Mr Hatsill [sic] writes to me that above 360 private petitions have been presented for Bills, being above fifty more than in the last Session, and three times as many as the average twenty years ago. He attributes this to the superaccretion of wealth; and, at the same time, the bankruptcies in the Gazette are ten times as many as the old average.

Thus Lord Auckland to Lord Grenville on 11 February 1811.The legislative output of that year resulted in 128 public and 295 local and private acts. Of the latter, one was for change of name, two for divorce, six concerned the settlement of private estates, 133 were for inclosure; the remainder, some 150, concerned local affairs. The majority of this last class were for turnpike roads, some were for canals or bridges, others for churches, and a number for purely local matters – the streets or poor rates of a given town.

In 1711, only seventy-four acts, public and private, were passed. Some may be called matters of state: encompassing the death of a privy councillor; a quarantine act was necessary; three, including the mutiny act, related to the army. There were nine financial measures, six acts were concerned with trade and transport and one or two related to social matters – there was a game act and provision for the building of fifty new churches. There were three turnpike road acts. About half the total related to private estates.

Not unnaturally, the greater part of Robert Harper's practice was concerned with that ‘most notable achievement of the conveyancers’, the classical strict settlement. Although the papers themselves have not survived, his indexes show that Harper drew innumerable agreements of this kind, as well as the attendant conveyances, wills and mortgages relating to his clients' lands. These agreements were protected by the courts and did not require legislation; indeed, so well were they protected that legislation was often needed to unsettle them, and thus arose the eighteenth-century private estate acts. It says much for the conservatism of landed families that, just as they felt obliged to ‘continue in the tradition of re-settlement’, they did not even more often resort to procedure by private act, which was cheap, expeditious and very effective.

Very little work has been done on the contents of these acts, although they contain information which must be of importance for local and economic history. It is to be wished that they could be analysed in geographical groupings, taking into account the local and inclosure acts for the same time and place. It will often be found that a landlord intent on developing his own estate by private act will be taking the lead in inclosure and other measures in his locality.

All students of this subject must acknowledge their debt to the work of the late Dr O. C. Williams. His intimate knowledge of the House of Commons and its ways produced three books which are an inexhaustible mine of information.

I am grateful to the benchers of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn, and to their Librarian, Mr C. W. Ringrose, for permission to consult the volume of Robert Harper MSS.

Dr P. D. G. Thomas was good enough to allow me to see the typescript of his forthcoming book, The House of Commons in the eighteenth century.

I am indebted to Mr Maurice Bond, Clerk of the Records of the House of Lords, for much valuable advice and criticism, most kindly and generously given.

The private bill procedure was used not only for those bills that subsequently became private acts, but also for all bills affecting private or local interests. Before 1720, some road and harbour bills, having gone through the private bill procedure, were classified by the King's Printer as private acts, but after that date, although they followed the same procedure in parliament, they were classified and printed as public acts at the end of it.

All these bills of course paid fees, but fees were also payable by parties taking benefit from any act whatever, and it was in this area that disputes arose as to whether fees should be charged. As the order of 1751 clearly states, ‘every bill for the particular interest or benefit of any person or persons, whether the same be brought in upon petition, or motion, or report from a Committee, or brought from the Lords, hath been and ought to be, deemed a private bill, within the meaning of the Table of Fees.’ It is not possible to have a more comprehensive definition than this. The list printed by Hatsell, is not a list of private bills, but a list of bills on which fees had been paid, which is not at all the same thing. Similarly, the sections of the Liverpool Tractate dealing with private bill procedure refer not at all to private acts as such, except for one very slight reference to inclosure, but to those public acts which were required to pay fees and to go through the private bill procedure.

STATUTES

The promulgation of the statutes is discussed in chapter 9. Throughout the work, I have not adopted the very complicated differentiation by style of numbers used in the printed editions, but have used only arabic numerals, with the abbreviations c. for public acts, pr. c. for private, and loc. for those few references to acts classified as local after 1798. For details of the official numbering see R. W. Perceval, ‘Chapter Six, VI, vi, 6 or 6?’, Parliamentary Affairs, iii (1950), 506–13.

