[T]he whole of the constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta. - William Stubbs

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.

Without some knowledge of Constitutional History it is absolutely impossible to do justice to the characters and positions of the actors in the great drama; absolutely impossible to understand the origin of parties, the development of principles, the growth of nations in spite of parties and in defiance of principles. It alone can teach why it is that in politics good men do not always think alike, that the worst cause has often been illustrated with the most heroic virtue, and that the world owes some of its greatest debts to men from whose very memory it recoils.

The general tendency of the process may be described as a movement from the personal to the territorial organisation; from a state of things in which personal freedom and political right were the leading ideas, to one in which personal freedom and political right had become so much bound up with the relations created by the possession of land, as to be actually subservient to it: the Angel-cynn of Alfred becomes the Engla-lande of Canute.