Linen, Salmon and Turnpikes
The session’s final day, 12 May, brought an extraordinary cluster of enactments. There were measures to regulate grand-jury presentments, parish watches and highways; to clarify the supply of corn and flour to Dublin; to control customs and excise fraud; and to restrain harsh or unjust exactions by gaolers from prisoners. One act freed people acquitted of indictable offences from the fees that might otherwise have kept them in prison. Such a provision should not be mistaken for a modern doctrine of equal justice, but it did acknowledge a real abuse of the fee-based penal system.