HOUSE OF LORDS

A new Guide to the Records of Parliament is to be published by H.M. Stationery Office in 1971 and will cover, comprehensively, the materials available in the House of Lords Record Office (HLRO).

A description of the principal types of private bills and the classes of records relating thereto is available in ‘The Private Bill Records of the House of Lords’ (HLRO Memorandum No. 16, 1957). This is particularly useful for the nineteenth century, when the surviving papers are much more numerous and more complex than for the eighteenth century.

For the purpose of this work, much use has been made of the committee books, containing the minutes of select committees of the House on private bills and other matters. The eighteenth-century volumes are not numbered, and not all of them are paginated, so the only reference necessary is the date of the meeting of the committee. This is given either in the text, or in footnotes with the abbreviation Com. Bk.

The nature of Robert Harper's collections and the indexes to them have been described briefly in the text. The only section of Harper's professional papers now extant, with the exception of a little of his ‘great precedent book’ is that covered by the index at Lincoln's Inn which is entitled ‘Index to Acts of Parliament’. When these volumes were acquired by the Museum they appear to have been catalogued at first as they stood, under references beginning 356 to 358. Each volume was usually in the order: printed private bills; printed public bills and other parliamentary papers; a section in manuscript containing copies or drafts for the measures with which Harper had been personally concerned. At some later date in the nineteenth century, the printed private bills were removed from these volumes and used to make up the set of so-called ‘Private Acts’ under pressmark BS Ref. 2. Almost all the private bills were removed in this manner so that copies remain under references 356 to 358 only if Harper had two copies, or if (rarely) the Museum possessed a clean copy from another source (except those in the King's Library, under references 212 to 215, which were then, as they are still, sacrosanct). But the original Museum references, beginning 356 to 358, can still be seen pencilled on the private bills now bound under BS Ref. 2 and these have been of assistance in reconstructing the volumes.

It is when one turns to local bills that parliamentary controversy is to be expected; it was with these bills that the time of parliament was unnecessarily taken up; and it is they that have given private bill legislation in general a bad name. It is for local bills that the immensely complicated precautions embodied in the nineteenth-century standing orders had to be invented, which Dr Williams at such laborious length explained.

The content of these local acts has been discussed at great length by Clifford and the Webbs who concentrated on the nineteenth-century development of municipalities; that is, the manner in which local authorities obtained powers to deal with finance, sanitation, water supply and so forth. This type of legislation in the eighteenth century is well described by Spencer. The acts relating to transport by road, river and rail, are discussed by Jackman; there have also been many local studies of particular projects. The nature of the materials in the House of Lords manuscripts for the study of these topics has been described by Mr Bond and Mr Cobb. There is no need to go over this ground again.

Both Clifford and Williams chose the Bridgewater canal bill of 1762 as an example for a description of the outline of procedure in the House of Commons. Neither remarks on one of its most striking attributes: it became a private, not a public, act as was the case also with the Duke's three other measures concerning his navigation.

The merits or otherwise of the movement to inclose open fields and common land by private act of parliament, which began in the eighteenth century, is still the subject of controversy. The most extreme writers of the anti-inclosure school, notably the Hammonds, based much of their comment on evidence given before parliamentary committees in the nineteenth century, a source which must always be used with caution. They all ignored, or perhaps refused to see, the extent to which the procedure of both Houses, in the eighteenth century, did offer protection to parties affected by proposed inclosures and the attempts made to improve that procedure. Both critics and advocates of inclosure have been inclined to exaggerate the parliamentary costs of inclosing by act.

The Lords, in 1706, promulgated the standing order that private bills were to have a preliminary hearing before the judges, which, as we have seen, had an important effect on estate bills and seems both to have made it certain that the interests of all parties were consulted and also to have avoided charging applicants with parliamentary fees in doubtful cases. But in 1706 inclosure bills had been almost unknown, and although the wording of the order appears to apply to all private bills, it was never in fact applied except to estate bills. At first, all inclosure bills began in the House of Lords, the parties no doubt thinking of them as a sort of extension of estate bills, and leave was granted by the House immediately upon the reading of the petition.

