ABSTRACT
The first legislation enabling the establishment of a public museum in Britain dates from the middle of the eighteenth century and concerns the purchase, housing and use of the founding collections for the British Museum. Although the Ashmolean Museum had opened some 70 years earlier, this had resulted from a gift to further the work of an already long-established institution, the University of Oxford, and parliamentary legislation was not sought to give the Museum a separate corporate existence. Similarly, other collections and museums held by private persons and societies to which the public had access during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, do not figure in British law. Indeed there is a sparsity of relevant museum legislation of substance for much of the period during which museums have existed. It is therefore of some interest to examine the parallel developments of the notion of cultural property and its public access in considering the historical context of museum legislation.
