ABSTRACT
WHEREAS the election or appointment of assemblies, purporting to represent the people, or any description or number of the people of this realm, under pretence of preparing or presenting petitions, complaints, remonstrances, and declarations, and other addresses to the King, or to both or either houses of parliament, for alteration of matters established by law, or redress of alleged grievances in church and state, may be made use of to serve the ends of factious and seditious persons, to the violation of the public peace, and the great and manifest encouragement of riot, tumult, and disorder, be it declared and enacted by the King’s most excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons in parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, That all assemblies, committees, or other bodies of persons elected, or in any other manner constituted or appointed to represent, or assuming or exercising a right or authority to represent the people of this realm, or any number or description of the people of the same, or the people of any province, county, city, town, or other district within the same, under pretence of petitioning for, or in any other manner procuring an alteration of matters established by law in church or state, save and except the knights, citizens, and burgesses elected to serve in the parliament thereof, and save and except the houses of convocation / duly summoned by the King’s writ, are unlawful assemblies; and it shall and may be lawful for any mayor, sheriff, justice of the peace, or other peace officer, and they are hereby respectively authorised and required, within his and their respective jurisdictions, to disperse all such unlawful assemblies, and if resisted to enter into the same, and to apprehend all persons offending in that behalf.
