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• malleability of this unwritten constitution posed huge problems in a period of political conflict and instability
• At the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy
• lesson of the civil war period is that the relationship between consti­tutionalism and the emergence of written constitutions is not simple.
• A consti­tutionalism which saw the principles and limits of government as deeply embedded in law and national life was not just problematically flexible – it was also helpfully flexible. Pinning it down would not just be alien to its character; it might also reduce its usefulness in unforeseen circumstances, unless the principles taken to inform it...
• But written constitutions were also in danger of undermining precisely the authority that ­con­stitutionalism invoked, and seeming like contingent, new, human and possibly partisan creations, rather than the ancient wisdom of the nation. The reverence which surrounded the ancient constitution might militate against trying to pin down its essence in...

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