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Among the familiar sights crowding the landscape of English history from the dooms of Ine to that crown plucked from a hawthorn bush at Bosworth, none is more deeply cherished than the crisis of 1297 and the “Confirmation of the Charters” to which it gave rise. For, despite all the sharp differences over detail that the documentation for this crisis has engendered, scholars have shown remarkable agreement in seeing it as the one defeat suffered by Edward I in a long and notably successful reign. And to that defeat they have attributed great constitutional significance. Stubbs set the pattern, calling the “result singularly in harmony with what seems from history and experience to be the natural direction of English progress,” and Wilkinson is only one among the many who have recently elaborated on that theme:The crisis of 1297 … placed a definite check on the tendencies which Edward I had shown, to ignore the deep principles of the constitution under stress of the necessities which confronted the nation … It was a landmark in the advance of the knights … toward political maturity. It helped to establish the tradition of co-operation and political alliance between the knights and the magnates, on which a good deal of the political future of England was to depend …. What the opposition achieved, in 1297, was a great vindication of the ancient political principle of government by consent ….

Because depositions lie at the heart of that process through which England developed a limited monarchy, historians have long studied them. Nevertheless, this scholarly attention has been unequally bestowed. Edward II and Richard II are familiar figures in the depositional literature, but one seldom encounters Henry VI, and Edward V is never mentioned at all.The reasons for these differences are readily comprehensible. Edward II and Richard II had significant reigns, and in the very process of their depositions the limits of legitimate monarchical power were defined. The fall of Henry VI offers few similar opportunities: if his policies also led to revolt, they were sui generis, no more than a byproduct of his lamentable mental state and, as such, of no lasting concern to those studying the growth of the constitution.

No one reading Suger's life of Louis VI would be apt to think that the abbot of Saint Denis had an extremely broad or, as one used to say, ‘liberal’ conception of the territorial limits of Francia. On the contrary, it is evident that for him Francia was a compact unit of lands roughly equivalent to the more modern Ǐle de France, lands which in no way approximate what France was later to become. One finds, for example, that Louis after his various provincial expeditions is described as returning ‘in Franciam,’ be it from Flanders, Auvergne, or Berry. Similarly, frontiers and marches are to be found facing not only the empire, which is natural enough, but also Normandy, Berry, Auvergne, and Burgundy. In short, for Suger Francia was hemmed in by a host of other and often hostile lands, and while the king's duty might be to control them as best he might, it is nevertheless apparent that they do not, in Suger's normal use of the term, constitute part of Francia.