Early precedents: personal: acts of attainder and restitution in blood: differences between houses as to right of originating such bills: act degrading from dukedom: acts not printed in statute-book. a judicial murder: estate, naturalization, and divorce acts: miscellaneous.

We must not look to the reigns of the Plantagenets for examples of settled constitutional practice in private or public legislation. Sometimes, according to the records which have been quoted, the answers to petitions or Bills were given by the King's Council, however this body may have been composed. The assent of the Commons, except to grants of money,¹ was assumed, and was not asked. Parliaments were convened all over the kingdom, and seem often to have been little more than provincial assemblies. The Lords, spiritual and temporal, were summoned, or left unsummoned, at the King's pleasure. Similarly, the numbers of the Commons in Parliament rose or fell as the King or his advisers thought fit.² Between public and private Acts no clear distinction was drawn, though there was a form of assent appropriate to each class. Legislation might be by charter, statute or ordinance, and the distinction between the two last, as we have seen, was by no means clear. In revoking (A.D. 1322) the Act of pardon to the pursuers of Hugh Despenser, father and son, the statute repealed, which would now be called a personal Act, is mentioned as a “statute, ordinance, provision and acquittance,”³ showing that the terms sometimes conveyed substantially the same meaning. It was the dawn of private as of public legislation, and in the examples which will now be given, it is seldom possible to trace the line of separation between general and particular measures, or to vouch that due constitutional forms were observed before they found places in the statute-book.