In his opening lecture at Oxford as Vinerian professor of the laws of England, Dr. William Blackstone introduced his subject with a statement of his “diffidence,” which amounts almost to an apologia for academic study of the law: “He must be sensible how much will depend upon his conduct in the infancy of a study, which is now first adopted by public academical authority; which has generally been reputed (however unjustly) of a dry and unfruitful nature; and of which the theoretical, elementary parts have hitherto received a very moderate share of cultivation.”

In 1750, Archibald Kennedy condemned New York's legislators for their radical constitutional innovation. “They take upon themselves to be the sole judges,” he stormed, and “‘insist… that no order for publick money shall issue, till their judgment has been obtained for it.’” Kennedy meant the charge literally. For almost half a century, New York legislators had preserved their power over the purse by determining claims made against the colony for money. In an arrangement sharply at odds with later legal doctrine on the separation of powers, the legislature—not the courts—had since 1706 settled contract claims for services and materials, demands for military pay and salaries, calls for compensation for the impressment of property, petitions for disability pensions, and a range of other claims.

At least once during his tenure, the royal governor of colonial New York received a list of questions from London. The Board of Trade, which recommended colonial policy to the king's Privy Council, sought information about the province's geography, population, trade, and legal regime. This last question often came first: “What is the constitution of the Government?” The responses, from the first British governor in 1669 to the last before the Revolution, described the imperial arrangement as a hierarchy of power flowing directly from the Crown. In 1738, for example, the lieutenant governor wrote that “The constitution is such as his Majesty by his commission to his Governour directs, whereby the Governour with the Council and assembly are empowered to pass laws not repugnant to the laws of England.” A decade later, Governor George Clinton replied more insightfully, with the help of his closest advisor, Cadwallader Colden: “The constitution of this Government is founded on His Majesty's Commission & Instructions to his Governor. But the assembly have made such Encroachments on his Majesty's Prerogative by their having the power of the purse that they in effect assume the whole executive powers into their own hands.”

Of all the comments made by British politicians to describe the United States Constitution, Gladstone's remains the most difficult to deny: by calling it “the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man” he covered the true origins of the document in a mantle of consensus, well understood and coherent in intent, and epitomizing the human capacity for reasoned progress. All of these attributes have little favor among American constitutional historians today, but the remark still makes the rounds.

One of my few unrepressed childhood memories is of a high-school field trip to the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The docent, a hapless but not entirely innocent volunteer, addressed us in a tone of perky condescension usually reserved for precocious six-year-olds. Thus, when he stood before an object of local veneration—the state constitution of 1780, I think, or perhaps one of the royal charters—and clucked, “Now class, does anyone know what ‘constitution’ means?,” it was with casual adolescent malice that a voice from the back answered, “Yeah, it has something to do with metabolism.”

History is a strange medium: it carries the most contemporary debates onto the most distant terrain. Both Bruce Mann and David Konig focus on the notions of change and context that undergird the forum essays. Those issues, more than any moment in early New York, link the articles and the comments. By exploring the way we defined “constitutions,” “constitutionalism,” and “constitutional history,” the commentators open up a large and current question. They invite a discussion about approaches to constitutional change.

Bruce Mann's irreverent schoolmate would have made a good historian. Unlike the hapless docent, the student (whatever his intent) grasped that a word's various meanings, now divided, might once have been united. The word constitution, for example, was born in obfuscation—and this ambiguity enabled it to become a powerful analytical tool in the early modern period. In fact, the political meaning of constitution derived from the word's physiological connotation, which is why the latter appears first in Professor Mann's dictionary.