BUT the royalist version of history was rapidly developing to a point where the ideas of Spelman could be of use to it. Feudalism could be used to prove Filmer's and Prynne's point that the House of Commons was no older than Henry III's reign; it could also be employed, as Hobbes had shown, to vest the monarchy with an authority which was sovereign and paternal rather than contractual. It should perhaps be emphasized once again that to the seventeenth-century English feudalism did not mean a dissolution of the state or even a private agreement between lord and vassal; it implied primarily that all land was held of the king on condition of homage and obedience. The time was not long, therefore, before the ideas of Spelman were revived and employed in party controversy; but the way in which this came about may repay study. In 1675, the year of Hale's death, Sir William Dugdale, the most eminent medievalist of his day, published the first volume of a work entitled The Baronage of England, and in the preface gave an account of parliamentary history in which the ideas are plainly Spelman's. Eleven years previously, he had brought out a complete edition of the Archaeologus, including for the first time the article ‘Parlamentum’, and we have seen how William Prynne quoted this without apparently realizing its full significance. The remarkable fact is that Dugdale himself seems to have been distinctly slow to grasp what it really implied.