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).
Hello:
Thanks for your very useful site. I wonder if you could help me identify an edition of early 19th English statutes.
I’m editing text for the London Record Society which extensively cites the Gaols Act of 1823 (4 Geo. IV, c64) and gives page references “p.772” and “p.788”. But I’m unable to identify any contemporary edition of the statutes in which the text of the Gaols Act spans such page numbers.
Do you have any ideas?
Best wishes,
Simon
Hi Simon,
What text are you editing? What is its publication date?
There’s no collection of statutes I know of that would match the pagination, certainly not annual vols. It could be some sort of collection of prison administration legislation, or possibly a JPs manual, but I’ve failed to find anything like that of over 700 pages.
Best,
John
Hi John:
Thanks for trying — and replying — so quickly.
I’m editing the diaries of Horace Cotton, the Ordinary (prison chaplain) of Newgate, from 1823 to 1838 — they deal in especial detail with the behaviour of the people being hanged during the last years of the Bloody Code.
I’m disappointed you don’t have an answer, but it’s some relief to know that I’m exhausting the plausible sources. I wondered about a JP’s manual as well. One thing — this entry would have been made so soon after passage of the Act that the source must date to 1823 itself. But what is it?
Thanks again,
Simon
That’s an interesting context: the question is about where the people involved in the administration of laws actually got their copies of the latest legislation, and what commentary surrounds it.
A possible answer is that Cotton was reading the serial publication. Individual Statutes were published as they gained assent, as pamphlets. This upped the page count, and they were paginated consecutively. These pamphlets would later be collected into single volumes: see
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C_zCZ5VfLlsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
as one such example.
If you can find an original copy of the Act, then you can check the pagination. However, I haven’t found one, and nor have I found the pamphlets for that year collected into a single vol (the earliest of such a publication that I know of is the vol linked to above).
Best,
John