And how had the common people made known their approbation or selection of these laws? Plainly, in no other way than this that the juries composed of the common people had voluntarily enforced them. The common people had no other legal form of making known their approbation of particular laws.
The word "concede," too, is an important word. In the English statutes it is usually translated grant as if with an intention to indicate that "the laws, customs, and liberties" of the English people were mere privileges, granted to them by the king; whereas it should be translated concede, to indicate simply an acknowledgment, on the part of the king, that such were the laws, customs, and liberties, which had been chosen and established by the people themselves, and of right belonged to them, and which he was bound to respect.
I will now give some authorities to show that the foregoing oath has, in substance, been the coronation oath from the times of William the Conqueror, (1066,) down to the time of James the First, and probably until 1688.
It will be noticed, in the quotation from Kelham, that he says this oath (or the oath of William the Conqueror) is "in sense and substance the very same with that which the Saxon kings used to take at their coronations."
Hale says:
"Yet the English were very zealous for them," (that is, for the laws of Edward the Confessor,) "no less or otherwise than they are at this time for the Great Charter; insomuch that they were never satisfied till the said laws were reenforced, and mingled, for the most part, with the coronation oath of king William I., and some of his successors." 1 Hale's History of Common Law, 157.
Also, "William, on his coronation, had sworn to govern by the laws of Edward the Confessor, some of which had been reduced into writing, but the greater part consisted of the immemorial customs of the realm." Ditto, p. 202, note L.
Kelham says:
"Thus stood the laws of England at the entry of William I., and it seems plain that the laws, commonly called the laws of Edward the Confessor, were at that time the standing laws of the kingdom, and considered the great rule of their rights and liberties; and that the Eriglish were so zealous for them, 'that they were never satisfied till the said laws were reenforced, and mingled, for the most part, with the coronation oath.' Accordingly, we find that this great conqueror, at his coronation on the Christmas day succeeding his victory, took an oath at the altar of St. Peter, Westminster, in sense and substance the very same with that which the Saxon kings used to take at their coronations. * * And at Barkhamstead, in the fourth year of his reign, in the presence of Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, for the quieting of the people, he swore that he would inviolably observe the good and approved ancient laws which had been made by the devout and pious kings of England, his ancestors, and chiefly by King Edward; and we are told that the people then departed in good humor." Kelham's Preliminary Discourse to the Laws of William the Conqueror. See, also, 1 Hale's History of the Common Law, 186.
Crabbe says that William the Conqueror "solemnly swore that he would observe the good and approved laws of Edward the Confessor." Crabbe's History of the English Law, p. 43.