the house of lords as a court of appeal These English-language summaries or statements of cases for and against the appellant, which became mandatory from the late seventeenth century ownwards and now survive in considerable numbers, were an obvious concession to the fact that the vast majority of peers had no legal qualifications or training, and that the House of Lords did not function as an ordinary law court. Another sign of its amateur status in that regard was the lack of a dedicated bureaucratic apparatus charged with recording the progress of appeals from the time they were first presented by way of petition; this task was simply added to the duties of the clerks who kept the manuscript record of daily proceedings, in which lists of attendees, reports from committees, appeals cases, bills, and interactions with the lower house are promiscuously jumbled up together in what was later printed as the Journals of the House of Lords. Other surviving records in the parliamentary archives help to illuminate the judicial business of the Lords, but as yet these have been only partially explored by historians.35 We have patchy surviving records of the committees which filtered petitions, deciding whether they should be given a full hearing as requested or simply refused. Similarly, the arguments of counsel for and against appellants only began to be systematically reported in printed form from the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century. As already mentioned, no formal record was kept of the basis on which appeals were decided, the judgments of the House, before the nineteenth century. Professor Cornish has recently observed that “[s]o long as the House of Lords acted as an ultimate authority in the settlement of disputes by voting rather than by articulating reasons for judgment, it was difficult to treat its decisions as settling legal rules in a general sense.”36 In this and other respects, the Lords’ position atop imperial Britain’s legal hier35 See Bond, Maurice 1971 pp. 106-23. This paper was completed before I had the benefit of consulting Dr Philip Loft’s recent PhD thesis, the most thorough analytical study to date based on this material. 36 Cornish, William et. al. 2010 p. 48. 190 Conclusion
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