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 372 WRITS OF ASSISTANCE, 1558-1700 July In conclusion it is necessary to utter a warning : for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Parliament Pawns are practically complete and therefore statements based upon them can be regarded as accurate, but in the series that covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there are serious gaps ; these gaps render any general statements in regard to those centuries of considerably less value than would otherwise have been the case, and unless they are based on other evidence they must always be read with this qualification in mind, though of course, if the same procedure is followed for some time before and for some time after the period for which no Pawns survive, it is fairly safe to assume that it was followed during that period also. Moreover, these Pawns sometimes look as though they had been rather hurriedly prepared, and therefore little stress can be laid on occasional omissions of an official who was otherwise regularly summoned. 1 But though all this must be borne in mind, it still is, we think, possible to deduce from these Pawns some general rules in regard to the summons of assistants to the house of lords. 2 E. R. Adair. F. M. Greir Evans. 1 For example, no. 30 in bundle i is obviously unfinished, for the list of assistants breaks off in the middle of a name. See also above, p. 362, n. 1. 2 After this article had gone to press our attention was drawn to a small book, Sir John Pettus, The Constitution of the Parliaments in England (1680), which enume- rates, from the Pawn for the parliament of 1661-79, the various classes of persons who were summoned to the lords, and then discusses the reasons for their summons, ch. xiii (pp. 299-370) being devoted to the assistants. On the whole its statements agree with the conclusions that we have come to, and where we differ from them we feel that we do so on good grounds. On one matter, however, Pettus proves useful, for he points out that a lord keeper or a lord chancellor who was not a peer was summoned to the house of lords by a writ of assistance. This is confirmed by the Parliament Pawns : to the parliament of 1529 Sir Thomas More apparently received no writ of any description ; we have no evidence about Sir Thomas Audley in 1536 or Sir Nicholas Bacon from 1558 to 1579, but Sir Thomas Bromley was called to the parliament of 1586 by a writ of assistance precisely similar to that sent to the judges except for the fact that he was addressed as ' Predilecto ' instead of merely ' Dilecto '. Sir Christopher Hatton (for the parliament of 1588), Sir John Puckering (for that of 1593), and Sir Thomas Egerton (for those of 1597, 1601, and 1604) were all summoned by similar writs of assistance. For the parliament of 1624 Lord Keeper Williams received not only a writ of assistance but also a peer's writ as bishop of Lincoln, and this was repeated in 1625. In 1640 Sir John Finch was sent a writ of assistance for the Long Parliament, and in 1661 Hyde received both the writ of assistance and the peer's writ, a very curious case, though parallel to that of Williams in 1624-5. Arguing from Hyde's double summons, Pettus lays down the theory that if the lord chancellor or lord keeper 4 be a Baron ... he hath or may require a Baronial Writ besides this Assisting Writ ' (pp. 215-16); for this theory there seems no sufficient foundation. For the parliament of 1695 Sir John Somers received a writ of assistance, as did Sir Nathan Wright for those of February 1701 and 1707, but for the parliament of December 1701 and for that of 1702 he was sent a peer's writ, though he was of course not a peer : another example, probably, of the careless ways the petty bag office was falling into at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Apparently the last lord keeper or lord chancellor to receive this writ of assistance was Sir Simon Harcourt in 1710.