It is unnecessary to suppose that any general intermixture either of Roman or of British blood has affected this national identity. Doubtless there w… - William Stubbs

There are no constitutional revolutions, no violent reversals of legislation; custom is far more potent than law, and custom is modified infinitesimally every day. An alteration of law is often the mere registration of a custom, when men have recognised its altered character. The names of offices and assemblies are permanent, whilst their character has imperceptibly undergone essential change.

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.

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.