From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
Macmillan & Co., 1871
A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany,
as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth
working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common
to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly
different. The distinctive character of English history is its
continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there
is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be
drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a
superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,--at the Norman
invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate
us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the
history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor
Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest.
Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign
kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a
foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of
wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real
and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the
greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages
before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England
has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon
kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and
Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The
England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all
external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age
immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely
removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a
conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and
slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of
power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is
an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and
circumstance of our own.
When, 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 anything
new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is
on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our
rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or
proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ,
conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of
England.
This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point
which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special
continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most
instructive part of the comparison between English history and the
history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the
many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one
Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and
barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every
institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth
century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young
indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,--the very
things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a
King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor
impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high
hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of
the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen,
and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons
still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons
whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual
changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard
questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take
their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great
offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have
assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character
they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun;
doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but
statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions
of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is
rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few
great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy
yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but
both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent
extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal
status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.
With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes,
and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at
least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language
was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible
at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it
was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England
at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest,
ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a
purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he
could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could
not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled
over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds.
The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems
truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more
on the throne of Cerdic and of AElfred. The modern English nation is
now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French
dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and
fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of
our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character
for good and for evil.
Let us here sketch out a comparison between the history and
institutions of England and those of France and Germany. As we before
said, our modern Parliament is traced up in an unbroken line to the
early Great Council, and to the still earlier Witenagemot. The latter
institution, widely different as it is from the earlier, has not been
substituted for the earlier, but has grown out of it. It would be
ludicrous to look for any such continuity between the Diet of
ambassadors which meets at Frankfurt and the Assemblies which met to
obey Henry the Third and to depose Henry the Fourth. And how stands
the case in France? France has tried constitutional government in all
its shapes; in its old Teutonic, in its mediaeval, and in all its
modern forms--Kings with one Chamber and Kings with two, Republics
without Presidents and Republics with, Conventions, Directories,
Consulates, and Empires. All of these have been separate experiments;
all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of
them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by
year; his successors in the Eastern _Francia_, the Kings of the
Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in
Western _Francia_, after it fell away from the common centre, no such
assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments;
every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and
Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to
contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair,
for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the
States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish
Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe,
in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From
that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful
course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of
England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of
political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive
measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King
could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If
they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked
minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit
reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from
magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both
were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the
States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France
generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their
extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791
to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year,
made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our
liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected
nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old
Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their
constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian
curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National
Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They have risen
and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of
Commons have gone on undisturbed.