1921 WRITS OF ASSISTANCE, 1558-1700 357 of the privy council ever summoned, as Clarendon suggests, along with the legal advisers of the Crown to ' be present with us and the rest of our council to treat and give your advice upon the affairs aforesaid ' ? * Fortunately there is in the Public Record Office a series of documents which should contain the information necessary to settle the matter once and for all. These are the so-called Parliament Pawns 2 or enrolments, first, of the writs to the spiritual and lay peers, secondly, of the writs of assistance to the judges and others, and, thirdly, of the writs to the sheriffs of the various counties calling upon them to return knights and burgesses to the house of commons ; in each case the writ is given and is followed by a list of the persons to whom it was sent. That these Pawns are enrolments of the writs of summons to parliament there seems little doubt, for they are exactly parallel to the enrolments of the writs on the back of the Close Rolls, which they superseded. 3 But during the Protectorate their nature appears to have been misunderstood. Formerly they had been written in Latin ; 4 for the two Protectorate parliaments for which Pawns have been preserved, 5 they are in English, and in translating the usual formula, ' Consimilia brevia diriguntur', &c, the Protectorate official has rendered it 'Let the like Writts be directed ', and has used the Pawn as a warrant to the clerks of the petty bag to issue the writs, and, that there may be no mistake, he has addressed it at the foot ' To John Thompson Esq. one of the Clerks of the pettibagg 6 1 This phrase, which is the one now used (* nobiscum ac cum ceteris de consilio nostro ' was the Latin form in use in the seventeenth century), is the essential charac- teristic of the writ of assistance ; the writ to the peers summons them ' on their faith and allegiance ' to be present ' with us and with the aforesaid prelates, peers and great men' ('nobiscum ac cum prelatis, magnatibus et proceribus praedictis '). The form of the writ of assistance does not really imply any subordination in the position of those whom it summoned ; historically the judges and others were there because they were members of the king's council, which really formed the nucleus of the house of lords. 2 The exact description is Petty Bag, Parliament Pawns. 3 Scargill-Bird, Guide to the Public Records, p. 75. He also says that these Pawns are transcribed in full in Dugdale, Summons to Parliament, but this is not the case ; after the parliament of 1529 Dugdale always omits the writ of assistance and the names of those who were summoned by it.
- This practice was resumed in 1660 and continued until well into the eighteenth
century. 5 There is one Pawn for the lords and assistants who were summoned to meet in 1658, and there are three Pawns for the parliament of 1659 — one for the lords, one for the commons from England and Wales, and one for those from Scotland and Ireland ; there is also a Pawn for the convention of 1660. There are no others for the Common- wealth and Protectorate. These five Pawns are at present placed unnumbered at the bottom of bundle i, and though this position probably arises from the lawyers' refusal to recognize the Cromwellian parliaments, yet, in a way, it is symbolic, for these Pawns are really quite distinct from the rest of the series and will be considered in greater detail below. 6 Pawn for the parliament of 1659.
