[MUSIC] The idea of the ancient constitution is really difficult in one sense to define very succinctly, because it's everywhere. If you're a 16th century political thinker in England, in France, in Holland, embedded somewhere in your political vocabulary is the idea that normally in a time immemorial, so time before memory. Time perhaps before historical records, there was an ancient constitution that bound monarchs and communities into one project. You know, in France, there's a fantastic word called francogallia, the free French that traces way, way back, you know, into the times of Astérix of Gaul. An idea that the community would sit round the biggest oak tree in their village and elect a king. So, for that French tradition, the ancient constitution is about elected monarchy and therefore, the rights of the people to withdraw their consent from that elected monarchy. In England, it was a little bit more complicated, because we could think back to at least William the Conqueror. When the Conqueror came over, conquered England, and presumably, in one tradition, destroyed the ancient constitution, or set up a new one with the King very much as the powerful figure. But men like Edward Coke, using Magna Carta, went back before the conquest, into time immemorial, before memory, before proper written records. And the idea was, this was a very powerful sort of belief, that there must have been some sort of constitutional arrangement. Magna Carta then, becomes a document that reinforces that tradition rather than starting a new one. Some other contemporaries of Coke or made a lot of fuss about coronation oaths, or the sort of various rituals of monarchy. But the point is that there is a constitution, it may not be written down, it may be sort of only moments of it glimpsed in other documents, but there must have been a constitution that somehow bound the king and the community together. So the king has offices. If he breaks those offices, there may be remedies that can be taken legally against him. And Coke sees the Magna Carta as the most important sort of legacy, if you like, of that ancient constitution, it reinforces it. By the time we get to the 1600s of course there are historians beavering away in archives producing all sorts of ancient documents. Some of which are rather sort of deviously turned towards establishing and fleshing out an ancient constitution. At the end of the 17th century a figure like James Tyrell is writing multi-volume accounts of that ancient tradition, and the idea really underpinning it is that history creates prescriptions for what is right. And if you can show how your contemporary politics, anchors into that history, the Magna Carta is the great document to do that. Then you can show how your contemporary constitution is legitimate or your resistance to bad behavior by kings or even parliaments is legitimate. So, the idea of the ancient constitution is more a sort of mental world that there must be in the passage of human time. Evidence that there is a constitutional legitimacy and we can reconstruct that by turning to history. And that's what Coke does brilliantly with his commentaries on Magna Carta, the text, but there are other historians at the same time. Nathaniel Bacon in the 1640s who, you know, sometimes they make the documents up, but the point is that ancient documents have legitimacy. They're powerful, people can say they did it like this in the past, therefore, it must be right. And it's an alternative to the divine right way of thinking. If we're James I, if we're Henry VIII, we pretty much believe God has put us on this earth to rule. And although there might be some sort of legal traditions that a good king can be bound by, the source of political authority is God. But those who believe in the ancient constitution, the source of political legitimacy is that constitution, and it's capturing of the rights of the people of a community. The consensual origins of political legitimacy, and that gets developed at great detail in the 18th and 19th century.
