The Origin of the English Constitution (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By George Burton Adams

A fascinating book about the history of England, this volume sets forth the author’s theory of the feudal origin of the English constitution, which established a limited monarchy, among other things, and the function of the Great Charter (Magna Carta) in effecting “the transition of the fundamental principle of the modern constitution.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411453234

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THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

GEORGE BURTON ADAMS

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-5323-4

PREFACE

Some articles and portions of articles previously printed have been brought together in this book, and I am indebted to the editors of the American Histori­cal Review and the English Historical Review for permission to republish them. To the chapters which most nearly follow these earlier articles, some addi­tions have been made in the text, and especially in the notes. Two introductory chapters have been added, and the third and the fifth are also new, except for some brief passages in text and notes.

The purpose of the articles as originally published was to point out the feudal origin of the English Constitution in its most distinctive features, and especially of the limited monarchy, and to show that the function which the Great Charter actually per­formed in the formation of the Constitution was to effect the transition of the fundamental principle of feudalism into the fundamental principle of the modern Constitution. The object of the present book is the same. The introductory chapters are concerned with the institutions of general government before any tendency towards change began to appear, and the third with the changes of the second half of the twelfth century, in order to make clear that the original government was feudal and that the only decisive changes which occur before the date of Magna Carta are not in the direction of a limited but of a more powerful monarchy. The purpose of the fifth chapter is to make more evident the distinctive character of the Great Charter in itself.

The tendency in the past quarter of a century in the study of English constitutional history has been a growing recognition of the feudal character of the Anglo-Norman period. This may be clearly seen by comparing the discussion of institutions in Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law with the opinions prevailing a generation earlier, even with those expressed in Stubbs's Constitutional History. Bishop Stubbs represents, I am tempted to say, the beginning of the scientific study of the Constitution. This would, however, be unfair to a number of scholars whose work upon particular points is of the greatest value to the later student. But in the study of the Constitution as a whole, Bishop Stubbs's work does form an epoch from which all later work must date, and in nothing does it mark a greater advance than in beginning an emancipation from the idea of the unbroken continuity of Saxon institutions, so strongly urged by Professor E. A. Freeman, and in bringing the royal government of England into more close relation with contemporary continental institutions. Much has been done in the same way since his time. There remained, however, at the close of the nineteenth century three important points still to be emphasized. First, the need of a more unreserved recognition of the completely feudal character of the general government down to the end of John's reign, still unmodified by the new developments of the king's prerogative. Second, the exact point and manner of the divergence of the modern English Constitution from the feudal. Third, the specific service rendered by the Great Charter in that divergence and the method in which the service was rendered. As less important may be added, the necessity of emphasizing more than is commonly done the different effects wrought by the Norman Conquest in the spheres of national and of local government.

It is hardly necessary to point out to Americans that the history of the origin of the English Constitution is our history as much as it is the history of living Englishmen. Our institutional past until near the close of the seventeenth century is to be found in England alone. This fact the history of the seven­teenth century shows clearly enough, for if one will study the constitutional innovations attempted or advocated during the period of Puritan rule, when the constitutional life of England abandoned for a moment all connexion with the monarchy, he will see how natural it seemed to the nation to turn to a sur­prising number of the political expedients which in our government seem departures from the English system. When Englishmen at home broke with their own institutional precedents, and began to make a republic, it was to things of this kind that their minds were naturally led, as if they had been trained to them. As to the relation between cabinet and legislature, which appears to us now a very striking difference, we need to remember that our constitution was framed at a time when the workings of a responsible ministry were not understood in England itself, and could not have been described by any one as they were by Macaulay fifty years later. In an especial way, and this is true quite independently of our racial descent as individuals, the England of those early centuries wrought out for us more truly than for any other people not within the borders of her Empire, the insti­tutions of free government, and we have a peculiar right to feel that in tracing the steps by which they were created we are studying our own history.

It would be easily possible in a book of this kind to multiply footnotes almost indefinitely. I have not felt them to be a necessary evidence of learning, and I have deliberately resisted the temptation to use them except where they seemed to me really to serve a need. I have also not reprinted passages from documents like Magna Carta which are easily accessible to all.

