ABSTRACT
English historians take it for granted that the successful development of English monarchy in the Middle Ages was based on the king’s landed patrimony and obvious continental contrasts and comparisons in other countries of medieval Europe appear to strengthen this view. The early failures of the medieval German kings and the subsequent chronic weakness of the central institutions of the Empire, are, at least in part, attributable to the absence of any powerful, consolidated princely German territorium, while the domaine of the French Capetian house was the undoubted nursery of French monarchical and national government, law and finance. The prominent position of the terra regis in the greatest land register of all time, our own English Domesday Book, is taken to be sufficient in itself to demonstrate a parallel importance of the crown lands, crown estate, or ‘royal demesne’, as English medieval historians have dubbed it, in the history of our own monarchy. Since English constitutional history first became a serious professional and academic study, with the publication of William Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development in the 1870s, this notion has lain behind some of the most fundamental generalizations of history textbooks: the revenues of the medieval English Crown are deemed to have been divided into ordinary and extraordinary and the king was traditionally expected to ‘live of his own’ on the ordinary revenues which were basically derived from the royal demesne, while the extraordinary revenues, derived from taxation, were of right reserved for extraordinary emergencies. Stubbs traced a continuous party of constitutional principle opposed to the alienation of the English royal demesne, running from the Ánglo Norman baronage to the parliamentary knights of die shire in the national assemblies of the later 16Middle Ages, 1 and, by implication, to the constitutional opposition to Stuart tyranny in the seventeenth century. His generation also produced the only modern edition of the earliest treatise on the English constitution to be written in the English language, Sir John Fortescue’s Governance of England, which its Victorian editor presented in support of Stubbs’s thesis as a medieval exposition of these constitution theories. 2
