Any reader of history born after about 1955 is likely to have comparatively little knowledge of the constitutional history of England. Members of that generation who have grown up in the United Kingdom (outside Northern Ireland) or the United States will not normally have come across it in school, at least not as an insistent theme; they will not have taken courses in it if they have proceeded into higher education; they will certainly have been able to avoid, if ever they became threatened with, Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the supposed tyrannies of Bad King John, Henry VIII and George III. Not so those previous generations who bore bravely or grudgingly their compulsory encounters with Stubbs's Select Charters, and with the constitutional histories and studies written by Bishop Stubbs himself, by Edward Freeman, Albert Venn Dicey, Sir William Anson, Sir David Keir, S. B. Chrimes, J. E. A. Joliffe, H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, together with collections of constipating constitutional documents with the names of Tanner, Costin and Watson merely among the memorable. For entire cohorts of schoolchildren in the century after 1850, by contrast, England's constitutional history functioned not as the accompaniment but as the explanation of her glory, while the crucial personalities in moulding that history – King Alfred, Simon de Montfort, Sir John Eliot, John Locke and a long list of modern embodiments of the will towards liberty – became the icons of textbooks and role models for their collective heirs, the British public.