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One of the distinguishing characteristics of the British constitutions is its indeterminacy. No clear boundary divides what is constitutional from what is not. What counts as constitutional in practice has never been codified, but is scattered about in sundry documents spanning ten centuries. The very notion of a master legal instrument that one might call ‘the constitution’is alien to the British legal tradition; thus, Blackstone, the great commentator on the English common law, refers to ‘the British constitutions’ in the plural, and this classical conception of his has been adopted for this chapter, the more faithfully to express the breathing reality of the thing. It is not easy to address the question,‘What were the British constitutions before 1989?’when inevitably many different answers can be given about so essentially contestable an object. For if like any polity the British constitutional order could not function without a reasonably well-defined core, the margins are all as fuzzy as quantum mechanics. An organic law arisen haphazardly piecemeal in time and space must be understood in the same spirit. In this spirit this chapter provides no systematic doctrine as a benchmark to evaluate the extent and intent of change in Great Britain before the contemporary era of reform.

Nonetheless a general consensus does exist as to where the British constitution is to be found. First and foremost it is comprised in Acts of Parliament the constitutionality of which is not in dispute: Magna Carta (1215), Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), and the Great Reform Act (1832). It is a series of celebrated texts, beginning in the 13th century, that …