‘If he has health and leisure to complete’
Following publication of his Cases of Privileges (1776), Hatsell rebranded this work as the first volume in the series Precedents of Proceedings. I refer to the three later volumes (in my short-hand) as Members/Speaker, Lords/ Supply and Conference/Impeachment.
The first edition of each of these four works reached the public in 1776, 1781, 1785 and 1796, respectively. ‘There are several other Heads, which are certainly of greater importance’, Hatsell observed in the Preface to Members/Speaker. Naming topics ‘Lords, Impeachment, Conference, Supply’ - on which he had not yet published - Hatsell came to ‘Proceedings on passing Bills, and some others’. Hatsell promised his readers that ‘if he has health and leisure to proceed upon, and to complete, will be the subjects of another volume’. Hatsell never wrote his projected work on ‘passing Bills’.28 As it happened, Commons’ Standing Orders - declared in the eighteenth century - were thin stuff when it came to guiding and governing the chamber’s consideration of public business.Hatsell presented 414 anecdotes scattered through the 306 pages of Members/Speaker.29 Hatsell’s sampling of anecdotes - taken as data from the journals - appear below:
2 On the 23d of May, 1614, a Committee is appointed to consider of a motion of Sir Robert Philips, ‘That persons naturalized may not be Members of the House of Commons’.30
5 On the 24th of January, 1678, the Parliament is dissolved by ProclamaÂtion, after having been first prorogued. So on the 12th of July, 1679; 18th of January, 1680; 2nd of July, 1687. And in all the subsequent instances of dissolution.31
Hatsell gathered anecdotes under the following headings; the second colÂumn represents the number of anecdotes under each heading:
Members 94
Rules of Proceedings 173
Speaker 30
Clerk 18
Fees 17
King 69
‘This John Milton deserves hanging’ 39 Under the heading Members, Hatsell offered the reader 13 subdivisions; the material gathered under the heading Speaker was divided into five subÂdivisions.
Following the anecdotes within each heading Hatsell appended his Observations. His printer set the type for the latter term as OBSERÂVATIONS. Hatsell also wrote voluminous footnotes below the text of Members/Speaker; 60 footnotes appeared in that work alone. In one such note - running 1,410 words - Hatsell ruminated at length on procedural issues arising from controverted parliamentary elections.32 The word count in Members/Speaker ran to 95,023 words. Jefferson polished off his Manual in 31,290 words while Bentham’s editors pitched 57,236 words into the printer’s tray when they assembled his manuscripts for publication.33Members/Speaker offered the reader:
• anecdotes that played no further role than as data referenced in his observations or footnotes. The count here was 163 anecdotes.
• anecdotes summarising members’ past experience; Hatsell adjusted his lens to give the narrowest possible attention to a procedural problem. The count here was 230 anecdotes. Supporting his data choices with references to the Journals of the House of Commons, Hatsell thereby assured his reader that Commons had taken action along the lines which these anecÂdotes suggested or otherwise exploited its experience in a fruitful manner.
• citation to and/or quotation of Standing Orders by which Commons had elevated either of the above actions to a higher status. The formula - explicitly setting forth the behaviour prescribed - was then attached to a second formula that ‘declared’ this behaviour to be ‘a Standing Order’, as I noted above. The count here was 14 anecdotes.
Hatsell subdivided searches for precedents along the following lines. The investigator might conclude that a search returned a sufficient number of examples of behaviour to justify treating data sampled as a parliamentary practice. Hatsell employed ‘custom’ on 23 occasions in Members/Speaker. In his Preface to that volume, Hatsell explained that the sampled data preÂsented ‘a repetition of similar cases...
from which useful observations might be drawn’.34 This approach might yield, as Hatsell must have recogÂnised, dry stuff. In his Privileges, for example, Hatsell arrived at the interval of his primary interest, 1603 to 1628, after completing two preliminary chapters and 129 pages. His anecdotes included:4 On the 14th of June, 1610, Dr. Steward’s servant is taken up for getting a woman with child; the Warrant was signed by four Justices before the Parliament, but executed now; it is referred to the Committee of Privileges, who report on the 16th, and it is determined he should have Privilege; there is some debate on the 20th, about paying the charges.35
Second, if only a very few examples of behaviour could be identified, they might be subjected to further discussion, taken one by one. Typically Hatsell
signalled the reader with ‘but see’ or a similar elocution. These cues indiÂcated that he had located precedents but the data presented inconsistent and therefore unreliable results.
Hatsell carried the taxonomy he worked out in Privileges into his next work, Members/Speaker. His data in that work runs up to the year of publication, that is, 1781. Members/Speaker is his most frequently cited work. Hatsell deployed ‘precedent’ 43 times and ‘practice’ 73 times (as a noun) with ‘practice’ as a verb used twice.36 Members/Speaker distinguished between procedure and practice. Hatsell employed the former term to indiÂcate that the House had formally committed itself to follow a given norm of behaviour in the future. The template for such a formulation follows the pattern ‘if-then-else’.37 The term ‘practice’ covers considerable ground. It may indicate nothing more than Commons’ official awareness that a pattern of patternable events had taken place and that an investigator might reliably locate evidence of such a pattern by sampling its official Journals. These two points are rethreaded in the final chapter, Chapter 7, this volume, which details a survey of prescriptive encounters.38