I wish to acknowledge, more explicitly than in my dedication, my obligation to the members of my historical seminary with whom many of the problems here discussed have been investigated, and from whose kindly criticism I have profited much.

New Haven,

March 5, 1912.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

General Introduction

CHAPTER II

Institutional Introduction

CHAPTER III

The First Age of Change

CHAPTER IV

The Germ of the Constitution

CHAPTER V

Magna Carta

CHAPTER VI

The Immediate Results of Magna Carta

CHAPTER VII

The End of the Period of Origin

APPENDIX I

The Descendants of the Curia Regis

APPENDIX II

Henry I.'s Writ Regarding the Local Courts

APPENDIX III

London and the Commune

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER I

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The importance of the English Constitution in the political history of mankind is so great that the ques­tion of its origin is of unusual interest. The unani­mous judgment of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is that this is the best system of government yet devised. All monarchies which have adopted a constitution have derived their forms from it, and the same is true of most republics. Local necessities, or local prejudices, have made the adop­tion in individual cases more or less complete, or have led to variations from the typical forms, but these are hardly sufficient, even in the most extreme case, to conceal the indebtedness. The English Constitu­tion has made the circuit of the globe and become the common possession of civilized man. After so many centuries of experiment, practical action, whatever be the opinion of the theorist, unites to declare this the best result of all experience. If this is true, the question from what and how it began to be should be considered one of the greatest and most absorbing of all historical studies.

Some definition is, however, necessary for the sake of clearness. By the term constitution, as used above, is not meant the whole system of government, all the organs of the state, the whole political machinery, national and local. What is meant is the machinery of a limited monarchy, those devices by which an abso­lutism, once existing in fact, can be retained in form and theory while the real government of the state is transformed into a democratic republic.¹ It is this group of institutions, and those more or less closely connected with them, as adaptable to a democracy which has never known a king, as to the Empire of Russia, which we mean when we say that the English Constitution has become the common possession of mankind. And it is this limited line of institutional history only, national and not local, which I propose to consider in this book.

There is another qualification also which I wish to have clearly understood at the outset. I am trying to find the beginning of the English Constitution in the way of forms and machinery only. It is as a body of institutions that I wish to trace its rise. From what legal and constitutional ideas, from what methods of doing the business of government, by what changes in those ideas and methods, was the process of creation carried on until we can say that the limited monarchy with its characteristic ideas and its characteristic machinery for doing the work of the state became fixed in the habits of the nation, this is the general problem which I propose. I know very well, however, that I am studying only a portion of the whole case. Racial, social, and economic influences, and others very likely, had to do with the result, and no doubt furnished more of the impelling force of change, in many instances at least, than did anything that was institutional merely. These I shall have to leave to others, who will no doubt in their turn acknowledge that existing forms with which the more dynamic forces had to deal made exceedingly important con­tributions to the common result.²

The Norman Conquest brought face to face with one another two groups of political institutions which in their historical origins had much in common, and which in some respects had passed through common phases of development. On one side was the Saxon. Its history had been begun in England by Teutonic tribes from the southeastern shores of the North Sea. Of their actual institutions before and for a time after the Conquest we know almost nothing, but they seem to have stood in a stage of political progress not materially in advance of the kingless tribes whose institutions are described in Tacitus's Germania. It is probable that the new conditions in which the Con­quest placed them impelled them to changes in the direction of larger and stronger states. The king came into existence, charged it would seem likely, at first, mainly with the duties of a permanent war-chief in view of the dangers constantly threatening the little colony of invaders. From such a beginning his power spread gradually over internal policy and administration, and grew stronger. The increase of the royal power in the Saxon state seems to have been very slow, but it did increase. The Saxon monarch of the eleventh century was far from absolute, or from being able to identify himself with the state, but in the hands of a king like Cnut it was a strong monarchy.

With the development of the kingship there had developed the institutional side of two other political functions which it is necessary for our purpose to notice—the administrative, and the combined judicial-­legislative. From a beginning which was probably hardly more than a stewardship, to look after the private interests of the king in the divisions of the primitive state, the shire-reeve, the sheriff, had devel­oped with the growth of the royal power into a gen­eral administrative and executive officer, having duties of great variety, judicial as well as administrative, executing the orders of the central government throughout the localities, and standing as well in close relationship with the local courts. It was a generic office, later undergoing much differentiation, but sufficing amply for the needs of a primitive govern­ment.

