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The search for the origins of modern democratic institutions, institutions grounded in what philosophers call “legitimation by consent,” has led historians far upstream into numerous tributaries. Francis Oakley argues that the institutional, practical, and political world in which Romano-canonist theories of consent were actually put to the test, could be found in ecclesiastical communities, the feudal contract, the conciliar movement, and “a myriad of corporate bodies and of cities enjoying de facto an extensive measure of self-governance.” The medieval English village was certainly one of the most important of these corporate bodies. As early as 1933, following in the path of the great nineteenth-century constitutional historians, A. B. White looked in the direction of the medieval village for indications of nascent institutions of self government. However, White devalued the significance of his own findings by arguing that this “self-government” developed in response to the needs of royal administrators, and was, in the end, overshadowed by the centralized power of a Tudor regime. White thus saw village institutions of self government as responses on the part of a local population to “the King's command.”