The Rolls of Parliament were the official records of the

English Parliament The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England from the 13th century until 1707 when it was replaced by the Parliament of Great Britain. Parliament evolved from the great council of bishops and peers that advised t ...

and the subsequent

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

. They recorded meetings of Parliament and

Acts of Parliament Acts of Parliament, sometimes referred to as primary legislation, are texts of law passed by the legislative body of a jurisdiction (often a parliament or council). In most countries with a parliamentary system of government, acts of parliament be ...

. Until 1483 the rolls recorded parliamentary proceedings (petitions, bills and answers, both public and private) which formed the basis of

, but seldom the statutes themselves. From 1483 to 1534 both public and private acts were enrolled in the 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 rolls. By 1629 all proceedings other than the acts themselves disappeared from the rolls and from 1759 the titles of private acts disappeared too. Enrolment of Public Acts on manuscript parchment rolls continued until 1850. The longest Act of Parliament in the form of a scroll is an act regarding taxation passed in 1821. It is nearly a quarter of a mile (348 metres) long, and used to take two men a whole day to rewind. Until 1850, a paper draft was brought into the House in which the Bill started; after the committee stage there the Bill was inscribed on a parchment roll and this parchment was then passed to the other House which could introduce amendments. The original Bill was never re-written and knives were used to scrape away the script from the top surface of the rolls, before new text was added. Since 1850 two copies of each Act have been printed on

vellum Vellum is prepared animal skin or membrane, typically used as writing material. Parchment is another term for this material, from which vellum is sometimes distinguished, when it is made from calfskin, as opposed to that made from other anima ...

, one for preservation in the House of Lords (now the

Parliamentary Archives A parliamentary system, or parliamentarian democracy, is a system of democracy, democratic government, governance of a sovereign state, state (or subordinate entity) where the Executive (government), executive derives its democratic legitimacy ...

), and the other for transmission to the

Public Record Office The Public Record Office (abbreviated as PRO, pronounced as three letters and referred to as ''the'' PRO), Chancery Lane in the City of London, was the guardian of the national archives of the United Kingdom from 1838 until 2003, when it was ...

(now

The National Archives National archives are central archives maintained by countries. This article contains a list of national archives. Among its more important tasks are to ensure the accessibility and preservation of the information produced by governments, both ...

).{{cite web , url=http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/cultural-collections/archives/the-records/parchment-to-print/ , work=History of the Parliamentary Archives , title=From parchment to print The rolls for 1272–1503 were first published in the eighteenth century, as ''Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et Petitiones, et Placita in Parliamento'' (London, 1767–77), under the general editorship of John Strachey. A modern CD-ROM edition has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, as ''The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England''. References to Rolls of Parliament are often abbreviated to Rot. Parl.

References

External links

Chancery: Parliament Rolls
* https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rolls-medieval

References

External links

See also