In the Anglo-Saxon state, as generally in an early stage of political development, the legislative function was scarcely exercised. Custom took the place of enacted law, and whatever institution had the duty of defining what the custom was and of deciding disputes about it, had as a natural consequence the power of making such slight changes in the law, or additions to it, as seemed necessary. In the Anglo-Saxon state the judicial-legislative function was exercised by an assembly or rather by national and by local assem­blies. The place and grade of these assemblies corre­sponded to the divisions and subdivisions of the terri­tory of the state. The national assembly, widest in scope and apparently in powers, seems to have been an aristocratic body, formed by bringing together the chief men in church and state, with no very definite ideas that can be called constitutional of what its composition should be. In addition to its judicial and rather vague legislative functions, it seems to have acted often as a council, and in times of national crisis, as in the vacancy of the throne, or in a time of disputed succession, to have assumed some authority to express the will of the united tribal or national whole. Of the composition of the local assemblies of shire and hundred we have no clear information from Saxon times, but they seem certainly to have contained a more popular element, perhaps repre­sentative in character, and they exercised within their narrower spheres the same judicial and legislative functions as the national assembly. Most important from our point of view is the fact that, whatever the function exercised, the method by which it was exer­cised was democratic within the assembly. The pre­siding officer, whether king, or ealdorman, or sheriff, was a moderator only, having no official right of influence upon the decision of questions before the assembly, which reached its conclusions by the forma­tion of a majority opinion.

On the other side were the Normans. They were the descendants of the Northmen, or Scandinavian sea-rovers, who had settled on the north coast of Gaul, on both sides of the river Seine, at the beginning of the tenth century, three hundred years after the Saxon settlements in Britain had become firmly established and extensive. We know no more of their original institutions than we know of the Saxon, but they seem to have stood in about the same stage of political development and their monarchy also to have been developed after their settlement. If we may judge of the institutions with which they were familiar at the time, as we probably may, by what we learn of Scandinavian institutions in general from writings of a later date, they would not differ materially from the institutions of the Saxons and the conditions in which they were placed in the conquered land would probably tend to develop them in the same direction.

The Normans, however, underwent at once an experience to which nothing in Saxon history corresponded. They came into immediate contact with a governmental system and indeed theoretically formed a part of it, which was much more highly developed than their own—the Carolingian monarchy. This system, probably because they formed but a small minority of the population of the province they occu­pied, and because they found their more primitive institutions less fitted to cope with the practical difficulties of the situation, the Normans finally adopted in place of their own. The Scandinavian institutions which they brought with them seem in the end to have disappeared without leaving discernible traces of any importance.³ The institutions which the Normans brought into England, therefore, were those of the Frankish monarchy.

These again were Teutonic in their origin, prob­ably not materially different from those of the Saxons, though the kingship had developed among the Franks before the conquests of Clovis began. But the contact with the Roman governmental sys­tem resulting from the occupation of Gaul had had the same effect upon them, though to a less degree, that the settlement in Normandy had upon the Scandinavian, much that was Frankish remained in use but much that was Roman was added to it, or mingled with it to form something that was not quite either.

We shall be concerned later with a number of details of this Frankish system, but in this general introductory survey we need to notice the larger fea­tures only. The Frankish monarchy at the beginning of the reign of Clovis had been apparently not more than the kingship of a small local subdivision of the Frankish tribe, many of which existed at the same time, not unlike the small kingdoms probably first resulting from the Saxon settlements in Britain, but the military needs and successes of Clovis's con­quests had carried the Franks in a single generation through a development which in England had taken many. It is probable also that the model of Roman centralization, which a conquest so rapid left largely undisturbed, exerted an influence in the same direc­tion which the Saxons never felt. At the end of Clovis's life a powerful monarchy had been estab­lished, which was strengthened by his immediate successors, and then, after a period of decline, further strengthened and institutionally perfected by the early Carolingians.

