The Constitution of England: George Custance’s 1808 View

The Constitution of England: George Custance’s 1808 View
A Reader’s Edition and Guide to “A Concise View of the Constitution of England”

George Custance’s A Concise View of the Constitution of England is a substantial early nineteenth‑century attempt to explain how the English constitution works. It sets out, in one volume, the roles of the Crown, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the courts, and the rights and liberties of the subject within the constitutional order of England. This Reader’s Edition has been prepared to make that older work easier to approach and to connect it directly to the key statutes and settlements behind it.

This is not a reprint of Custance’s book. The full text and an audio version of A Concise View of the Constitution of England are available separately through this site. This PDF is your structured guide and commentary. It explains Custance’s main themes in plain English and shows how his account rests on statute, common law and established constitutional practice.

What’s inside this Reader’s Edition

• A short factual introduction: who George Custance was, when he wrote, and why his 1808/1809 account of the constitution of England still matters.

• A “How to use this Reader’s Edition” page, explaining how to read or listen to Custance’s book alongside this guide.

• A clear contents and overview page mapping the main parts of the constitution as Custance describes them.

• Part I – What Custance means by “the constitution of England”: statute, common law and long‑established usage as the foundations of the English constitutional order.

• Part II – The Crown and the prerogative: the place of the monarchy in the constitution, and how royal powers are understood as legal powers with recognised limits.

• Part III – The Lords and Commons: how the House of Lords and the House of Commons fit into the older idea of a mixed constitution of Crown, Lords and Commons.

• Part IV – Courts, law and justice: the role of the courts and the common law in giving practical effect to the constitution and the rule of law.

• Part V – Rights and liberties of the subject: how English constitutional tradition understood the “rights and liberties of the subject”, especially through Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

• Part VI – The key constitutional statutes: how Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Act of Settlement 1701 function as written supports within the wider constitutional structure.

• Part VII – England’s constitution as seen from 1808: what Custance’s book shows about how the constitution of England was understood in the early nineteenth century.

• A closing note and “About this Reader’s Edition” section, explaining how this guide sits alongside the original book, the audio version and the other Reader’s Editions in the England Then and Now series.

Who this PDF is for

• Readers who want to study A Concise View of the Constitution of England but find nineteenth‑century constitutional prose hard to navigate.

• Anyone interested in how an English writer in 1808–1809 described the constitution of England as a real, working system of Crown, Parliament, courts and rights.

• People using your Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement Reader’s Editions who want to see how those statutes were later read together as parts of one constitutional inheritance.

Format and delivery

• Format: PDF (Reader’s Edition and guide).

• Contents: introduction, “how to use this edition”, contents/overview, Parts I–VII commentary, closing note and “About this Reader’s Edition”.

• Delivery: instant download after checkout, with access via your order email and account downloads area.