A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly

A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century

Warren M. Billings

Published in cooperation with

Jamestown 2007 / Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

306 pages. 2004.

ISBN 0-88490-202-1 (Cloth) $30.00

A Little Parliament is the first extended history of the founding and evolution of the oldest legislative body in the New World. The Virginia assembly developed legislative traditions that provided the basis of the American form of representative government. Based on extensive research in original records, the book also reinterprets the political history of the colony and illuminates the role of European events and commercial growth in the rise of the governing class of Virginia. It includes lively vignettes of many of the colony's earliest political leaders and focuses attention on how their actions shaped the lives of all the colony's residents between 1619 and 1700.

"His work always reflects enormous learning and complete familiarity with the sources.  [The book] is vintage Billings: full of interesting information, drawn from a wide range of archival collections as well as his own previous writings; written with clarity and brio."
—John Ruston Pagan, T. C. Williams School of Law, University of Richmond, and author of Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia.