story of our first stages has been told in much the same terms as the growth 
of the English constitution. This approach was from the first as much a 
matter of convenience as of prejudice. The early investigators into American 
affairs had enough to cope with on this side of the water without reexamining 
the premises and conclusions of the nineteenth-century masters 
who were reconstructing the constitutional history of the mother country. This 
had been conceived and executed as something restricted to the realm itself. 
The intricate problems of constitutional relations with the far-flung territories 
which acknowledged the lordship of England's King during the Middle Ages 
remained virtually untouched. 2 This imperviousness may have been made 
colorable by acceptance of the ancient distinction between realm and dominions 
3 but a vast area of English administrative activity was thereby left blank. 
In consequence, when the subject of imperial relations with the New World 
establishments came under scientific scrutiny, it was handled as if it had been 
as much res Integra to Stuart administrators as it was to modern scholars themselves. 
The historical underpinning which lent significance to the continuity 
and development in America of such matters as local institutions and representative 
government is nonexistent as to imperial relations. 
Now the truth of the matter is that when the first expeditions were being 
outfitted for America, the English were already old hands in the business of 
empire. Their experience had been accumulating since the time of the Norman 
conquest, although when the seventeenth century opened only a fragment of 
once vast holdings remained. The complex of territories in subjection to the 
2 The nineteenth-century English constitutional 
historians, e.g., Stubbs, occasionally use the expression 
"empire" with reference to crown possessions 
without the realm, but not in any artful 
sense. Of the writers of the present century, 
only Schuyler has seen the problem clearly: 
"There was an English empire, though it was 
not known by that name, long before the 
founding of overseas colonies in the seventeenth 
century," Parliament and the British Empire 
(1929), 6. He has used medieval precedent to 
found and explain the power of Parliament to 
legislate for the dominions. T. F. Tout notices 
the resemblance of the Gascon administration 
to that of Wales and Chester, 5 Chapters in the 
Administrative History of Mediaeval England, 
300; cf. Lodge, Gascony under English Rule 
(1926), 5, where the Gascon administration is 
compared with that of India. However, in 
speaking of the "Ordainers' " claim to control 
Scotland, Ireland, and Gascony, Professor Tout 
remarks: "We need not see in this either a 
prophetic vision of an imperial Britain in the 
future, or a simple suggestion of greediness, 
though in it there was more of the latter than 
of the former" (Place of Edward II in English 
History [2d ed., 1936] 185). This seems to us 
an implicit disclaimer of any "empire" theory 
or practice. The most recent work in which 
there is occasion to touch on these problems 
(Powicke, King Henry 111 and the Lord Edward 
[1947]) deals with "conflict of laws" (2 
ibid., 618-685) in a manner that equally negates 
any imperial constitutional ideas. The remark 
that Edward I "did not and could not 
set up a body like the modern judicial committee 
of the privy council for the administration 
of various kinds of law" indicates that 
Powicke has missed the significance of what 
Edward was doing with King's Bench, and certainly 
the significance of the triers of dominion 
petitions in Parliament. 
3 Cf. 3 Osgood, The American Colonies in the 
Seventeenth Century (1926) 8, where it is mistakenly 
said that "it was more a distinction of 
fact than of law, of practice than of principle."