Few historical doctrines agreed better with the prejudices of what one may call the romantic-liberal school of historians of the last century than the classical theory of Germanic kingship. In early Teutonic society, according to this theory, there were normally no kings, but in each nation there was a royal race from which kings could be chosen by the ‘folk’ if need arose. ‘Kings’, wrote Tacitus, ‘are chosen by reason of their nobility, dukes because of their good qualities’, and it was assumed that such an arrangement, which so judiciously combined a romantic respect for aristocratic traditions with a democratic element of popular selection, still held good in the epoch of the Barbarian Invasions. More sober historians of a later epoch echoed the enthusiasm of earlier scholars. The king, wrote Kern, ‘possessed a certain hereditary reversionary right, or at least a privileged “throne-worthiness” in virtue of his royal descent. But it was the people who summoned him to the throne with the full force of law, in as much as they chose from among the members of the ruling dynasty either the next in title or the fittest. … What distinguished the king from a freely elected official was his hereditary right to the throne; but this was an hereditary right not of any individual ruler, but of a ruling family…All members of the ruling family are royal’. Bury put it even more clearly. ‘A German state might have a king or it might not, but in either case it was virtually a democracy.… Some of them had kings; any of them might at any moment elect a king; but the presence or absence of a king might almost be described as a matter of convenience, it had no decisive constitutional importance…. But the people who had no king required an executive officer of this kind likewise. Well, they had an officer who was called a graf…. The graf was elected by the assembly, and the assembly might elect anyone they liked. The king was likewise elected by the assembly, but in his case their choice was limited to a particular family, a royal family. In other words, the kingship was hereditary, and the grafship was not. But this hereditary character of the kingship was of a limited kind. When a king died, the office did not devolve on any particular kinsman of his; the sovran people might elect any member of the family they chose; they might refuse to elect any successor at all.

As I see it, the course of English economic history in the later Middle Ages is as follows. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries medieval civilization had reached a climax of material prosperity and spiritual confidence which it was never to surpass. A cessation of economic advance in the first half of the fourteenth century was followed by a positive decline in the second half, continuing and deepening in the century following, to reach its lowest point between 1450 and 1470. Recovery first started in the last twenty or twenty-five years of the fifteenth century, leading directly to the great economic renaissance which came to flowering in Tudor England. Then began that ‘cumulative crescendo’ which was to lead, at an ever-increasing pace, through the Industrial Revolution, to the command over Nature and the vast material resources of our own day.

No description of the theory of the constitution which the Whigs Professed in the five years of their existence as a political party in Charles II's reign, can be adequately made except in relation to the position in which they found themselves during this period. For though their view of what the constitution ought to be was to a considerable extent built up on ideas inherited from past ages and especially from the previous half-century, as it was formulated between 1678 and 1683 it was designed to justify a particular set of actions, and to advocate a type of government appropriate to the needs of a group of people at a particular moment.