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.