Accessories and Abettors Act 1861
1861 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Act of Parliament 24 & 25 Vic c. 94
The Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 94) is a mainly repealed act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It consolidated statutory English criminal law related to accomplices, including many classes of encouragers (inciters). Mainly its offences were, according to the draftsman of the act, replacement enactments with little or no variation in phraseology. It is one of a group of acts sometimes referred to as the Criminal Law Consolidation Acts 1861. It was passed with the object of simplifying the law. It collected the relevant parts of Peel's Acts (and the equivalent Irish Acts) and others.
Provisions still in force
The act provides that an accessory to an indictable offence shall be treated in the same way as if he had committed the offence:
Section 8 of the act, as amended, reads:
Whosoever shall aid, abet, counsel, or procure the commission of any indictable offence, whether the same be an offence at common law or by virtue of any Act passed or to be passed, shall be liable to be tried, indicted, and punished as a principal offender.
Section 10 states that the act does not apply to Scotland.
“Accessories and Abettors Act 1861” enters the record as 1861 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Act of Parliament 24 & 25 Vic c. 94. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Accessories, Abettors and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Accessories and Abettors Act 1861” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Accessories, Abettors and United provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4672522. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1861.
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This entry incorporates text from “Accessories and Abettors Act 1861” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.