The growth of this monarchical power had been accompanied by some change in the character of local institutions though less than might be expected. The Frankish local courts, originally closely analogous to the Saxon in function, procedure, and probably in composition, had survived, though they had become less democratic in operation, a board of appointive officers, the scabini, making the judgment of the court in place of the popular assembly. A local administra­tive officer, representing the king, and exercising throughout the local divisions of the state functions closely similar to those of the Saxon sheriff, though an office apparently quite different in origin, as it was in history, existed in the count or graf. The oppor­tunity which an office, uniting in one hand so many of the functions of government for a definite locality and held usually for life, offered to its holder to become independent or to recognize only a vague dependence on the central power, had been often embraced under the weaker Merovingian kings, but the early Carolingian princes had reduced these officers to a new obedience and held them under a strict control as true administrative officers, but still of a generic type.

Of a general assembly of national scope and demo­cratic in character, open to the ordinary Frankish freeman, scarcely a trace remained. There was, how­ever, a king's council or court, composed of the officers of the king's immediate household and the chief men of the church and state. In the things that it was accustomed to do, as in composition, it was very like the Saxon national assembly, and seemed to perform judicial, legislative, and conciliar acts without con­sciously distinguishing them in character. If local assemblies corresponding to the shire courts of Saxon England existed in the Frankish state, they certainly left few traces in the evidence which has come down to us, but of the hundred assembly there is no doubt.

At the beginning of the tenth century when the settlement of the Northmen was made along the lower Seine, the Frankish monarchy had recently passed into a second period of decline. A variety of causes, partly political and partly economic, had combined to render the exercise of a real central authority over the great empire which the earlier Carolingians had created exceedingly difficult and to favour the rise of local powers, acknowledging in form the supremacy of the emperor but actually independent in the practical government of their territory. The leader of the Normans, as count of the lands they occupied, was the representative of the emperor as the officer to whom it belonged to make the authority of the cen­tral government effective in that portion of the empire. In the actual powerlessness of the monarch, he fell heir to that authority as if it were his own, and he was able to prevent a further weakening of it in his hands. As his territory assumed by successive grants or occupations the size of a small kingdom, coming not badly off in this respect in a comparison with the kingdom over which Alfred the Great actu­ally ruled, his power became really sovereign and found in extent and effectiveness hardly an equal in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In regard to other institutions it seems highly prob­able that there had already come into existence in Normandy administrative and judicial-legislative institutions very similar in character to those of the Saxons. The local administrative and financial officer bore in Normandy the name of viscount—the vicecomes—the count's deputy, becoming as necessary to effective local government when the county assumed more and more the character of a kingdom, as the count had originally been for the king of the Franks. The tendency of these deputies to become independent, which showed itself throughout the whole Frankish state, the strong Norman counts had been able to hold in check and they seem to have maintained as firm a hold over their viscounts, in nearly every case, as Charlemagne had maintained over his counts.

For Normandy as a whole there seems also to have been an assembly similar in composition and function to those of the Frankish empire and the Saxon king­dom. The chief men, lay and ecclesiastical, of the province, less conscious now, it is probable, of per­forming a public than a feudal duty, met in an assembly for the whole territory subject to the count and did such judicial, legislative, and other business as needed attention.⁴

The evidence which has come down to us from which we can describe in detail the institutions of Normandy, before the Conquest, is even more scanty and fragmentary than that for Saxon institutions, but the larger features which have been here sketched seem nearly as well established for the continent as for the island. It is possible for us now to say that not merely in remote origins and in some phases of devel­opment, but also in general features, the two groups of institutions brought face to face by the Conquest were strikingly similar. In details, and in details that were important in the subsequent history, there were many differences, but at the moment of the Conquest they would count for less than the larger similarities and these embrace the whole structure, and operation of such machinery as existed for the government of the state as a whole.

