xxxii Introduction
a study of the long labour and suffering by which it has
been wrought.
The field of general English history is divided into the
following main divisions1:
a. Britain before the Roman occupation began, namely,
before 55 B.C. This is practically prehistoric Britain.
6. Roman Britain, 55 B.c.-~4O7 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 governmental institu-
tions were in the making, 1066-1485.
e. The modern period, when through greater political
self-consciousness these institutions were tested and de-
veloped, and in recent times greatly modified and ex-
tended.
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 came. Our institutional story has
its beginning in the third division, the Anglo-Saxon period.
It is exceedingly important to note, however, that it had
its beginning also on the continent. Through the Norman
Conquest its roots run back through Norman history to
France and the Prankish Empire, and draw from the
soil of the whole continental development since the fall
of Rome, and from Rome itself. Thus in its fullest sense
English constitutional history did not begin until the
Norman Conquest, because, until that time, there were
not present in England all the materials out of which the
constitution was to grow. There were, then, two great
introductory lines of development, two tap roots from
which the later constitution drew, the one Anglo-Saxon
and the other Norman, the one largely insular, the other
continental.2 The coming together of these through the
1 Strictly speaking, of course, there was no English history in the island
of Britain until the coming of the Anglo-Saxons.
2 But It should be noted here, and the point will be illustrated in the
account which follows, that Anglo-Saxon institutions owed much to con-