Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/29

Rh three times by various kings of England and explained in the Petition of Right, contained some of them; other basic statutes did so too; but the application of the term, fundamental law, to the text of a statute or the text of several statutes was scarcely warranted by English traditional usage. As Professor McIlwain says: “If a constituent law ever existed in England it must be looked for mainly in the attitude of men toward the law, or, better, in the rules applied by judges in cases arising under the law. The fundamental law there may be contained in a document, or documents, as in the case of Magna Charta, but the validity of that law is not due to the form of the document or documents but rather to the character of the principles.” In seventeenth-century England “fundamental law” denoted a series of principles deducible from the common or statute law, or perhaps naturally inherent in the minds of all men.

Such principles of fundamental law would be of little avail unless given practical application by some body or person empowered to interpret them authoritatively and finally. The Long Parliament by virtue of being the king’s highest court asserted its right to the office of interpreter. Its claim should teach us that the word “Parliament” means one thing to writers of the seventeenth century and another to writers of the twentieth.