William Stubbs Quotes

We hear of the dead past and the living present: we are bid (and we do well to remember that it is an American poet who so adapts the words) to let the dead past bury its dead. But surely the past lives in the present, the process by which we became what we are is a part of our living being; if we are cut off from what we were, we only half live.

The nation, on whom and by whom he [Edward I] was working, had now become a consolidated people, aroused by the lessons of his father's reign to the intelligent appreciation of their own condition, and attached to their own laws and customs with a steady though not unreasoning affection, jealous of their privileges, their charters, their local customs, unwilling that the laws of England should be changed. The reign of Henry III, and the first twenty years of Edward, prove the increasing capacity for self-government, as well as the increased desire and understanding of the idea of self-government.

England, although less homogeneous in blood and character, is more so in uniform and progressive growth. The very diversity of the elements which are united within the isle of Britain serves to illustrate the strength and vitality of that one which for thirteen hundred years has maintained its position either unrivalled or in victorious supremacy. If its history is not the perfectly pure development of Germanic principles, it is the nearest existing approach to such a development. England gained its sense of unity centuries before Germany: it developed its genius for government under influences more purely indigenous: spared from the curse of the imperial system and the Mezentian union with Italy, and escaping thus the practical abeyance of legislation and judicature, it developed its own common law free from the absolutist tendencies of Roman jurisprudence; and it grew equably, harmoniously, not merely by virtue of local effort and personal privilege.

It is of the greatest importance that this study should become a recognized 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 realizes its identity, and have exercised on the wellbeing of the civilized world an influence not inferior certainly to that of the Classical nations.

Nor shall I be going so far as to anticipate what I shall have to lay before you by and by if I say now that I do trace in the old Teutonic system more germs of real liberty than I can in the Celtic system, so far as we know it, or in the Sclavonic, or in the Roman itself, with respect, be it said, to all those who find nothing in civilisation that is not Roman. I do think that in the free tenure of land, the fixed obligations of allodialism, the relation of the freeman to history as the impersonation of the race, the combination of the frankpledge, nay, I will add the compurgation and the ordeal and the wergild, is to be found a more likely basis of freedom than in the community of land, the close tie of patriarchal or family unity, the enormous and disproportionate estimate of blood nobility, and the clannish spirit that one finds in the Highland Scot and Irishman, or in the Pole or Hungarian.

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.

National character may be regarded as the result of national history, or national history as the development of national character; either way we cannot fail to recognise the closest connection between the two. Now, of all the evidence that can be taken, and that we shall attempt to take in this course, of the actual origin of each nation and of the persistence of the original character, by far the most clear and decisive are the customs of common law. These customs spring out of the first movements of the race towards social and civilised life; although not recorded in books, they are the most ancient portion of its lore, but they are not the earliest monuments of its literature.

In the preservation of the old forms,—the compurgation by the kindred of the accused, the responsibility for the wergild, the representation of the township in the court of the hundred, and that of the hundred in the court of the shire; the choice of witnesses; the delegation to chosen committees of the common judicial rights of the suitors of the folkmoot; the need of witness for the transfer of chattels, and the evidence of the hundred or shire to the title to lands; the report of the hundred and shire as to criminals and the duty of enforcing their production and punishment, and the countless diversity of customs in which the several communities went to work to fulfil the general injunctions of the law,—in these remained the seeds of future liberties; themselves perhaps the mere shakings of the olive tree, the scattered grains that royal and noble gleaners had scorned to gather, but destined for a new life after many days of burial. They were the humble discipline by which a downtrodden people were schooled to act together in small things, until the time came when they could act together for great ones.

It is unnecessary to suppose that any general intermixture either of Roman or of British blood has affected this national identity. Doubtless there were early intermarriages between the invaders and the natives, and probably in the west of England a large and continuous infusion of Celtic blood. But though it may have been locally or relatively great, it could only be in very small proportion to the whole. The language, the personal and local names, the character of the customs and common law of the English, are persistent during historic times. Every infusion of new blood since the first migration has been Teutonic; the Dane, the Norseman, and even the French-speaking Norman of the Conquest, serve to add intensity to the distinctness of the national identity.

The knowledge of our own history is our memory, and so the recorded history of a nation is the memory of the nation: woe to the country and people that forget it; an infant people has no history, as a child has a short and transient memory: the strong man and the strong nation feel the pulsation of the past in the life of the present: their memory is vital, long and strong. Neglect of historical study and knowledge is to a nation what the loss of memory is to a man—a sign of old age and decrepitude, or the effect of some terrible disease in an individual; it is in a nation a sign of lost independence in manners and ways of thought—a moral decrepitude waxed old and ready to vanish away; or perhaps in this case also the result of some terrible convulsion—a wave of revolution rolling over the land, overthrowing laws and institutions, and washing away old landmarks, as you may see in the France of this day.

The result of this comparison is to suggest the probability that the polity developed by the German races on British soil is the purest product of their primitive instinct. With the exception of the Gothic Bible of Ulfilas, the Anglo-Saxon remains are the earliest specimens of Germanic language as well as literature, and the development of modern English from the Anglo-Saxon is a fact of science as well as of history. The institutions of the Saxons of Germany long after the conquest of Britain were the most perfect exponent of the system which Tacitus saw and described in the Germania; and the polity of their kinsmen in England, though it may be not older in its monuments than the Lex Salica, is more entirely free from Roman influences. In England the common germs were developed and ripened with the smallest intermixture of foreign elements. Not only were all the successive invasions of Britain, which from the eighth to the eleventh century diversify the history of the island, conducted by nations of common extraction, but, with the exception of ecclesiastical influence, no foreign interference that was not German in origin was admitted at all. Language, law, custom and religion preserve their original conformation and colouring. The German element is the paternal element in our system, natural and political.

Among the first truths which the historical student, or indeed any scientific scholar, learns to recognise, this is perhaps the most important, that no theory or principle works in isolation.

England alone has a history in which ancient freedom has made its way through, and utilised all that is good in feudalism, widening from precedent to precedent into perfect political liberty.

Almost any student who has read the usual books, if he were asked to mark what was the foremost idea of the three centuries that intervene between the year 1500 and the year 1800, would reply that it was the idea of the balance of power. The balance of power, however it be defined, i.e. whatever the powers were between which it was necessary to maintain such equilibrium, that the weaker should not be crushed by the union of the stronger, is the principle which gives unity to the political plot of modern European history.

In a further stage the land becomes the sacramental tie of all public relations; the poor man depends on the rich, not as his chosen patron, but as the owner of the land that he cultivates, the lord of the court to which he does suit and service, the leader whom he is bound to follow to the host: the administration of law depends on the peace of the land rather than that of the people; the great landowner has his own peace and administers his own justice. The king still calls himself the king of the nation, but he has added to his old title new and cumbersome obligations towards all classes of his subjects, as lord and patron, supreme landowner, the representative of all original, and the fountain of all derived, political right.