History 101

I know: I’ve got a theme going here. In spite of my new found interest in the Civil War, I do not intend to write a kind of 1865 and All That . I just wanted to call attention to a splendid web site I found en route to looking up something else. I came across the Minutes of the House of Lords. I was in a time machine, beamed back to April 15, 1626. I am often more interested in the “how” rather than the “what”, so I was picturing some scribe with a tired wrist hastily trying to capture the goings on as best he could in those pre-Gregg and Pitman days. He lists all the Lords Spiritual and Temporal present in the chamber that day and could have saved himself some ink if he had prefaced the list with “present” rather than the convoluted Latin phrase he used. By the time he got to the list of Lords playing hooky he had learned his lesson and reverted to English.

What was happening that day? A couple of agenda items are mentioned by title only, then it gets a little more interesting. The Apparel Bill, “an Act concerning apparel” was given its third reading, discussed and passed. Next we move on to Irregularities among the Clergy. That got your attention. It too had its sub-heading, “an Act to restrain and prevent some Disorders that are, or may be, in Ministers of God’s Word”. Note the “maybe.” Got to hand it to the British, none of this guilty until proven innocent. But what the problem was, or how it was resolved, remains a mystery. A sub-committee was appointed and they were scheduled to meet six days later in the Painted Chamber.

This site merits further exploration. So much for the days of searching out primary sources, translating them and so on. I was reflecting on the scope of the Internet and musing, "Soon they’ll have the Magna Carta on-line.” Then I checked, and what do you know. . .