Theories of jurisprudence owe much to the development of concepts of natural law and sovereignty used to justify resistance to constituted authority in the early modern period. It has long been a commonplace that there was a continuity in resistance doctrine from fifteenth-century conciliarism to the Glorious Revolution. This orthodoxy is encapsulated in Laski's phrase: “The road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one.” It underlies the theme of Gierke's Natural Law and the Theory of Society, and it is reiterated in J. N. Figgis's Birkbeck lectures From Gerson to Grotius. This paper suggests that there was a byway as well as a highway: not one road, but two.

The theorists of resistance held that political authority was created by the consent of the entire community and that, if it was exercised in a way contrary to the welfare of the community, it could be withdrawn. Thus the decrees of the Council of Constance declared ultimate authority in the church lay not with the pope but with the whole body of the faithful, and its exercise rested in their representative, the general council. This argument was applied to the secular state as well as to the church by such conciliar theorists of the time as Gerson, who saw the need for coercive power as the consequence of sin. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the conciliarists Jacques Almain and John Mair located sovereignty in the whole body of the citizens, who empowered the ruler to act as their delegate for the common good. A tyrant who acted with contrary intent might be deprived of his authority.