ST. EDWARD AND THE SAGRALIZATION OF ENGLISH KINGSHIP

As the preceding chapter noted, St. Edward's laws deserve pride of place among the trinity of texts that formed the foundation of the ancient constitution. And St. Edward himself constituted the actual, non-legendary ancestor upon whom the ancestral constitution was based. This is a fact of some importance, since an historical construction founded on a mythical figure such as Brut might well have been extinct by the mid-seventeenth century, a casualty of the increasingly sophisticated scholarship associated with Sir Henry Spelman, John Selden, and Sir William Dugdale. As it was, the ancient constitution, with the exalted Confessor at its center, boasted a long and respectable medieval pedigree, nourished and sustained by generations of esteemed sources and writers. This chapter explores the early origins and literature of the ancient constitution and examines the beginnings of the process by which a cult of kingship was transformed into a cult of law.

The story commences in the early middle ages, when both Saxons and Normans discovered that linking themselves to the English past carried distinct political and legal advantages.