DURING the Interregnum there also occurred the first signs of a royalist reaction in the field of historiography; but this reaction, though it produced some new and valuable criticisms of the traditional accounts of constitutional history, did not of itself lead to a radical reassessment of the whole subject. That could come only when feudal institutions were given their proper place in English history, and the royalist writers before and just after 1660 lacked many of Spelman's works and did not fully understand those which they had. They sought merely to provide a history of the constitution which would emphasize the original and essential nature of the king's authority; and while this was not without its value as a means to criticizing the concept of the immemorial, its power to bring about a deeper understanding of history was limited. It is noticeable, too, that the reinterpretation they did provide depended rather on changes taking place in royalist political theory than on developments in the field of scholarship; and this may help to explain the curious fact that a genuine royalist historiography seems to have been delayed until at earliest the years between the first and second civil wars.