The King's Printer's patent gave him the right to print all acts of parliament, but he had discretion as to the exercise of his prerogative and, since the Treasury was his largest customer, he came under Treasury supervision. A clerk at the House of Lords prepared bills for the Royal Assent, dividing them into the categories of public and private. Public acts received the assent in the form ‘le roi le veult’ and private in the form ‘soit fait comme il est desiré’. At the House of Lords, the original acts, ingrossed on parchment rolls, were numbered and preserved in the order in which they had received the assent, sometimes on several separate occasions during a session, public and private being therefore mixed up together. The division into public and private as we know it today was made by the King's Printer when he came to make up his sessional set of acts. He arranged the public and the private acts in two separately numbered series, printing the texts of the former, but only a list of the titles of the latter.

He printed the text of all the truly public general acts, such as the supply and mutiny acts and all matters of state; these acts were of their own nature public and did not contain a clause declaring them to be so. But from at least the late seventeenth century, it became usual to insert such a clause into privately promoted bills, especially the local acts for roads, rivers, town improvements and so on.

‘Theise private bills benefitt yow, Mr. Speaker’, said Sir Henry Poole in 1621. Indeed they did, to the tune of £200 in 1597, and £500 a year by the 1730s; and not only the speaker, but every official in both Houses from the chancellor down to the doorkeepers.

This being so, the first thing to be decided by the promoters of a bill was whether to proceed with it as a public or a private measure. In many cases they had no choice. As Sir John Neale remarked, the problem of distinguishing between public and private bills in the sixteenth century was solved by the officials ‘in a very simple way. Could they extract fees from someone? If so, it was a private bill.’ But on the border line, if the promoters had the cash, they were well advised to proceed by the private method, otherwise they might well find their bill jammed in the clerical machinery with the session drawing rapidly to an end. It was in 1607 that the speaker ruled a bill to amend the highways of 'only three shires’ to be a private bill, a dictum upon which Hatsell was still relying heavily in 1781.

Professor Neale's chapters on the officers and on procedure give a vivid picture of the importance of fees in the promotion of business in the sixteenth-century House of Commons and, in particular, his examples show how Elizabethan speakers exerted themselves to defend the financial rights of themselves and the officials of the House.

Being engaged in preparing a list of printed House of Commons sessional papers for the eighteenth century, I found myself relying upon a collection of such papers in the State Paper Room of the British Museum. Many of the printed bills bore manuscript annotations and notes of amendments, and at first I assumed they had belonged to a member of parliament and wondered whether it might be possible to identify him. I noticed that many papers also bore contemporary ink reference numbers and sometimes the initials ‘R.H.’ ; then I found one or two whose docket was endorsed ‘To Mr Harper’ and others marked ‘as drawn by R.H.’. Finding no member of that name, I set off in search of a lawyer named ‘R. Harper’. This book is the result of the search. It centres round the work of one attorney, hitherto completely unknown and without any official status. Its purpose is to illustrate the procedures by which legislation was prepared and enacted in the eighteenth century.

The legislative output of the century was so great that historians in political and economic fields who have little concern with legislation as such can scarcely escape touching upon the subject at some time. My purpose is to go behind the formal rules of procedure to show, by illustration, what actually took place in a number of cases and thus to suggest how any particular bill may have been initiated and put through to the statute book.

On Friday the 30th ult. died, Robert Harper, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, Counsellor at law, who is deservedly supposed to have been one of the most able conveyancers in England for more than half this present century. He was deeply versed in the laws of his own country, and well acquainted with the language and history of the modern and ancient nations. His knowledge was great; but his humanity and good temper were above all the modes of expression. He was born at Farnley in this parish; educated at the Free-School in this town; and was the elder brother of Samuel Harper Esq., Alderman of this borough.

The eldest son of Samuel Harper of Farnley, Yorks, gentleman, Robert Harper was born just before the turn of the century and was admitted to Lincoln's Inn on 14 March 1717. On 5 February 1735 he was called to the bar and on 30 May 1746 to the Bench of Lincoln's Inn. Robert's brother Samuel was born about 1700. He did not attend university but despite the lack of any indentifiable legal training he assisted his brother in his London practice. In later life he returned to Leeds. From 1758 the local paper records property of his in the town to be let. On 26 October 1762 he was chosen common councilman, and two weeks later alderman; the following year he was elected mayor – a rapid rise.