SELECT CHARTERS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF ENGLISH CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE REIGN OF EDWARD THE FIRST ARRANGED AND EDITED BY WILLIAM STUBBS D.D., HON. LL.D., D.C.L.; BISHOP OF OXFORD EIGHTH EDITION OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M. DCCCCV PREFACE. THIS book is intended to be primarily a treasury of reference; an easily handled repertory of the Origines of English Constitutional History; and, secondarily, a manual for teachers and scholars. With a view to the first purpose, I have tried to collect in it every constitutional document of importance during the period that it covers. With a view to the second, I have attempted by way of illustration to point out the bearings of the several documents on one another and on the national polity; supplying in the Introductory Sketch a string of connexion and some sort of continuous theory of the development of the system. The study of Constitutional History is essentially a tracing of causes and consequences; the examination of a distinct growth from a well-defined germ to full maturity: a growth, the particular direction and shaping of which are due to a diversity of causes, but whose life and developing power lies deep in the very nature of the people. It is not then the collection of a multitude of facts and views, but the piecing of the links of a perfect chain. And in this comparatively complete and intelligible connexion of cause and consequence, it has a certain charm that makes up for the default of everything depending on the play of personal character, the unlooked-for and the picturesque. It is of the greatest importance that this study should become a recognised part of a regular English education. No knowledge of English history can be really sound without it: it is not creditable to us as an educated people that while our students are well acquainted with the state machinery of Athens and Rome, they should be ignorant of the corresponding institutions of our own forefathers: institutions that possess a living interest for every nation that realises its identity, and have exercised on the wellbeing of the civilised world an influence not inferior certainly to that of the Classical nations. I have pointed out in the introductory chapter my reasons for not going further than the reign of Edward I. The later history is rather a history of politics than of polity, and has to be illustrated by a very different sort of documents. A more consistent supplement or companion to this volume would be a comparative assortment of corresponding Origines of the other constitutions of Europe. This is a branch of study without which the student cannot fully realise either the peculiar characteristics of his own national polity, or the deep and wide basis which it has in common with those of the modern nations of the Continent. To have furnished however in this volume, even the bare texts of the chief constitutional monuments of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia, would have obliged me to alter the plan altogether; nor could the comparative Constitutional History of Europe be illustrated at all thoroughly on the same scale. For the present, I commend this little book to the good offices of teachers, and to the tender mercies of pupils, in the firm conviction that the subject it illustrates is of the first educational importance, and in the hope that the plan and line of study which it suggests will be found well calculated to draw out the mind, and to extend the area of sound teaching. OXFORD, October 7, 1870. In the Second Edition a few additions have been made to the Excerpts, and five or six documents of interest have been added, amongst which the Habeas Corpus Act and the Act of Settlement are the most important. An interesting charter of Canute will be found inserted at p. 75. OXFORD, January 14, 1874. PREFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION THE demand for a new edition of this book justifies me, I trust, in believing that it has been found useful to students of English Constitutional History, and in hoping that it will continue to be so. In preparing it for the press, I have thought it well to make some small modifications in the 'terminology' of the earlier part, and to get rid of a few expressions which belong more properly to French and German History. Some of these, useful enough in a comparative survey, are not directly appropriate to English customs or institutions, which, although nearly if not quite identical with those of the Continent, have never, in contemporary documents, borne the same designations. The use of these terms, accordingly, leads occasionally to the misconceived notion, that customs which are either matter of common primitive origin, or of independent analogous development from common origin, are borrowed or derived in their matured form by one national system from another. This risk is considerable in the study of the commonly called feudal institutions and of many theories on the history of landownership. In relation to this point, I will add a word of caution, necessary in these days, although familiar to antiquaries and students of continuities. The first occurrence of the mention of particular terms, or forms of institutions, is treated by diversely constituted minds and different schools, in ways diametrically opposed. To one it is an evidence of novelty or innovation, to the other a presumption, strong enough to be a proof, of a previous |