The Ancient Constitution refers to the belief that England’s legal system and governance have ancient roots, existing long before the Norman Conquest of 1066. This idea gained prominence in the 17th century, suggesting that the common law and the rights of English citizens were based on longstanding traditions rather than recent changes by monarchs or governments.
Prominent legal figures like Sir Edward Coke supported this concept, arguing that the common law was a timeless set of principles that had always been part of English society. This notion was used to challenge the royal prerogative and emphasize the authority of Parliament and the common law courts over the monarchy. By linking contemporary legal and political structures to an ancient tradition, the Ancient Constitution provided a basis for legitimizing them.
The Ancient Constitution was particularly influential during political conflicts such as the English Civil War and the Exclusion Crisis. It was used to argue against the monarchy’s perceived overreach and played a crucial role in shaping English constitutional thought, influencing debates about the distribution of power among the monarchy, Parliament, and the judiciary.
The Ancient Constitution isn’t a single document you can locate, but rather a concept and body of legal thought suggesting that England’s legal system has ancient origins, predating the Norman Conquest of 1066. This idea was developed by legal figures like Sir Edward Coke in the 17th century.
To explore this concept, you can start with key texts and historical documents that discuss it. For primary sources, look for historical legal documents and treatises such as Sir Edward Coke’s “Institutes of the Lawes of England,” available in major law libraries or online databases like HeinOnline.
For secondary sources, read scholarly analyses and interpretations, such as J.G.A. Pocock’s “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law.” University libraries and academic databases like JSTOR or Google Scholar can provide access to these resources. Additionally, digital collections from the British Library, the Avalon Project, and BAILII offer access to historical legal documents and scholarly works that can help you understand the Ancient Constitution.
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law by
Professor Pocock's subject is how the seventeenth century looked at its own past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most important modes of studying the past was the study of the law - the historical outlook which arose in each nation was in part the product of its law, and therefore, in turn of its history. In clarifying the relation of the historical outlook of seventeenth-century Englishmen to the study of law, and pointing out its political implication, Pocock shows how history's ground was laid for a more philosophical approach in the eighteenth century.
The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty by
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to "the ancient constitution" as the cornerstone of liberty. According to this idea, constitutional law was not dictated by a monarch but based on the authority of custom, passed down unaltered from time immemorial. Legal historian John Phillip Reid convincingly demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power. At the same time, it provided American revolutionaries with legal arguments for rejecting the British parliament's effort to impose arbitrary rule upon the colonies.
Whereas modern historians have tended to fault the constitutionalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inventing a mystical past, these polemical pamphleteers had less interest in the accuracy of their history than in its usefulness in forensic argumentation. Much as lawyers contending before the bar, they appealed to the past as precedent, as analogy, as principle—in short, as forensic history. Claiming that liberty had been more effective and secure during ancient times, they upheld an idealized Anglo-Saxon standard for testing contemporary institutions. More significantly, they called upon the authority of the ancient constitution as a defense against the innovations of the English monarchy and against the assertions of an unrepresentative parliament.
The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty complements Reid's recent book on another cornerstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence and constitutional theory, Rule of Law. Whereas "rule of law" insists that one law applies to rulers and ruled alike, the ancient constitution embodied the ideal for what that one law should be.
Law, Political Thought, and the Ancient Constitution by
The blending of myth and legal history evident in the body of literal and legal texts produced to debate the union proposals of James VI and I following the king's proclamation of them in 1604 illustrates the seamless nature of the legal and literary canons at a formative moment in the history of British-American constitutionalism. This case study focuses on one of the lesser known Union Tracts, George Saltern's 1605 Of the Antient Lawes of great Britaine, in conjunction with examples from various Union Tracts and contemporaneous works in British history, Calvin's Case and other judicial opinions, and works of British-American political thought to illustrate and evaluate the creative mix of mythical and historical elements present in the juridical historiography of the ancient constitution. King James's proposed 'restitution' of a realm which had in fact never previously existed in history - the unified realm of Great Britain - could only have been defended through such a blend of literary myth, history, and legal precedents. Furthermore, tracing the juridical historiography of ancient constitutionalism over the following centuries reveals the surprising extent to which ancient constitutionalist thought has continued to influence the development of British-American constitutionalism to the present day. The appendix includes a facsimile of George Saltern's Of the Antient Lawes of great Britaine (1605)
The Politics of the Ancient Constitution by
The Politics of the Ancient Constitution is a close examination of the political ideas of common lawyers in early Stuart England, and includes important surveys of the ideas of Sir Edward Coke and John Selden. It provides an original interpretation of the lawyers' theory of the ancient constitution and on this basis it provides a novel interpretation of the basic structure of political thought and ideology in pre-Civil War England. In this way the book is able to make a substantial contribution to debates over the ideological origins of the English Revolution.
The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution by
This book deals with critical aspects of English historical, constitutional and political thought from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. In particular, the book is a study of the ways in which history could be deployed for all kinds of political purposes. The entire story of the historical construct of the "radical ancient constitution" is told, focusing on the ways in which rebels turned to important medieval sources including the so-called "Laws" of Edward the Confessor, in an effort to legitimize resistance, deposition and regicide.
The Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law by
This is a critical collection of essays on the origin and nature of the idea of liberty. The authors explore the development of English ideas of liberty and the relationship those ideas hold to modern conceptions of rule of law.
The essays address early medieval developments, encompassing such seminal issues as the common-law mind of the sixteenth century under the Tudor monarchs, the struggle for power and authority between the Stuart kings and Parliament in the seventeenth century, and the role of the ancient constitution in the momentous legal and constitutional debate that occurred between the Glorious Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence.
These resources may be useful to ensure that your topic has not been written in a non-law journal, but these databases may also be useful later when you are doing research for your paper, because you may want to use knowledge (including statistics) from other disciplines to support your arguments.
If you want to be thorough in your searching, or if you are having difficulty finding relevant articles, you can try searching a journal index. Index searches are only search the title or abstract of the article, (NOT a full-text search).
| Advantages to Index Searching | Disadvantages to Index Searching |
|---|---|
| Legal periodical indexes allow you to search nearly all U.S. law review articles from 1918 to present. Therefore, searching these indexes allows you to search more journal articles than you can search in Lexis or Westlaw. | After you find the citation, you still need to find the full-text. |
| Good for historical research. | Your search is limited to title and abstract. |
| Index searching can help you eliminate many irrelevant articles from your full-text search results. But after you find the citation, you then need to find the full-text. |
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The Bluebook by 
Prince's Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations! by