ABSTRACT
Stubbs’s generation, and several later generations of English historians, thought that the period of Lancastrian kingship saw a major constitutional experiment in English government. They believed that the Lancastrian branch of the English royal family had been nurtured in a tradition of opposition to arbitrary rule which could be traced back to the sainted Ordainer Thomas of Lancaster, cousin and opponent of Edward II. By contrast, therefore, the Yorkist kings were deemed to have reverted to more autocratic methods, abandoning what had become the goals of normal medieval constitutional government: rule with frequent parliaments through a Council of notables, according to a right course of law, by a king expected to ‘live of his own’. Like Hallam before him Stubbs saw Edward IV manipulating parliamentary institutions in a reign which was the first in our history to see no enactment whatsoever which furthered the liberty and security of the subject
