Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION I THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST AND ITS PROBLEMS r study the constitutional history of England means to study the origin and growth of those institutions which have to do with the government of the English people. It is true that nearly everything in a people's life has at least an indirect bearing upon the making of its government; but in the study of this subject it is a practical necessity to fix the attention especially upon certain phases of the people's activity. Probably no two scholars would agree as to just where the domain of constitutional history ends and that of such subjects as legal or economic history or sociology begins. Such agreement is neither possible nor necessary; there will always be debatable ground, always some overlapping. But one cannot go far upon the wrong road, if he keep his eye fixed constantly upon the sole purpose of his study—an understanding of how the present English government has come to be what it is. The broad, fundamental divisions of English history are the following': 1 Strictly speaking, of course, there was no English history in the island of Britain until the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, a. Britain before the Roman occupation began, namely, before 55 B. c. This is practically prehistoric Britain. b. Roman Britain, 55 B. c.-oj A. D. c. England from the Anglo-Saxon conquest to the Norman Conquest, 449-1066. d. England from the Norman Conquest to the end of the middle ages, the period when the English constitution was in the making, 1066-1485. e. The modern period, when the constitution was tested and developed. Constitutional history has nothing to do with the first division, and very little to do with the second, from which latter period little or nothing that is found in the later English government c...