In this opening quote, Lord Thring states what he believed to be the essential purpose of an enactment: ‘An enactment … is a declaration of the legislature’. This conceptualisation was, as Thring admitted, simplistic. It nonetheless captured an essential position of legislation in the British constitution. Legislation was an instrument to resolve a problem in the common law (Goldsworthy 2004). A commandment or ‘statutum’ (the origin of the word ‘statute’) is, under this conception, a declaration of intent from Parliament to the courts, as well as government. If this was still true today, we would expect ‘clearness’ in the ‘selection of words’ and the ‘arrangement and construction of the sentences’. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, legislation has undergone a change in linguistic form.

Lord Thring was the first ever head of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. That is the civil service team principally responsible for drafting government Bills. In collaboration with the sponsoring department and ministers, these legal specialists craft legislative language before sending it across to Parliament for debate, scrutiny and amendment. In Thring's time, most parliamentary counsellors were former conveyancing lawyers. They therefore brought fastidiousness from their world of drafting property deeds. That style of drafting favoured long sentences, with minutely detailed exposition. Take, as an example, one of the last Acts of Parliament that Thring would have overseen in his long career – section 1 of the Ecclesiastical Assessments (Scotland) Act 1900:

Where in any parish it shall be necessary to impose an ecclesiastical assessment which, according to previous use and wont in the parish, would fall to be imposed according to the valued rent, but which it would be competent to impose according to the real rent, it shall be lawful for any valued rent heritor to request the clerk to the heritors to summon a meeting of valued rent heritors in the manner prescribed by section twenty-two of the Ecclesiastical Buildings and Glebes (Scotland) Act; and …