This volume is intended to provide a representative and easily accessible selection of documents concerned with, and often in themselves comprising, the political and constitutional history of the seventeenth century in England. It overlaps two older collections, J. R. Tanner's Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I and S. R. Gardiner's Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution. Since they were published in a less affluent society each is comparable in size with the present volume, and they retain their value as source books, as a glance at my footnotes will show. But Tanner's commentary is in many respects out of date, while Gardiner offered none at all, apart from a short introduction, and his choice of documents was geared to the requirements of the Oxford Schools in the closing years of the nineteenth century.