In 1284 Edward I king claimed divine providence as his guide for the
new order he decreed (statuendum decrevimus) for conquered Wales,^31
echoing Aquinas’s dictum about subordinate governors who derive their
plan of government from the supreme governor. By the second half of
the thirteenth century there existed an idea of the territorial state struc-
tured by law which could be used by practical administrators as well as
theologians. The following chapters will trace the building of a model
of the State out of the systems of legal procedures and law-courts, acts
of legislation, and definitions of public crime, private property and
injury, which had begun to appear in the Germanic kingdoms that
succeeded the Roman Empire in the West; and show how it reached
completion as an arrangement of legally differentiated estates that
included the king and embedded the regime in the commonwealth.
State as commonwealth 9and Rebellion, selected R. E. Treharne and ed. I. J. Sanders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973),
72–5, 294–5, 308–9; A. Harding, ‘Legislators, Lawyers and Lawbooks’, in Lawyers and
Lawmen, ed. T. M. Charles-Edwards, M. E. Owen, and D. B. Walters (Cardiff: U. of Wales
P., 1986), 246–53.
(^31) SRi. 55.