It is evident a priori that a conquest which should make the Norman the ruler of the Saxon and able to determine the institutional character of the resulting state, need lead to no violent constitutional changes, but that it might rather bring about a new government by an almost easy and natural combination of the two sets of institutions which it threw together. In other words it was possible that a new government might be formed in England by an amalgamation of Norman and Saxon institutions without giving to anyone the impression, certainly not so strongly as to get into the record, that revolutionary or violent changes had been made. We may almost say, indeed, that if the whole of Saxon institutions had been swept away, if that were possible, and Norman had alone survived, the change would seem more revolutionary to us, thus baldly stated, than it would have seemed in the actual experience of contemporaries. The two sets of institutions were so nearly alike in all their essential features that conquest of one by the other was hardly possible, but a union between them was easy and almost inevitable.⁵

Such a result was made practically certain by the disposition of William the Conqueror. He was the conqueror beyond all question, but he makes it clear to us by many acts that he did not wish to be regarded in that way by those whom he had conquered. He would tolerate no rebellion, from Norman no more than from Saxon, but his authority being recognized, he desired to rule as an English king would have ruled in his place, and the most decisive changes which he introduced, except in ecclesiastical matters, he probably did not know to be changes. It is not likely that he ever understood how extensive the innovations really were which he actually made. His first official act, so far as we know, after his coronation was his charter to the city of London and it is typical of his attitude throughout his reign. It is hardly a city charter in the later sense, granting economic and political privileges and defining local government. Its brief and general statements are in line with much that was contained in the later charters, in that of his son Henry I. for the same city, for instance, but the differences are equally striking. Certainly to those to whom it was addressed in the circumstances of the moment, it would seem rather to be a proclamation, the proclamation of a conqueror defining his policy, and it would say to them chiefly that no foreign law was to be introduced, that no confiscation was to be made, and that his army was to be restrained from violence. It was a proclamation, however, put into the form of a charter, that is, of a legally binding grant. The promises of this proclamation were faithfully kept, so far as we know, to the city of London. They were not kept to the country at large, but William's plea in defence would have been one of necessity, and I think we must admit its sufficiency, judged by the standards of the eleventh century. A large body of foreign law was introduced and became firmly rooted in England, but no foreign law was introduced of deliberate intention. Extensive confiscations were made, affecting perhaps all, at any rate a considerable part, of the land of the kingdom, and a new theory of final ownership was introduced. For these things we can only admit such justification as may be found in the necessity of thoroughly garrisoning the country, though we may say, if that be extenuation, that the aristocracy suffered most from them, not the great mass of the population.⁶ The violence of the army was not always restrained, nor his own violence, to his lasting shame, but we must acknowledge that as he would regard the situation his patience was severely tried, and he had much provocation.

Using the word constitution in the sense to which it was restricted at the beginning of this chapter, the organization of the national government as distinguished from the local, it is my own belief that the history of the English Constitution upon English soil begins with the Norman Conquest, and that, whatever may have been the character of the Saxon national organization, it made as such but little contribution to the later result. The institutions of general government which grew in England and in course of time passed into the institutions of the modern state are in all the most important particulars those which were brought in by the Normans in 1066.⁷ While there may have been so great a similarity of Saxon and Norman institutions that no evidence of violent substitution of one for the other is to be found, there can be no doubt but that it was the Norman constitution, with whatever peculiarities it possessed, which ruled henceforth. And beneath the superficial similarity, there was great difference. The Norman was a centralized absolutism, organized and operating by means of the feudal system. If anyone inclines to think this too definite a statement for what we know of the Norman government before 1066, it certainly is the government which ruled in England after Christmas day of that year, and there is no evidence of any constitutional transformation which followed the battle of Hastings. Cnut's was a powerful monarchy and England was held in his time with a strong hand; Edward the Confessor was a strong king, potentially if not actually; but the absolutism of William I. is a monarchy of a different type, both in spirit and in practical operation. As to the legislative machinery, so much alike on the surface were the two institutions that the Saxon Chronicle went on for a long time calling the Norman curia regis by the old name of witenagemot as if the writers thought there had been no change, but the institutional difference between the two is very wide. There are many things in Saxon society which have a strongly feudal appearance, and in its later history we detect easily some of the most important elements which went to form completed feudalism, but the Saxon government was certainly not getting its business done and the Saxon landholder was not performing his public duties, as incidents in a prevailing feudal organization.⁸ Towards all these things I have no doubt the Saxon world was rapidly drifting, but the Norman Conquest interrupted the process. We may characterize the change it wrought accurately, I think, by saying that what the Norman Conquest did was to carry the English Constitution forward suddenly, overnight as it were, to results which it would itself have been likely to reach after some generations, or at least to very similar results.

