The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Tought in the Seventeenth Century

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The ancient constitution and the feudal law are the phrases - almost the slogans - of two opposed interpretations by 17th-century Englishmen of their own medieval history.

The most eloquent spokesman for the "ancient constitution" was Sir Edward Coke, who regarded the common law and the status of Parliament as having immemorial origins outside a monarch's power. Set against this was the view, stemming from Sir Henry Spelman, that the institutions and concepts of feudalism which had come in with the Norman Conquest were specific developments, and that the common law thus could not be regarded as an unchanging standard by which to measure present institutions.

The Englishman's mystical reverence for the common law was partly due to his ignorance of comparative law; his fundamental limitation in this age was his having had to contemplate the national past through one system of law alone. Without an understanding of Roman and feudal law, he was badly hampered in dealing with legal and political problems.

Professor Pocock's subject is how the 17th century looked at its own past. Its historiography was hardly a detached discipline: it was actively committed to finding precedents for or against policies of its own day, and the followers of Spelman were no more objective than their opponents, turning Spelman's ideas to the service of the Glorious Revolution.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Professor Pocock writes, one of the most important modes of studying the past was the study of the law ... the historical outlook which arose in each nation was in part the products of its law, and therefore, in turn of its history.

In clarifying the relation of the historical outlook of 17th-century England to the study of law, and pointing out its political implications, Pocock shows how history's significance as a discipline came to be understood, and how the ground was laid for a more philosophical approach in the 18th century. The history of historiography is not only the history of the rise and perfection of a particular manner of thought ... it is the history of all the ways in which men have felt committed to their past.