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 mo… - William Stubbs

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.

The design, as interpreted by the result, was the creation of a national parliament, composed of the three estates, organised on the principle of concentrating local agency and machinery in such a manner as to produce unity of national action, and thus to strengthen the hand of the king, who personified the nation.
This design was perfected in 1295. It was not the result of compulsion, but the consummation of a growing policy. Edward did not call his parliament, as Philip the Fair called the States General, on the spur of a momentary necessity, or as a new machinery invented for the occasion and to be thrown aside when the occasion was over, but as a perfected organisation, the growth of which he had for twenty years been doing his best to guide. Granted that he had in view the strengthening of the royal power, it was the royal power in and through the united nation, not as against it, that he designed to strengthen.

It is that the essence of the historical study is in the working out the continuity of the subject, while the essence of the legal study is in the reducing of it all to certain theoretic principles.