CASES AND DOCUMENTS TO ILLUSTRATE ENGLISH CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, 1660-1832 EDITED BY C. GRANT ROBERTSON, M.A. FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD SECOND EDITION REVISED AND ENLARGED METHUEN & CO. LTD. LONDON TH PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION HE origin, purpose, and scope of this volume require a brief explanation. In lecturing for the Honour School of Modern History at Oxford on English Constitutional History from 1660 to the Great Reform Bill, I invariably found that both my classes and I laboured under the serious disadvantage of having no handy collection of pièces justificatives in the shape of selected original authorities for our subject, such as is at the disposal of teachers and students for the preceding periods of English history in the well-known Select Charters of Stubbs, and the similar volumes of Dr. Prothero and Mr. Gardiner-with what profit to all concerned needs no proof here. If the student, in short, of English Constitutional History for the hundred and seventy years from 1660-the period in which the bases of the constitution under which we live to-day were finally established-desire access to the most important statutes and documents, or to the text of the decisions in the leading cases in constitutional law, he has so far been compelled to seek them scattered in the ponderous collection of Parliamentary Statutes, in the still more voluminous and confusing mass of Law Reports, or piecemeal in various books not always to be found in his college library, and certainly not within the reach of a modest purse. Otherwise he must rest content with the quotations or paraphrases of the leading secondary authorities, or, worse still, the ipse dixit of the lecturer. The educational value of bringing the student face to face with the original authorities is a point that to-day requires no laboured proof; it is one of the truisms common to all places where history is seriously studied. Furthermore, I fancy that all teachers will agree on these two propositions: First, that even if the desire to undertake the hunt for a reference to original authorities given by a lecturer were present in the average student (which in nine cases out of ten it is not), the pressure on 296929 |