A milestone: This site has just had it’s one hundred thousandth page view.
The most popular pages – leaving aside the home page – have been the bibliography of the Statutes of the Realm, and the Chronological Bibliography; the most viewed laws have been James 1’s notorious Act against Witchcraft, and George 1’s Transportation Act.
It’s very gratifying that this site has been so useful, even if, as yet, it is a rather random collection of statutes, and a fraction of the total number passed.
But I persist in thinking that this material is of considerable historical significance and utility. As such, it requires cataloguing and curation – and I’m amazed that this hasn’t been done already – and also rendering into formats useful for humans, and the computers they use.
Obviously, this project is constrained by time and abilities; it is taking considerably longer than I had envisaged to correct the texts, and in the meantime given me a thorough course in regular expressions. Not only can the machine do only so much correcting, every correction has to be pattern has to be formulated by a human.
Currently, I am focusing on producing tables of the acts, public, local and private, from Restoration to Irish Independence, 1660 to 1921. I hope these will allow both the finding of both individual acts and acts by type, and open a way towards statistical analysis of legislative patterns over two and a half centuries.
To see the hundreds of tables already transcribed, see these directories in the Statutes’ Github Repository:
Public Acts; Local Acts; Private Acts.
If you find this site, and the larger project, useful, feel free to make a donation via Kofi. Contributions will be used to pay the hosting charges and expenses related to research, reward the editor with a nice meal, and if the donations are significant, hire people to develop the site and proof the texts.
It should go without saying, however, that all content on this site is, and will always be, free to read, use and download, either public domain (which applies to all the legislation ) or open access by CC-SA-4 (my own contributions).