The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times

The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times is by Edward A. Freeman, M.A., Hon. D.C.L., late Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Chapter I describes a yearly meeting in Switzerland where the Sovereign People, not entrusting its rights to a few of its own number, meets in the open market-place or in the green meadow at the mountain’s foot.

The text says that at no earlier time have so many important changes in constitutional doctrine and practice won universal acceptance without being recorded in any written enactment. The text calls a tendency of later times simply another application of the Englishman’s love of precedent. The text says the growth of the unwritten Constitution has much in common with the earlier growth of the unwritten Common Law. A numbered note says the succession of a grandson, which first took place in England in the case of Richard the Second, marks a distinct stage in the growth of the doctrine of hereditary right.