The language used in the last of these questions, "Do you concede that the just laws and customs, _which the common people have chosen_, (_quas vulgus elegit_,) shall be preserved?" &c., is worthy of especial notice, as showing that the laws, which were to be preserved, were not necessarily _all_ the laws which the kings enacted, _but only such of them as the common people had selected or approved_. And how had the common people made known their approbation or selection of these laws? Plainly, in no other way than this--_that the juries composed of the common people had voluntarily enforced them_. The common people had no other legal form of making known their approbation of particular laws. The word "concede," too, is an important word. In the English statutes it is usually translated _grant_--as if with an intention to indicate that "the laws, customs, and liberties" of the English people were mere _privileges, granted_ to them by the king; whereas it should be translated _concede_, to indicate simply an _acknowledgment_, on the part of the king, that such were the laws, customs, and liberties, which had been chosen and established by the people themselves, and of right belonged to them, and which he was bound to respect. I will now give some authorities to show that the foregoing oath has, _in substance_, been the coronation oath from the times of William the Conqueror, (1066,) down to the time of James the First, and probably until 1688. It will be noticed, in the quotation from Kelham, that he says this oath (or the oath of William the Conqueror) is "in sense and substance the very same with that which the _Saxon_ kings used to take at their coronations." Hale says: "Yet the English were very zealous for them," (that is, for the laws of Edward the Confessor,) "no less or otherwise than they are at this time for the Great Charter; insomuch that they were never satisfied till the said laws were reënforced, and mingled, for the most part, with the coronation oath of king William I., and some of his successors."--_1 Hale's History of Common Law_, 157. Also, "William, on his coronation, had sworn to govern by the laws of Edward the Confessor, some of which had been reduced into writing, but the greater part consisted of the immemorial customs of the realm."--_Ditto_, p. 202, note L. Kelham says: