For the beginnings of the House of Commons we may go back to the thirteenth century. In 1254 the king summoned to Parliament not only the bishops, abbots, earls, and barons, but also two knights from every shire. Then, in an irregular Parliament, convened in 1265 by Simon de Montfort, a great baronial leader against the king, two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns for the first time sat with the others and helped to decide how their liberties were to be protected. These knights and burgesses were the elements from which the House of Commons was subsequently to be formed. Similar bodies met repeatedly in the next thirty years, and in 1295 Edward I called a "model Parliament" of archbishops, bishops, abbots, representative clergy, earls, and barons, two knights from every shire, and two citizens from each privileged city or borough,--more than four hundred in all. For some time after 1295 the clergy, nobility, and commoners [Footnote: _I.e._, the knights of the shires and the burgesses from the towns.] may have deliberated separately much as did the three "estates" in France. At any rate, early in the fourteenth century the lesser clergy dropped out, the greater prelates and nobles were fused into one body--the House of "Lords spiritual and temporal,"--and the knights joined the burgesses to form the House of Commons. Parliament was henceforth a bicameral body, consisting of a House of Commons and a House of Lords. [Sidenote: Powers of Parliament: Taxation] The primary function of Parliament was to give information to the king and to hear and grant his requests for new "subsidies" or direct taxes. The right to refuse grants was gradually assumed and legally recognized. As taxes on the middle class soon exceeded those on the clergy and nobility, it became customary in the fifteenth century for money bills to be introduced in the Commons, approved by the Lords, and signed by the king. [Sidenote: Legislation] The right to make laws had always been a royal prerogative, in theory at least. Parliament, however, soon utilized its financial control in order to obtain initiative in legislation. A threat of withholding subsidies had been an effective way of forcing Henry III to confirm _Magna Carta_ in 1225; it proved no less effective in securing royal enactment of later "petitions" for laws. In the fifteenth century legislation by "petition" was supplanted by legislation by "bill," that is, introducing in either House of Parliament measures which, in form and language, were complete statutes and which became such by the united assent of Commons, Lords, and king. To this day English laws have continued to be made formally "by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same." [Sidenote: Influence on Administration]