Volume 1

Microcosm of London / [Anon].

Date:
[1808-1811]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Microcosm of London / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    204/248 page 192
    The Parliament sits upon any day except on Sundays, or other high festivals, or fast days, when it is not usual to assemble, unless upon the most urgent occasions: but though the speaker always adjourns the house to nine o’clock of the morning of the day when they agree to meet again, the house seldom meets before noon. This house has concurrent power with the lords in all matters of legislation, and no law can be made without their united consent*. * The forms of passing acts of Parliament have varied at different periods. About the year 1400, it appears from the rolls, that most of the laws were then preferred to the king by way of petition, and the lords, at the sitting down of their house, appointed receivers and triers of petitions; but in those times, after the petitions were received, and had passed both houses, they were ingrossed by the clerk into one roll, and so presented to the king. After the end of the Parliament, all those acts which the king had assented unto, and were to be published as statutes, were extracted into another roll, and transcripts made of them under the great seal of England, and sent to every sheriff, to be proclaimed in their several counties, printing being not then invented. But these forms of passing bills in Parliament were altered in King Henry the Seventh’s time, when petitions were so many and of such length, that they could not well be comprehended in one roll: then every petition was changed into the form of an act, and made in English (which before was in French or in Latin), and presented by itself; and if the king did not assent unto it, it was laid aside, and not entered upon the statute roll: and since printing came up, there hath been no use of any such second roll, to collect the acts to which the king had assented, nor of making any such transcripts, for the sheriff to publish them, the print supplying that turn. For the principal information which relates to St. Stephen’s Chapel, we acknowledge ourselves in- debted to Mr. Smith’s Antiquities of the City of Westminster; a work which every man who feels an interest in the history of the arts, and their early introduction and progress in this island, will peruse
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