Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, at a surge of 212 pleasure and liberty.

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Now then, in June, 1509 as Henry's nobility gathered in London for their new kings coronation,

Henry called his very first great council. Just a very quick recap of what the great council

was and its role. The great council is essentially the same as the Magnum

Consilium that's been a feature of the English Kingdom since the days of Billy the Conk,

and indeed you might argue since the days of the Anglo-Saxon kings and their Witan, the wise men.

It's not an official organ of state such as we might recognise today with a secretary at

and terms of reference and all that sort of thing. It's simply the king and his great men

gathering together for a wag of the collective chin. The king fulfilling his responsibility to

consult before going off and doing pretty much exactly what he pleased.

You might remember that the parish by this stage is pretty much restricted to 60 families,

60, a tiny tiny percentage of the population of England, somewhere around two to turn a half million.

You might note that the wider group of what you might call the gentleman of England was itself

only about 2,000 households. So that's knights and people not formally knighted but behaving as

though they could be or frankly just people who look and sounded like gentlemen with a coat of

arms. I tell you this to remind you of just how lucky you are to be living in 2017.

Nope, I tell you this to remind you that we're talking about a really small group of people here

of inter-bred families who knew each other pretty well and all their lineages.

By the way, while we're on it, Andy asked me a question about the nomenclature of the

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