Original text - Engels - Like all Englishmen, the colonists were familiar...

Like all Englishmen, the colonists were familiar with written documents as barriers to encroaching power. “Anxious to preserve and transmit” their liberties “unimpaired to posterity”, the English people had repeatedly “caused them to be reduced to writing, and in the most solemn manner to be recognized, ratified and confirmed,” first by king John., then Henry III and Edward I, and “afterwards by a multitude of corroborating acts, reckoned in all, by Lord Cook, to be thirty-two, from Edw.1st to Henry 4th, and since, in a variety of instances, by the bills of right and acts of settlement.” Moreover, America’s own past was filled with written charters to which the colonists had continually appealed in imperial disputes-charters or grants from the Crown which by the time of the Revolution had taken on an extraordinary importance in American eyes.