ABSTRACT
as early as there was theorizing about the nature of the English government, it was suggested that it was a mixed government. The most notable early expression of this view appeared in the writings of Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench in the reign of Henry VI and one of the first legal writers in England to deal systematically with the nature of the English constitution. Standing as it were on the thin line separating medieval from modern times, Fortescue may perhaps be taken as representative of constitutional thought in fifteenth-century England. As is well-known, he distinguished sharply between what he called dominium regale, the type of government found in France, and dominium politicum et regale, a form of mixed government existing in England. Dominium regale has been translated as absolute monarchy, and dominium politicum et regale as limited monarchy, though these terms are possibly too modem for the thought of a medieval lawyer who considered that both types of monarchy had originated under natural law. Regardless of how Fortescue viewed the French monarch, he saw the English king as a limited monarch who could neither make laws nor levy taxes without the assent of his subjects. 1 The constitutional treatises in which he distinguished between the two types of government, though they exerted little influence in his day, shaped Tudor political thought and made him in the seventeenth century a recognized authority on constitutional law. 2
