n, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its
beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be
drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great
creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia--the
thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England
which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is
essentially the still living England in which we have our own being.
Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries;
from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King
AElfred's Witenagemot is a valuable link in the chain of our political
progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by
the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A
statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be
shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good
to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we
may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our
political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see
the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in
wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought
improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others
capable of further improvement still.

Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since
the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never
known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly,
Witenagemot, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been,
capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more
or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria,
England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary
constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken
it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English
Witenagemots, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian
research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries
fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a
veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In
the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional
principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the
seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anyth