The Statutes of the Realm
The official edition of the Acts of the English Parliament. Volume 3 prints, in their original spelling, the Acts of 1533–1534 by which Henry VIII’s Parliament ended the pope’s jurisdiction in England and made the king head of the English church.
Read the text at archive.org ↗Acts of the English Parliament still wholly or partly in force (legislation.gov.uk) ↗The Acts of Uniformity of 1549 and 1552 in modern spelling (Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History, 1896) ↗
The edition was made from the rolls of Parliament and gives each statute in full under its regnal year and chapter number: the Act in Restraint of Appeals is 24 Henry VIII chapter 12, the Act of Supremacy 26 Henry VIII chapter 1. The short titles and years by which some of these Acts are now known were given to them in the twentieth century.
These are the laws themselves and the best evidence of what was enacted and in what words. Their preambles are another matter. They give the Crown’s account of history and of its own motives, as when the Act in Restraint of Appeals says that old chronicles show England to be an empire. A preamble shows what the government wished to have believed; it is not independent evidence that the thing was so.
Cited in
- 1534, firm date
- 1549 to 1552, firm date