course of English constitutional changes on a foreign observer of exceptionally good intelligence and information. M. Boutmy has brought to his work not only knowledge of our language, but a careful study of the best authorities, and a mind singularly free from prejudice. He is not an appointed champion of either Romance or Teutonic origins, and he can admit that the main work of the French Revolution had already been done in England a century earlier. It is good for us to know what are the conditions that to a Frenchman of M. Boutmy's stamp appear to have been the really decisive ones in our history, and which features have struck him as most characteristic.

English readers, it is true, will not be ready to allow that even the fairest and acutest outside view can be faultless in the sense of proportion and local atmosphere. If home-bred institutions have their anomalies and abuses, they have also their "temperaments," as the publicists say, which are not to be found in books. We shall read M. Boutmy with our individual reservations and supplements, with doubts and may be with differences on this and that point. But the differences will be profitable. A book like M. Boutmy's is in many ways good for information; its farther and best purpose is to set the reader thinking.

F. P.

PREFACE

VARIOUS publications have lately done much to clear up the subject of the origin and early development of political institutions in England. The light thrown by Guizot on one division of the subject has not indeed grown dim. Recent writers have not observed more accurately than did the great historian, but their observations have gone further and deeper, a broader view of the whole has been obtained, and a more complete mastery of detail. My aim is to point out to the French reader the chief conclusions which contemporary research has either thrown into higher relief or confirmed by fresh documentary evidence.

Modern political England was formed in its essential elements during the period which embraces the eleventh and fourteenth centuries; the character and mutual relations of those elements took their fixed and final shape under the Tudors. Those five hundred years witnessed, so to speak, the unbroken development of a vigorous frame towards that solidity

of structure which marks the attainment of manhood. A comparison between the various phases of this first process of evolution and the corresponding stages of the process in France suggests more than one useful lesson.

The authors whose researches have given a new aspect to this period of history and to those events which led up to it have gone direct to the authorities, and have with their own hands turned over the pages of a multitude of original texts. Nothing can make up for the want of this. The political theorist, who merely draws from the stream, should be slow to dissent from, and cautious in objecting to, the conclusions of those writers who have gone to the fountain head. Still, professed students have, like other men, their passions and their prejudices, political or national as the case may be: they show too a special inclination to forsake the broad highway of history which their predecessors trod, for some narrow bypath which they have opened out for themselves and which they explored in the first instance alone or nearly alone. Lookers on who have no such personal reasons for leaving the beaten track do not always find in mere general reasons a sufficient justification for doing so. Freeman, for instance, delights in tracing out the beginnings of a quasi-republican monarchy, his political ideal, in the remotest possible past of English

history.1 Gneist is inclined to refer all that he considers valuable to a Germanic origin. Augustin Thierry has made the separation between conqueror and conquered more deep and lasting than it really was, and has consequently overestimated the influence of the Norman element. Freeman and Gneist go to the opposite extreme; they agree in teaching that the English nation, as it exists now, is nothing but the Anglo-Saxon nation restored to its former inheritance; they hold that we can discern in the period preceding the Norman Conquest, not only the vague beginnings but the more or less definite features of that free government of which we are able to trace the development during a period which is, in a fuller sense, historical, and that the outlines of those features, rude indeed and few, but clear and well marked can even be recognized in the constitution of the old Germanic. communities.

Distant surveys like these, with their ever-widening horizons, flatter the imagination, and are by no means to be treated with contempt. We may glean much political information by the study of society at a very early period, if our object is merely to trace general features of manners and disposition, and the first clearly marked lines which show the direction of the national character. Such investigations lead, on the other hand,

1 Freeman, Growth of the English Constitution, ch. iii.

to deplorable mistakes when our avowed object is to discover in the remote past the details of well-defined institutions, to mark their systematic operation, and to prove how subsequent institutions have sprung from them by a process of elimination, addition, or elaboration.1 Stubbs shows very clearly that the Germanic tribes described by Cæsar and 150 years later by Tacitus, had not as yet emerged from the inorganic stage, and that no conclusions can be drawn from political formations which, ill-defined and perpetually shifting, presented only some passing phase to the notice of either of those excellent observers.2 Historical phenomena like these are merely floating clouds, which may resemble mountains in outline but must not be mistaken for them. Stubbs admits that the results of research in this direction are very "indistinct," that even ninth century testimony upon the subject of the Saxons in the land of their origin is vague and obscure, and that as to the Angles, the Danes, or the Normans at the time of their invasion, "we know nothing." His professions of ignorance or uncertainty are less explicit on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, although he owns that "there is no subject on which we have less knowledge, than on the administration of public revenues before the Conquest." Certain institutions there are indeed 1 See Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, pp. 12 to 18. 2 Stubbs, i., c. ii., ibid. c. iii. c. vi.