‘And this is made a Standing Order’

In March and April 1774, Commons reviewed procedures guiding and gov­erning inclosure, turnpike and canal projects. This effort focused on proce­dural fairness to stakeholders.

The House of Commons hammered out the text of 11 new Standing Orders in the spring of 1774. Including three more Orders declared in 1771 and 1773 - governing and guiding projects of internal improvements - a total of 14 Standing Orders were revised or newly declared in this interval. The signal ‘Resolved’ introduced the text of these rules. The phrase ‘and this is made a Standing Order of the House’ closed the declaration. The lat­ter phrase alerted the reader that Commons intended the useful life of this procedure to extend beyond the current session of Parliament. The House of Commons crafted its 1774 Standing Orders as a complete set of proce­dures guiding and governing petitioners, counter-petitioners and members of the House through the process by which Commons wrote bills for inter­nal improvements.¹⁹

Procedural progress made in the House of Commons lined up with the opening of the industrial revolution: James Watt and Matthew Boul­ton (Watts’ investment partner since 1775) successfully placed their steam engines into commercial operation. This came about in the decade follow­ing the ‘famous Sunday afternoon walk on Glasgow Green, in the spring of 1765’ in which the idea of the steam condenser occurred to Watt.²⁰ Members of the House of Commons devoted the time necessary to refine technical skills to be employed in the course of writing canal, turnpike and inclosure projects into law.

The attention of the House of Commons to procedure-writing was detailed. On 28 January 1771, Commons resolved that canal bills contain a Clause ‘to oblige the Commissioners or Trustees to take Security from their

Treasurer, Receiver, or Collector, for the faithful Execution of his Office’.²² Another order called for future canal legislation to include a ‘Clause, com­pelling the Subscribers for carrying any such Work into Execution, to make payment of the Sums severally subscribed by them’.²³ Taken as a whole, the Standing Orders of the House of Commons completed in 1774 are best viewed as a mini-code that supplied, for ease of legislators’ reference, bench­marks to guide and govern law-making. John Hatsell published these and other selected Standing Orders in June 1774 under the title A Collection of Rules and Standing Orders of the House of Commons (1774). This work is referenced in this study as Hatsell 1774 Standing Orders.

This was not the first publication of codified Standing Orders. The 1747 private printing of the Standing Orders was the ancestor of similar offerings. The preface announced the purpose of the project in the following.

If it is reasonable to wonder, that this Manual was never published before, it will be so much the less necessary to apologize for publish­ing it now: And, surely, if it appears, that not only all who have Seats in Parliament, or who are in a Capacity to sit, or who have Business to transact there, but the whole People in general, are interested in the Rules and Orders of their Representatives, it will not be disputed, that they ought to be acquainted with them; and the Persons will rather deserve their Thanks than Censure, who put it in their Power to be so.²⁴

Hatsell stressed the educational value of his pamphlet.

Orders are indispensably necessary to be observed by all Gentlemen who intend to inclose their Estates, and by all Surveyors, Engineers, Agents, and Solicitors, who are likely to be employed in the Prosecution of Bills for Turnpike Roads and Navigable Canals.²⁶

Hatsell and his printer must have anticipated a robust interest in his slender and timely work of 24 pages. Only six weeks intervened between Com­mons’ completion of work on the Standing Orders relating to these three types of projects and the appearance of advertisements offering Hatsell’s mini-code of rules for sale.²⁷

Commons was prepared to penalise promoters and solicitors who failed to follow the rules. The House of Commons placed its trust in the commit­tee ‘to whom the said Petition shall be referred’; it was the committee’s job to sniff out promoter non-compliance with the relevant procedure. A Stand­ing Order required that the Committee must ‘examine, in the first place, how far the [relevant] Orders... have been complied with’. This require­ment was backstopped by the further requirement that ‘the Chairman of

‘Orders indispensably necessary’ 17 such Committee shall report the Evidence upon such Examination to the House, on the Report of the Petition’.²⁸

Procedures both guided and governed the House of Commons, on the one hand, and provided benchmarking functions so that promoters, solicitors and other professionals could address deviation from the procedures Com­mons had declared. As noted above, members of the House or its stakehold­ers were held responsible if their behaviour diverged from that prescribed. In so doing, Commons got its hands dirty with the process of composing procedures. The ultimate goal was to facilitate Parliament’s merit law­making. In other words, these steps promoted efficiency in the legislative process. In a dual perspective Commons might be seen as schooling pro­moters (and other stakeholders) and also schooling itself. Hence, declaring Standing Orders served two purposes, with stakeholders and members alike invited to employ these orders as learning aids.