Thus we may say that, in the time of Edward the First, the English Constitution definitely put on the same essential form which it has kept ever since. The germs of King, Lords, and Commons we had brought with us from our older home eight hundred years before. But, from King Edward’s days onwards, we have King, Lords, and Commons themselves, in nearly the same outward shape, with nearly the same strictly legal powers, which they still keep. All the great principles of English freedom were already firmly established. There is indeed a wide difference between the political condition of England under Edward the First and the political condition of England in our own day. But the difference lies far more in the practical working of the Constitution than in its outward form. The changes have been many; but a large portion of those changes have not been formal enactments, but those silent changes whose gradual working has wrought out for us a conventional Constitution existing alongside of our written Law. Other changes have been simply improvements in detail; others have been enactments made to declare more clearly, or to secure more fully in practice, those rights whose existence was not denied. But, speaking generally, and allowing for the important class of conventional understandings which have never been clothed with the form of written enactments, the main elements of the English Constitution remain now as they were fixed then. From that time English constitutional history is not merely an inquiry, however interesting and instructive, into something which has passed away. It is an inquiry into something which still lives; it is an inquiry into laws which, whenever they have not been formally repealed, are in full force at this day. Up to the reign of Edward the First English history is strictly the domain of antiquaries. From the reign of Edward the First it becomes the domain of lawyers(47).