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

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.

But although English society was divided by sharp lines, and broad intervals, it was not a system of caste either in the stricter or in the looser sense. It had much elasticity in practice, and the boundaries between the ranks were passable.

The Great Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity: the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates, and lawyers have been labouring for a century. There is not a word in it that recalls the distinctions of race and blood, or that maintains the differences of English and Norman law. It is in one view the summing up of a period of national life, in another the starting-point of a new, not less eventful, period than that which it closes.