As long ago as 1593 (and one could start earlier) Francis Bacon introduced a project in Parliament for reducing the volume of statutes, which were ‘so many in number that neither the common people can practise [sic] them nor the lawyers sufficiently understand them.’ This task was committed to all the lawyers in the House of Commons, but nothing came of it. In 1607 James I invited Parliament to scrape the rust off the laws so that they ‘might be cleared and made known to the subjects.’ The idea was to reconcile conflicting decisions, discard obsolete material and prepare an authoritative restatement of the law. In his ‘Proposition touching the Amendment of the Law’ in 1616, Bacon himself, by then Lord Chancellor, again called for digests of the common law and statute laws with ‘law commissioners’ to revise them and keep them up to date, but again nothing was done.…

Brougham's great speech on law reform on 7 February 1828, no doubt deserves to be considered as the greatest single landmark in our non-history of systematic law reform before 1965. The speech lasted 6 hours and 3 minutes, and he is reported to have sustained himself by consuming a hatful of oranges, ‘which were all the refreshment then tolerated by the custom of the House. […]