Sir John Fortescue (c.1395 – c.1477) was undoubtedly the major English political theorist of the fifteenth century. His works are famous, above all, for their vision of the English polity as a ‘dominion political and royal’, ruled by common law, and they have been widely quoted and used over the past five hundred years. This very popularity, however, has resulted in their original meaning falling victim to the various purposes of his commentators.

The process of distortion began in the sixteenth century, when the development and strengthening of both the monarchy and the institution of parliament led to a division and potential conflict of power between the two. In attempting to deal with this problem, political writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries interpreted Fortescue's ‘political and royal dominion’ in support of their own projects to define the respective spheres of king and parliament.