A statute roll is a manuscript parchment roll with the text of statutes passed by the medieval Parliament of England. The statute rolls are also called Tower rolls since they were kept in the Wakefield Tower of the Tower of London until the 1850s. [1] [2] [3]
At the end of a medieval parliament, a collection of acts of a public character was made in the form of a statute roll and given the title of the king's regnal year; each particular act of Parliament forming a section, or a chapter, of the complete statute, so that, e.g. the Vagabonds Act 1383 became 7 Ric. 2. c. 5.
The first statute roll is the Statute of Gloucester of 1278. Before 1278 there were Coram Rege Rolls (from 1194), Fine Rolls (from 1199), Charter Rolls (from 1199), Patent Rolls (from 1202) and Close Rolls (from 1205). The idea that Magna Carta was the first statute on the first roll is a mistake. [4] [5]
The statute rolls were discontinued in 1469 when Acts of Parliament in their final form began to be enrolled on parliament rolls. Until 1483, parliament rolls recorded parliamentary proceedings (petitions, bills and answers, both public and private) which formed the basis of Acts of Parliament, but seldom the statutes themselves. From 1483 to 1534, both public and private Acts were enrolled in parliament rolls; after 1535, only those private Acts for which an enrolment fee was paid appear, and from 1593 only the titles of private Acts are mentioned in the parliament rolls. By 1629, all proceedings other than the Acts themselves disappeared from the parliament rolls and from 1759 the titles of private Acts disappeared too.
The statute rolls were translated and printed in the first two volumes of The Statutes of the Realm (9 volumes, Record Commission, 1810-1828).
Elizabeth Woodville, later known as Dame Elizabeth Grey, was Queen of England from her marriage to King Edward IV on 1 May 1464 until Edward was deposed on 3 October 1470, and again from Edward's resumption of the throne on 11 April 1471 until his death on 9 April 1483. She was a key figure in the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic civil war between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist factions between 1455 and 1487.
English law is the common law legal system of England and Wales, comprising mainly criminal law and civil law, each branch having its own courts and procedures.
Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, was the sixth child and second son of King Edward IV of England and Elizabeth Woodville, born in Shrewsbury. Richard and his older brother, who briefly reigned as King Edward V of England, mysteriously disappeared shortly after their uncle Richard III became king in 1483.
The Ragman Rolls are the collection of instruments by which the nobility and gentry of Scotland subscribed allegiance to King Edward I of England, during the time between the Conference of Norham in May 1291 and the final award in favour of Balliol in November 1292; and again in 1296. Of the former of these records two copies were preserved in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey, and it has been printed by Thomas Rymer. Another copy, preserved originally in the Tower of London, is now also in the National Archives. The latter record, containing the various acts of homage and fealty extorted by Edward from John Balliol and others in the course of his progress through Scotland in the summer of 1296 and in August at the parliament of Berwick, was published by Prynne from the copy in the Tower and now in the National Archives. Both records were printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1834.
The Parliamentary Archives of the United Kingdom preserves and makes available to the public the records of the House of Lords and House of Commons back to 1497, as well as some 200 other collections of parliamentary interest. The present title was officially adopted in November 2006, as a change from the previous title, the House of Lords Record Office.
The Rolls of Parliament were the official records of the English Parliament and the subsequent Parliament of the United Kingdom. They recorded meetings of Parliament and Acts of Parliament.
The patent rolls are a series of administrative records compiled in the English, British and United Kingdom Chancery, running from 1201 to the present day.
The Maughan Library is the main university research library of King's College London, forming part of the Strand Campus. A 19th-century neo-Gothic building located on Chancery Lane in the City of London, it was formerly the home to the headquarters of the Public Record Office, known as the "strong-box of the Empire", and was acquired by the university in 2001. Following a £35m renovation designed by Gaunt Francis Architects, the Maughan is the largest new university library in the United Kingdom since World War II.
A charter roll is an administrative record created by a medieval chancery that recorded all the charters issued by that office.
An Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom is primary legislation passed by the UK Parliament in Westminster, London.
The Close Rolls are an administrative record created in medieval England, Wales, Ireland and the Channel Islands by the royal chancery, in order to preserve a central record of all letters close issued by the chancery in the name of the Crown.
The Statute of Gloucester is a piece of legislation enacted in the Parliament of England during the reign of Edward I. The statute, proclaimed at Gloucester in August 1278, was crucial to the development of English law. The Statute of Gloucester and the ensuing legal hearings were a means by which Edward I tried to recover regal authority that had been alienated during the reign of his father, King Henry III (1207–1272), who had been made a virtual tool of the baronial party, led by Simon de Montfort. Edward I recognized the need for the legal "reform" and considered Parliament as a means of buying popular support by encouraging loyal subjects to petition the King against his own barons and ministers.
The Statutes of the Realm is an authoritative collection of acts of the Parliament of England from the earliest times to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, and Acts of the Parliament of Great Britain passed up to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. It was published between 1810 and 1825 by the Record Commission as a series of nine volumes, with volume IV split into two separately bound parts, together with volumes containing an alphabetical index and a chronological index.
John Chevir or Chevyr was an Irish judge and politician of the fifteenth century. He held the offices of Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and Master of the Rolls in Ireland, and was also one of the first recorded Speakers of the Irish House of Commons.
The Record Commissions were a series of six Royal Commissions of Great Britain and the United Kingdom which sat between 1800 and 1837 to inquire into the custody and public accessibility of the state archives. The Commissioners' work paved the way for the establishment of the Public Record Office in 1838. The Commissioners were also responsible for publishing various historical records, including the Statutes of the Realm to 1714 and the Acts of Parliament of Scotland to 1707, as well as a number of important medieval records.
The Great Seal of Ireland was the seal used until 1922 by the Dublin Castle administration to authenticate important state documents in Ireland, in the same manner as the Great Seal of the Realm in England. The Great Seal of Ireland was used from at least the 1220s in the Lordship of Ireland and the ensuing Kingdom of Ireland, and remained in use when the island became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801–1922), just as the Great Seal of Scotland remained in use after the Act of Union 1707. After 1922, the single Great Seal of Ireland was superseded by the separate Great Seal of the Irish Free State and Great Seal of Northern Ireland for the respective jurisdictions created by the partition of Ireland.
The Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper was a civil servant within the Irish Chancery in the Dublin Castle administration. His duties corresponded to the offices of Clerk of the Crown and Clerk of the Hanaper in the English Chancery. Latterly, the office's most important functions were to issue writs of election to the Westminster Parliament, both for the House of Commons and for Irish representative peers in the House of Lords.
John Chaumpeneys was the last Abbot of Darnhall Abbey and first Abbot of Vale Royal Abbey, Cheshire, from around 1275 to circ 1289.