William Stubbs

A national polity is not the creation of a single brain or of a royal commission of brains, but grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength of the nation; cannot be changed without changing much of the spirit of the people, and …

England alone has a history in which ancient freedom has made its way through, and utilised all that is good in feudalism, widening from precedent to precedent into perfect political liberty.

It is that the essence of the historical study is in the working out the continuity of the subject, while the essence of the legal study is in the reducing of it all to certain theoretic principles.

We hear of the dead past and the living present: we are bid (and we do well to remember that it is an American poet who so adapts the words) to let the dead past bury its dead. But surely the past lives in the present, the process by which …

[T]he whole of the constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta.

No legislation turned the free owner into the feudal tenant: whatever changes in that direction took place were the result of individual acts, or of very gradual changes of custom arising indirectly from the fact that other relations were …

There are no constitutional revolutions, no violent reversals of legislation; custom is far more potent than law, and custom is modified infinitesimally every day. An alteration of law is often the mere registration of a custom, when men …

But although English society was divided by sharp lines, and broad intervals, it was not a system of caste either in the stricter or in the looser sense. It had much elasticity in practice, and the boundaries between the ranks were …

Among the first truths which the historical student, or indeed any scientific scholar, learns to recognise, this is perhaps the most important, that no theory or principle works in isolation.

Froude informs the Scottish youth That parsons do not care for truth. The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries History is a pack of lies. What cause for judgements so malign? A brief reflexion solves the mystery –