Froude informs the Scottish youth

[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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …