To the word "parliament" many derivations have been assigned. Petyt explains the name as suggesting that every member of the assembly which it designates should _parler le ment_ or speak his mind.[3] Another authority derives it from two Celtic words, signifying to "speak abundantly"--a meaning which is more applicable in these garrulous times than it was in days when debate was often punctuated by lengthy intervals of complete silence. [3] "Lex Parliamentaria" (1690), p. 1. Whatever its derivation, the word no doubt referred originally to the "deep speech" which the kings of old held with their councillors. The first mention of it, in connexion with a national assembly, occurs in 1246, when it was used by Matthew Prior of a general convocation of English barons. About thirty years later it appears again in the preamble to the First Statute of Westminster. It has now come to be employed entirely to describe that combination of the Three Estates, the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons, which with the Crown form the supreme legislative government of the country. The ancient Britons possessed a Parliament of a kind, called the _Commune Concilium_. Under the Heptarchy each king in England enjoyed the services of an assembly of wise men--or Witenagemot, as it was called--which advised him upon matters of national importance. The Witan sat as a court of justice, formed the Council of the chiefs, and could impose taxes and even depose the King, though the latter too often took the whole of their powers into his own hands. When the separate kingdoms became united, their different Councils were absorbed into the one great Gemot of Wessex. This, in Anglo-Saxon times, was a small body, consisting of less than a score of Bishops, a number of Ealdormen (or heads of the different shires), and certain vassal members. This senate was undoubtedly the germ of all future systems of Parliamentary government; and though for the first two hundred years after the Conquest there is no historical record of the meeting of any body corresponding to our present Parliament, from the days of the Witenagemot to our own times the continuity of our national assemblies has never been broken.