It is but a small section of this great period that we propose to sketch in the present volume; the history of our own country during this epoch of great men and great causes; but it comprises the history of what is one at least of England’s greatest contributions to the world’s progress. The history of England under the early kings of the house of Plantagenet unfolds and traces the growth of that constitution which, far more than any other that the world has ever seen, has kept alive the forms and spirit of free government; which has been the discipline that formed the great free republic of the present day; which was for ages the beacon of true social freedom that terrified the despots abroad and served as a model for the aspirations of hopeful patriots. It is scarcely too much to say that English history, during these ages, is the history of the birth of true political liberty. For, not to forget the services of the Italian republics, or of the German confederations of the middle ages, we cannot fail to see that in their actual results they fell as dead before the great monarchies of the sixteenth century, as the ancient liberties of Athens had fallen; or where the spirit survived, as in Switzerland, it took a form in which no great nationality could work. It was in England alone that the problem of national self-government was practically solved; and although under the Tudor and Stewart sovereigns Englishmen themselves ran the risk of forgetting the lesson they had learned and being robbed of the fruits for which their fathers had labored, the men who restored political consciousness, and who recovered the endangered rights, won their victory by argumentative weapons drawn from the storehouse of medieval English history, and by the maintenance and realization of the spirit of liberty in forms which had survived from earlier days. It is an introduction to the study of English history during the period of constitutional growth, that we shall attempt to sketch the epoch, not as a Constitutional History, but as an outline of the period and of the combinations through which the constitutional growth was working, the place of England in European history and the character of the men who helped to make her what she ultimately became. Before we begin, however, we may take a glance at the map of Europe at the point of time from which we start. [Sidenote: Geographical summary. ] [Sidenote: Eastern Europe. ] [Sidenote: Italy.]