Parliamentary Texts

Texts about Parliamentary proceedings, or generated by Parliament in the course of these proceedings, are not only a source for the history of politics and of Parliament as an institution but are invaluable for all historians. Parliamentary papers contain a huge amount of evidence about social, economic, local and cultural history, and much of this has been scarcely tapped.  

The History of Parliament has been working with a number of bodies to promote the digitisation of Parliamentary texts, and effective co-ordination among them.  They include:

• British History Online: this joint project of the History of Parliament and the Institute of Historical Research has been principally funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  It now includes a large number of volumes of the Journals of the House of Lords and the House of Commons and parliamentary diaries from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as much other material relating to British history.
  
  
• The BOPCRIS 18th Century parliamentary publications project(based at the University of Southampton) provides the UK academic community with access to 1400 volumes of core 18th century official Parliamentary publications that include Parliamentary Papers, Bills, registers and Journals. Nearly 1 million pages are available as searchable texts from complete runs of publications generated by the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
  
  
• Oxford Digital Library: among the ODL’s projects, this has digitised all 36 volumes of Cobbett's Parliamentary History, (a major source for eighteenth century historians), providing online access to it initially as a stand alone database.
  
  
• Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England (PROME): The rolls of parliament were the official records of the meetings of the English parliament from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) until the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509). An electronic edition of the rolls, which amount in total to over four million words, has been produced by a team of scholars headed by Professor Chris Given-Wilson at the University of St Andrews. The principal funding for the project, which began in 1997 and was completed in 2004, was provided by the trustees of the Leverhulme Trust. The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) provided supplementary funding and facilities for research staff. The History of Parliament contributed towards the cost of publication.
  
  
• Stormont papers This website offers access to the Parliamentary Debates of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament on March 28 1972.
  
  
• The Hansard Digitisation Project: Led by the Directorate of Information Services of the House of Commons and the Library of the House of Lords, provides access to digitised text of Hansard from 1803 to 2004.