conjuncture of the time.  It would not have suited the ante-Tudor kings to have had a fictitious assembly; they would have lost their sole Feeler, their only instrument for discovering national opinion.  Nor could they have manufactured such an assembly if they wished.  The instrument in that behalf is the centralised executive, and there was then no ‘prefet’ by whom the opinion of a rural locality could be made to order, and adjusted to suit the wishes of the capital.  Looking at the mode of election a theorist would say that these Parliaments were but “chance” collections of influential Englishmen.  There would be many corrections and limitations to add to that statement if it were wanted to make it accurate, but the statement itself hits exactly the principal excellence of those Parliaments.  If not “chance” collections of Englishmen, they were “undesigned” collections; no administrations made them or could make them.  They were bona-fide counsellors, whose opinion might be wise or unwise, but was anyhow of paramount importance, because their co-operation was wanted for what was in hand.

Legislation as a positive power was very secondary in those old Parliaments.  I believe no statute at all, as far as we know, was passed in the reign of Richard I., and all the ante-Tudor acts together would look meagre enough to a modern Parliamentary agent who had to live by them.  But the negative action of Parliament upon the law was essential to its whole idea, and ran through every part of its use.  That the king could not change what was then the almost sacred datum of the common law, without seeing whether his nation liked it or not, was an essential part of the “tentative” system.  The king had to feel his way in this exceptional, singular act, as those ages deemed original legislation, as well as in lesser acts.  The legislation was his at last; he enacted after consulting his Lords and Commons; his was the sacred mouth which gave holy firmness to the enactment; but he only dared alter the rule regulating the common life of his people after consulting those people; he would not have been obeyed if he had not, by a rude age which did not fear civil war as we fear it now.  Many most important enactments of that period (and the fact is most characteristic) are declaratory acts.  They do not profess to enjoin by inherent authority what the law shall in future be, but to state and mark what the law is; they are declarations of immemorial custom, not precepts of new duties.  Even in the “Great Charter” the notion of new enactments was secondary, it was a great mixture of old and new; it was a sort of compact defining what was doubtful in floating custom, and was re-enacted over and over again, as boundaries are perambulated once a year, and rights and claims tending to desuetude thereby made patent and cleared of new obstructions.  In truth, such great “charters” were rather treaties between different orders and factions, confirming ancient rights, or what claimed