M&D Deep Duck: "when the world was yet feudal"

[Monte Davis]

So on p. 5 Cherrycoke characterizes 1632 (when Charles I issued the charter
for Maryland to Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore) and 1681 (when
Charles II issued that for Pennsylvania to William Penn, Esq.)

It's interesting that from a century later and a newly-forged American PoV,
the whole span -- encompassing the English Civil War(s), Commonwealth,
Protectorate, and Restoration -- is "feudal." Historically, the political
thought and rhetoric of US independence was by no means all from the
18th-century Enlightenment: a lot of it had been in play since those
17th-century Parliamentary challenges to the monarchy, and the constraints
on royal power (explicit and tacit) that the restored Charles II and his
successors had been forced to accept.

Naturally, the rebellious colonists cast George III as an absolutist
tyrant, and their own divided government, checks & balances, etc. as a
wholly new thing in the world. That's what national creation myths do. But
in fact, the rebels borrowed ideas and arguments wholesale from 150 years
of decidedly post-feudal British political evolution.
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