LAUSR

Since writing the introductory chapter of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (ACFL), I have been concerned with the two kinds of intellectual history named in the above title. ‘Political thought’ and ‘historiography’ – both terms are in need of further definition – have had and have histories which have interacted and indeed helped to generate one another; but they are not identical and can be the subjects of distinguishable historical studies and narratives. In the all-but-sixty years separating ACFL from Barbarism and Religion (BR) I have written and published essays on the theory and methodology of both kinds of history and a number of more ambitious narratives studying episodes in which they interacted. The Machiavellian Moment (TMM) has its place in these enquiries, and in this essay I shall try to situate it in the sequences they form. It is arguable that TMM is climactic, in the studies they offer, in the ‘history of political thought’, since BR is rather an enquiry into the ‘history of historiography’. In the final format of ACFL, I started at the moment at which it became evident that the two histories had often gone on together: the moment at which the republication of the works of Filmer in 1679–1680 provoked replies in both the idiom of political theory (sacred and secular) and the idiom of English legal and parliamentary historiography. The germ of TMMmay be found here, in a single chapter header ‘Interregnum; the Oceana of James Harrington’; but it is important to stress several ways in which this chapter is anomalous in the structure of ACFL as a whole. In that work ‘the ancient constitution’ indicates a belief that a ‘common law’ – upholding the independence of a freeholder class from feudal ties to crown and nobility – was of immemorial and customary antiquity in pre-Norman England, while ‘the feudal law’ indicates a contrary belief that such dependencies were introduced by conquest in 1066 and shaped English history for centuries thereafter. In the history of