Before the sixteenth century, the term status was only used by political writers to refer to one of two things : either the state or condition in which a ruler finds himself (the status principis); or else the general ‘state of the nation’ or condition of the realm as a whole (the status regni). What was lacking in these usages was the distinctively modern idea of the State as a form of public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.(Skinner,1978:353)