Dr Sophie Ambler, from the Department of History, is in conversation with the Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg MP in his podcast ‘Why Parliament Works’, which explores some of the less understood aspects of the UK’s parliamentary democracy and how our constitution delivers for voters. The second series of the podcast explores the history of parliament, beginning with its emergence in the thirteenth century.

Dr Ambler, lecturer in Later Medieval History and Deputy Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy, puts the 1297 ‘Statute Concerning Tallage’ into its thirteenth century context – reflecting on it as the culmination of a story that began in 1215 with the much more widely known Magna Carta and continued with the drama of Simon de Montfort’s brutal rise and fall.

Dr Ambler is a leading authority on Simon de Montfort having published a highly acclaimed book, The Song of Simon de Montfort: England's First Revolutionary and the Death of Chivalry (Picador and OUP, 2019). In the podcast, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP remarked that he would 'strongly recommend' this 'excellent biography' of Simon de Montfort, and that he had 'listened to it over Christmas as an audio book and learned an enormous amount from it.'

The ‘Why Parliament Works’ podcast is produced by the Cabinet Office with the objective of championing the importance of Parliament in the UK’s constitution.