Forgery Act 1861
Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Forgery Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 98) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it then was). It consolidated provisions related to forgery from a number of earlier statutes into a single Act. For the most part these provisions were, according to the draftsman of the act, incorporated with little or no variation in their 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 is essentially a revised version of an earlier consolidation act, the Forgery Act 1830 (11 Geo. 4 & 1 Will. 4 c.66) (and the equivalent Irish act), incorporating subsequent statutes.
Most of it was repealed by the Forgery Act 1913, and today forgery is mostly covered by the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 and the Identity Documents Act 2010. However three offences under the 1861 act remain in force today (in sections 34, 36 and 37). These deal with forgery of registers of births, marriages and deaths, and with impersonation of a surety.
Certain kinds of forgery used to be high treason until this act downgraded them to felonies.
The act does not apply to Scotland.
01Subsequent developments
The whole act, except sections 34, 36, 37 and 55, was repealed for England and Wales and Northern Ireland by section 30 of, and part I of the schedule to, the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which came into force on 27 October 1981.
The whole act was repealed for the Republic of Ireland by section 3(1) of, and schedule 1 to, the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001, which came into force on 1 August 2002.
Sources and credits
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- Coat of arms of the United Kingdom (1837).svg by Sodacan (ed. Safes007), CC BY-SA 4.0
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