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XXIII. 10 Anne, c. 6 (The Occasional Conformity Act).
XXIV. 13 Anne, c. 7 (The Schism Act)

*XXV. 1 Geo. I. St. 2, c. 5 (The Riot Act)

*XXVI. 1 Geo. I. St. 2, c. 38 (The Septennial Act)

A Protest of Dissentient Peers (1716)

XXVII. 6 Geo. I. c. 5 (The Irish Parliament Act)

10 Hen. VII. c. 4 ("Poyning's Law")

*XXVIII. The Peerage Bill (1719)

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*XXIX. 4 Geo. II. c. 26 (The use of English in the Courts of Law)
XXX. 15 Geo. II. c. 22 (A Place Act)

XXXI. 19 Geo. II. c. 39 (The Pacification of the Highlands of Scotland) 127

XXXII. 20 Geo. II. c. 43 (The Abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions in

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XXXIII. 26 Geo. II. c. 33 (" Hardwicke's Marriage Act")

*XXXIV. 1 Geo. III. c. 23 (The Judges and the Demise of the Crown). 140

XXXV. 12 Geo. III. c. 2 (The Royal Marriage Act)

XXXVI. 22 Geo. III. c. 41 (" Burke's Place Act”)
XXXVII. 22 Geo. III. c. 53 (The Declaratory Act, Ireland)

XXXVIII. 24 Geo. III. Sess. 2, c. 25 (Pitt's India Act)

*XXXIX. 32 Geo. III. c. 60 (" Fox' Libel Act")

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XLIV. 7 & 8 Geo. IV. c. 28 (The Prerogative of Pardon)
*XLV. 9 Geo. IV. c. 17 (The Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts)
XLVI. 10 Geo. IV. c. 7 (The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act)
*XLVII. 2 Will. IV. c. 45 (The Reform Bill)

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THE

PREFACE

HE origin, purpose, and scope of this volume require a brief explanation. For the past few years, when lecturing in the Honour School of Modern History at Oxford on English Constitutional History from 1660 to the Great Reform Bill, I invariably found that both my classes and I laboured under the serious disadvantage of having no handy collection of pièces justificatives in the shape of selected original authorities for our subject, such as is at the disposal of teachers and students for the preceding periods of English history in the well-known Select Charters of Stubbs, and the similar volumes of Professor Prothero and Mr. Gardinerwith what profit to all concerned needs no proof here. A teacher's increasing experience of this disadvantage for the important epoch which opens with the Restoration of Charles II. has been reinforced by a three years' experience as an examiner in the Oxford Honour School of Modern History, a school which now numbers annually nearly two hundred candidates. If the student, in short, of English Constitutional History for the hundred and seventy years from 1660 -the period in which the bases of the constitution under which we live to-day were finally established-desire access to the most important statutes and documents, or to the text of the decisions in the leading cases in constitutional law, he has so far been compelled to seek them scattered in the ponderous collection of Parliamentary Statutes, in the still more voluminous and confusing mass of Law Reports, or piecemeal in various books not always to be found in his college library, and certainly not within the reach of a modest purse. Otherwise he must rest content with the quotations or paraphrases of the leading secondary authorities, or, worse

still, the ipse dixit of the lecturer. The educational value of bringing the student face to face with the original authorities is a point that to-day requires no laboured proof; it is one of the truisms common to all places where history is seriously studied. Furthermore, I fancy that all teachers will agree on these two propositions: First, that even if the desire to undertake the hunt for a reference to original authorities given by a lecturer were present in the average student (which in nine. cases out of ten it is not), the pressure on his time of other studies and interests under an ordinary university course would veto the attempt; and secondly, that most students not only require to be tempted to walk to the original founts, but that the fount itself must be in a reasonably accessible place, and its salutary waters must be presented to an artfully created thirst in a tolerably digestible form and in a vessel easily handled. This volume, then, is the outcome of the truth of these two conclusions. Since no such collection existed as I required for my own purposes as a lecturer, some years ago I set to work to make one for myself, utilising to the best of my powers a teacher's experience. I am ready frankly to admit that criticism of the selection, both on the grounds of what is included and what is omitted-to show that it is both arbitrary and incomplete-will be easy. The extended task of selection, indeed, would enable me to play very effectively the part of advocatus diaboli against the form of my own labours. On the other hand, I can but ask those who are disposed to criticise unfavourably to remember one or two things. (1) A very serious, I might say an insurmountable, difficulty has been the singular wealth and copiousness of the material at the compiler's disposal. Yet four hundred and fifty pages can only contain, after all, a certain number of words. Rigorous considerations of space have compelled me reluctantly to eliminate much of what I had carefully excerpted and intended to include. It would have been easy to compile two volumes, but the condition of the task, as I conceived it, required the material to be limited to a single volume, and that of a reasonable compass. (2) I have endeavoured to cover a period of one hundred and seventy

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