But this is only the same as saying that, if we wish to know the earlier history of the royal power which William the Conqueror exercised, we must seek it in the Frankish and not in the Saxon state. The Saxon development towards a strong kingship, however great it may have been, comes to an end with 1066. It can be regarded as preparation only. It is the Frankish which goes on from that date. And it is so, in differing degrees, with other things. Saxon witenagemot, the national assembly of the chief men of church and state, becomes the Norman curia regis composed of the king's vassals. Function does not change, but function is never a test of institutional difference, and the principle of composition is decidedly different. The Saxon earl disappears, the Norman count of that day takes his place, though the English name continues. In superficial appearance the office of sheriff seems to have changed very little, but this primitive organ of centralization shared in the increased royal power and obtained a local authority and a range of activity which it would probably have been some time in reaching by natural growth. These may serve as examples of the general fact. The change is either so great that we have a right to say that it is the Norman and not the Saxon which goes on, as in the case of the monarchy and of the witenagemot, or it is great enough to contribute the essential element of future growth as in the case of the shrievalty.

It should be clearly observed that I am saying nothing here regarding the great province of local institutions and local law. That is the field in my opinion of which Saxon institutions kept possession and in which comparatively few Norman innovations were made, except so far as feudalism and later the new judicial institutions entered the field. But with local institutions I am to be in this book only incidentally concerned.⁹ In the case of institutions through which the business of the country as a whole was managed, while superficial appearances in many cases seem unchanged, any minute examination will show that in necessary institutional interpretation, as of the witenagemot, the change is great, or that the impulse to fruitful growth is new.

Of these Norman innovations in the field of general government two greatly exceed all others in their influence on the future. They are the centralized monarchy and the feudal system.

Of the centralized monarchy it is not possible to say much beyond a statement of the fact itself. It is my own belief that the executive and administrative power of the Norman duke and his practically unlimited control of his little state came to him in direct descent from the strongest age of the Carolingian monarchy combined with the fact that he was at the beginning the chief of a conquering invasion which settled upon the land. The real descendants in early Capetian times of the strong rulers of the Carolingian empire at its height are to be found not so much in the occupants of the throne as among the successors of those local agents through whom the imperial centralization had been exercised—counts and viscounts now become feudal barons, or of those who by usurpation had assumed their rights and names. They are found among the greater where the count or duke had succeeded in checking the tendency to further division of these powers, as in Normandy, possibly because of the fact of conquest, and among the barons of some subordinate rank in cases where that tendency had not been checked, as in Aquitaine. The powers once exercised as the instruments of a strong monarchy they continued to exercise as if they were their own. I am not saying that the Capetian kings ever surrendered their claim to the complete government of the state in all particulars; that they never did, and probably we should now recognize a larger actual power in their hands than would have been admitted fifty years ago. But throughout the larger part of modern France in 1066 the actual government which came into immediate contact with land and people and maintained law and order locally was not exercised by the king but by some feudal baron holding under his control a larger or smaller district. In Normandy the district was large and the control was strict, except possibly over some subordinate lordships lying on the borders.¹⁰

With reference to William's government of England the fact should not be overlooked that the Normandy over which he ruled before the Conquest was in area a very respectably sized kingdom for the eleventh century. Few sovereigns of his day con­trolled with anything like the same actual effectiveness a larger territory than his. So far as concerns the difficulty of that age which created the most serious problem for a general government, the difficulty of intercommunication, England as conquered by William was not enough larger geographically to render the methods and machinery of his Norman government less effective there than at home. England, indeed, presented no difficulty of general government which William's experience had not trained him to overcome. For William, certainly the simplest and most natural thing would be to transfer to England bodily the entire machinery of government as he was operating it in Normandy, and that is undoubtedly what he did. For England, the experience of almost a hundred years, since the beginning of the second Danish attack, in the drift of the monarchy towards absolutism and of local arrangements towards things more nearly feudal, had been preparing to make the transition easy, easy for William to make the transfer, and easy for Englishmen to reconcile themselves to the new with little sense of violent change.

Whatever may be true of Normandy, in England the result of the campaign of 1066 was the establishment of a monarchy so absolute that there was neither in the law nor in the practices of the time any recognized method of setting a limit to its action, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the sovereign was