This chapter explores the terms of letters patent for internal colonial government. It observes that every patent to a private colonizer prescribed a balanced colonial constitution: Some type of independent legislature in the colony, separate from the colonial executive, was to consult on laws and taxes. The chapter presents a strategic model to explain why this served the crown’s interest: An independent colonial legislature could restrain excessive extraction from colonists by colonial executives, which the crown itself – given the distance and its limited capacity – could not do.

Between the fourth and tenth centuries, across most of western Europe, law, legal institutions, and legal procedures became Christianized, in the sense that Christian rhetorical tropes, ideologies, and existential perspectives infused legal expression and practices. Royal and imperial courts were sites for interweaving secular and ecclesiastical authority, and hence for interweaving secular and ecclesiastical law. Such interweaving found voice in “mixed assemblies,” that is, assemblies in which both higher clergy and secular nobility participated in judicial and legislative processes; documents issued under the name of a king or emperor also show the integration of secular and ecclesiastical law. Law was not exclusively developed and implemented at royal courts and assemblies: complementing governmental efforts to instantiate Christian law, the educated elite took an interest in law, both as a subject for study and as a resource for informing arbitration, prosecution, or defense of rights and privileges. One of the many streams of legal formation was the practice of collecting, compiling, and conserving decrees and judicial opinions that would, in time, constitute the core of the canon law of subsequent centuries.

For kingship to be more than testimony to an individual’s ambition, it had to be passed on to the next generation. In theory, that should be a ruler’s eldest son. In practice that occurred in only a third of royal successions. Almost by definition, successions were therefore moments of uncertainty – for the realm, for a dying king’s relatives, for his dependents and followers. Yet because successions were inherently uncertain, the people at large played a far more significant role than scholars have often recognised. They would be called upon to conform a proposed settlement, for instance, but they were not bound by it. On a ruler’s death, it fell to them to reconsider and confirm. In other instances, they had to choose between a range of candidates with equally valid claims. Matters were complicated further by the fact that successions were supposed to be organised according to principles of descent and suitability. Ideally, each reinforced the other. In practice, the latter was frequently used to trump the former. Legitimacy was therefore in the eye of the beholder, which made it all the more important that the selection of an heir was recognised and accepted by the people at large.

Chapter 8 discusses how royal elections worked in practice. It discusses the preparations necessary for an election to take place, the choice of venue and location, the identity and social composition of the electors and the overlapping stages in which the act of choosing a ruler unfolded. It also shows how each stage served to highlight both abstract normative ideas of how a king should be chosen and the concrete practical necessities that shaped the process of election. It also draws attention to yet another inherent tension: the legitimacy of an election rested on its unanimity and the assumption that a candidate was chosen because he was most suitable to work for the common good. Campaigning, bargaining for votes, etc. were thus frowned upon and should not happen. In practice, unanimity and consent could be achieved only through advance negotiations, and candidates did, of course, canvass and campaign. Equally, electors were not free agents, but had to satisfy the demands and needs of their own followers. They had to secure grants and favours, but could not be seen to strive for them openly. How could these conflicting expectations be reconciled? How did they shape the practice of choosing a king?

This chapter describes the duty of States to respect and protect the right to life in the context of assemblies, including demonstrations, marches, and protests. The right to assembly peacefully is a fundamental human right. General Comment 37 on the right of peaceful assembly, adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in July 2020, is an important normative reference.

The chapter explores the paradoxes of the abundant sources for the west, where only a limited proportion of the population understood the dominant written language of communication, Latin; and until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reams of fiscal and judicial records which survive come mostly from a fairly narrow band of senior clerics. But the clergy were not monolithic, and their impact on the actual practice of governance varied north and south of the Alps. Much depended on the extent to which principles of Roman law and the habit of living in towns persisted. Yet there is striking consistency both in the prerequisite virtues of a ruler propounded by clerical writers and in the essentials of inauguration ritual. The law which a king swore to uphold at his coronation was not made at will: he was expected to govern consensually and heed good counsel. Who could give such counsel and what constituted reasonable constraints on the king’s volition changed over time. In some realms, assemblies developed the authority to approve taxes and become law-makers in the late middle ages: the monarch’s exercise of his authority was tempered by popular demand.

City-republics have traditionally served as exemplars of participatory government. Their bottom-up organization would seem to suggest an alternative path to representative emergence. The three chapters of Part II address this challenge of equifinality; this chapter does so in two ways. First, it points out that republics are different forms of governance than representative polities, as they eschew a central executive and don't involve the integration of varied social groups. Second, despite such differences, republics and municipal governance can also be shown to reflect the basic logic of this book, as they were preceded by a period of centralized rule under conditional relations. These enabled the institutional learning that was necessary for participatory institutions to consolidate. The absence of an executive, however, also meant that they did not survive over the long term. These points are demonstrated by an examination of Italian city-states and of the Low Countries. Both Flanders and Holland had a thriving urban sector, but they retained their participatory institutions longer because the exective authority of the count was comparatively greater. The Swiss Cantons are briefly considered. The role of trade emerges as endogenous to political organization.

Russia provides the final testing ground for the concept of conditionality. This chapter shows how the limited incidents of representation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Russia can be explained through the conditional rights to land granted to the lower nobility in order to counter the strength of the upper nobility, the boyars. This makes Russia another case of "second-best-constitutionalism." At that level, it displayed striking similarities to patterns observed in England, leading to the conclusion that the two cases differed not in the institutions that were being created but in the capacity of the state to enforce them. This position is at odds with common conceptions of the Russian tsar as all-powerful, so the chapter offers evidence to counter this assumption. It examines the weak control over the boyars, the limited taxing capabilities, and the mass enserfment of peasants to show how they either reflect or result from state weaknesses. The chapter then describes how these conditions interacted with the emergence of representation in Russia, as well as how they explain its demise.