Reading edition

How privileges can be counted

Before modern patent and copyright law, an exclusive right in a new technique or a book was not a right set by statute but a privilege granted case by case by a ruler, a senate or a parliament. The grants left documents, and nineteenth-century archivists bound them into lists. This site counts those lists grant by grant.

Each list counts in its own unit: Woodcroft numbers patents, Hulme counts grants, the Stationers' Register records entries and Fulin collects documents. Tables that set jurisdictions side by side therefore carry the unit with every figure.

Before and after 1624

The Statute of Monopolies limited patents for new inventions to 14 years or less. In Woodcroft's list the grants of 1617–1623 mostly state 21 years, and almost all grants after 1625 state 14 years or less. Comparing seven years on either side, the yearly number of grants is about the same; it rises in the 1630s.

Who received them

Many Elizabethan grants went to foreign craftsmen: Hulme counts 21 of 55 as grants to aliens. In the nineteenth century 'communication' entries, inventions communicated from abroad and taken out by an agent, become more frequent. About one Dutch privilege document of 1581–1621 in five names a grantee of known foreign origin.

Printing

The register of the London Stationers' Company records some ten thousand permissions to publish in 1557–1640. Entrance became compulsory only in 1637, so entries are not a count of books printed. Entries marked as shared or reassigned grow from the 1590s. In Venice printing privileges bunch in the 1490s, and roughly three in ten of them went to authors.

Using these numbers

Every figure is counted from a surviving list. Privileges granted outside these lists, or whose record is lost, are not in them. Please read the reliability card and the caveats that come with each metric.