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By Root 1077 0

to reduce the number of these committees took place in January 1641, resulting in a list of sixteen committees alongside the five Grand Committees. But the tendency was to sclerosis. The Houses usually sat for three hours each day, from 9 a.m. to noon, occasionally starting earlier, and afternoon sessions were relatively rare. In November and December 1640 only a little more than one in twenty sittings were in the afternoon. Even in November of the following year, a month of intense crisis, only one quarter of sittings were in the afternoon. In the absence of effective management, business tended to drift. Parliaments were not designed as executive bodies, but as occasions where the ills of the kingdom were resolved through a union of monarch and people. As a result, grievances and disputes were brought before the Houses in an apparently random manner and important discussion was hived off to the committees. The intention was that committees would produce legislation that would be passed effectively, but in these months the impression is more of drift than of efficiency.20

On top of this flood of petitions came numerous private legal suits to the House of Lords. During the 1620s the House of Lords revived its judicial function, responding to massive demand from the increasingly litigious population. The lower courts were overcrowded, plagued with complex and overlapping jurisdictions, procedural irregularities and peculiarities, and appeal from some of the busiest courts was not possible. Measures of reform in Parliament had been considered, but not produced, and so the Lords became an attractive alternative forum. This development was at first slow – there was a rising trend through the 1620s, but only about 200 petitions in all during that decade. The first three months of the 1640 session brought 200 more. In addition to the kinds of suit brought in the 1620s, the Lords was now inundated with petitions from people who claimed to have fallen foul of what they said was the abuse of the legal system by crown officials during the 1630s. The Lords was flooded with petitions relating to the imposition of Laudian policies and the enforcement of unpopular fiscal expedients, and, from the summer of 1641, another round of litigation was opened up when Parliament abolished some of the courts that had enforced these measures. Officials of those courts were forced to seek protection from prosecution for their actions while the courts had been in existence, and those who would have used those courts in the past were forced to go to the Lords instead. By the middle of 1641 the Lords had received some 500 petitions and by the end of the year the figure had reached 650.21

Another reason for slow progress was the close relationship between the fate of reform and redress in England and the negotiations for a Scottish treaty. The Covenanters had agreed eight negotiating points, each of which was to be settled in turn. Nothing was to be formally agreed until all eight had been dealt with, and then the whole package was to be ratified by the English parliament once everything had been agreed. In the later stages of the negotiation this raised the stakes, since earlier agreements could come unstuck in the light of later discussions, and each party was responding throughout to external circumstances in the hope of securing more of their aims. The eighth negotiating point included the demand that the religious practices of the two kingdoms would be harmonized around a single confession of faith, something which was in practical terms essential to the security of the Scottish settlement. The first seven points were agreed by February, leading to fears among English parliamentarians that they might be abandoned by their Covenanting friends. Fortunately, and perhaps not entirely to the regret of the Covenanters and their English friends, discussion of the vague eighth point dragged on until June. Business in the Long Parliament was tied to these negotiations formally but also because it was Parliament which paid the costs of the Scottish army