Definition
A Place Bill was a legislative measure in English constitutional history designed to limit the influence of the Crown over Parliament by restricting or excluding from the House of Commons any person who held a government office or pension granted at the pleasure of the Crown. The term derives from the use of "place" in its historical sense of a salaried government position or sinecure — a "placeman" being one who owed his appointment, and therefore his loyalty, to royal or ministerial patronage rather than to his constituents.
The paradigm example is the provision enacted in the Act of Settlement and related legislation, culminating in Stat. 6 Anne c. 7 (1707), which excluded from the House of Commons any person holding an office created after October 25, 1705, or receiving a Crown pension during pleasure. Crucially, the statute also required any sitting member who accepted a pre-existing government office to vacate his seat and stand for re-election — a mechanism intended to force public accountability when a parliamentarian took up Crown employment.
Place Bills were a recurring feature of seventeenth and eighteenth century English political reform efforts. Some passed, some failed, and their scope varied widely: some targeted all officeholders, others exempted military officers, judges, or specific categories of civil servants.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Place" as a noun means a particular location or position; as a verb, to put something somewhere.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Place" includes "office; employment; position of trust or profit" — as in, "he lost his place at court."
The legal and political meaning of Place Bill is entirely unreachable from the modern common meaning of "place." A researcher encountering the term for the first time might reasonably assume it concerns real property, zoning, or geographic jurisdiction. The key is the archaic sense of "place" as a government sinecure or appointment — a meaning that was standard in eighteenth-century political writing but has since fallen out of common usage entirely.
Common Confusion
Place Bills are sometimes loosely conflated with broader parliamentary disqualification measures or with conflict-of-interest statutes. The distinction matters: disqualification rules address who is categorically ineligible to stand for Parliament (e.g., felons, aliens, judges); Place Bills addressed the specific problem of executive patronage corrupting the legislature by rewarding sitting members with Crown appointments. The two concerns overlap but are not the same. Additionally, the re-election requirement in 6 Anne c. 7 is sometimes misread as a disqualification; it was not — it was a transparency mechanism that allowed constituents to pass judgment on a member who had accepted Crown employment.
Why It Matters in Research
Place Bills are primarily of interest to researchers working in English constitutional history, the history of parliamentary reform, and the separation of powers doctrine. Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the corpus of Place Bills is not a single statute but a series of legislative attempts spanning roughly 1675 to the mid-eighteenth century. Researchers must distinguish between bills that failed (numerous) and those that passed and became operative law. Rapalje & Lawrence identify 6 Anne c. 7 as the operative measure, but earlier failed Place Bills from the Restoration and early eighteenth century are equally significant as evidence of constitutional anxiety about Crown influence.
Second, the re-election requirement created under 6 Anne c. 7 survived in modified form well into the nineteenth century and was not fully abolished until the Re-election of Ministers Acts of 1919 and 1926. A researcher tracing the rule through nineteenth-century sources will find it still operative but increasingly anachronistic.
Third, American constitutional framers were familiar with the Place Bill tradition. The Ineligibility and Incompatibility Clauses of Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution reflect direct engagement with the English Place Bill debate. Researchers connecting founding-era constitutional design to English precedent will find Place Bills a necessary stop.
Fourth, the term appears in historical legal dictionaries almost exclusively in its English constitutional context. Do not expect to find it in American state law sources or post-nineteenth century practice guides.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is unusually compressed — the definition is embedded within a longer passage and is interrupted by what appears to be a typographical artifact (the intrusion of a separate entry on "Pit of Water" mid-sentence). Reading through the corruption, the substance is clear: the entry identifies the operative statute as 6 Anne c. 7 and captures the two key operative rules — exclusion of holders of offices created after October 1705, and the pension disqualification. The entry does not, however, address the re-election requirement for holders of pre-existing offices, which was arguably the more practically significant provision. It also makes no mention of the broader political history of failed Place Bills preceding the 1707 act. Researchers relying solely on Rapalje & Lawrence will have the statutory citation but an incomplete picture of the doctrine's scope and significance.
No other source dictionaries in the current corpus contain a Place Bill entry. The term is sufficiently obscure in American legal practice that it is absent from most nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Place Bills are a matter of English constitutional law and parliamentary history. The concept has no direct counterpart in American statutory law, though its influence is visible in the federal Ineligibility and Incompatibility Clauses. Researchers working in Commonwealth jurisdictions may find related disqualification provisions in Canadian or Australian parliamentary law, but the specific term "Place Bill" is not operative in those systems.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses Place Bills or English parliamentary history. The immigration and military encyclopedia entries returned as potential matches are not relevant to this term.