired by the interest of a history-minded MP – explains how Westminster is filling in the many missing pieces of its history.


Dr Paul Seaward in London. Dr Seaward is the Director of the United Kingdom’s History of Parliament Project. A former Assistant Clerk, Senior Clerk and Deputy Principal Clerk in the House of Commons at Westminster, he was also an A.H. Lloyd Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge University.


Dr Paul Seaward


How many people have ever been Members of the British Parliament? Over the 750 or so years of Parliament’s existence there have been very many indeed. It’s the History of Parliament Trust’s job to find out who they were.


62 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue One


Getting started That’s not always easy. There have been many Members, living at about the same time, who shared the same name and are difficult to distinguish. There are many, especially in the early years of Parliaments, whose names we only know in part, or don’t know at all. Our guess at the moment is that altogether, around 30,000 to 40,000 people have been elected to Parliament over all that time. The vast majority of them have


been men, of course, as women have only been elected to the House of Commons since 1918, and very few were returned until the most recent general elections. Most Members have been relatively rich and well- connected, since the electorate only became truly democratic in the


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