INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT
ROWING out of Anglo-Saxon and Norman material,
material brought together by the shock of conquest,
English governmental institutions entered upon their
great period of growth with the twelfth century. In the
last four centuries of the middle ages there were sketched
out most of the main features of England's judicial, ad-
ministrative, and legislative systems.1 There followed
a time of developing and testing, of growing political self-
consciousness, of the entry of political idealism into men's
purposes. But the middle ages was the time par excel-
knee of structural growth in English government. It was
the time also when whatever degree of self-government we
have attained in modern times was largely made possible
through the enforced participation in government work
and responsibility of practically the whole English people.
It is needless to insist on the well-known fact that in
England there have never been sharp distinctions among
the judicial, executive, and legislative departments, surely
not in the immature middle ages. Yet no government
mature enough or important enough to study fails to make
some distinctions in practice along just those lines. How-
ever, for a period when everything overlapped and almost
none of our modern categories were in the minds of the
people, the writer is conscious all the time of the artifi-
1 The great institution whose making belongs almost wholly to modem
times is the cabinet system of government, the principle of ministerial
responsibility. But even here the problem was seen in the middle ages
and some notable attempts made to solve it. And it is of course in modern
times that Parliament—at first aristocratic, but since the late nineteenth
century controlled by the people—has gained its final victory over the
king.